The Greatest Corvette Story Ever Told

• Take us back to 1960 – It all starts with Lloyd “Lucky” Castner? Story of how the team came together, sponsored by no car, going to GM, etc.
• What’s in a name … Isn’t CAMORADI an acronym? 
• Not the first Corvette to be entered at LeMans, but one of very very few to ever finish in those early days. 
• Who drove/raced the car? How was the car prepped versus the (Briggs) Cunningham cars? 
• Chuck you went from Fan/Spectator/Enthusiast to part of the crew, how? 
• Domenick – what’s it like to own a piece of Le Mans history? 
• The car was destroyed in August of 1960 during a transportation crash in Sweden, between races – Discovery & Restoration the Car
• What are some future plans for the CAMORADI corvette?
• Is there a search for the other car? We’ve seen plenty of “burnt cars come back from the grave too” (take for instance the lost ferrari collection, that was at car week in 2023 (RM/Sothebys)

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Evening with a Legend is a series of presentations exclusive to Legends of the Famous 24 Hours of Le Mans, giving us an opportunity to bring a piece of Le Mans to you. By sharing stories and highlights of the big event, you get a chance to become part of the legend of Le Mans, with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing.

Crew Chief Eric: Please stay tuned to the end of this presentation for additional information that pertains to the contents of this episode from our sponsors, The Motor Chain and Carnexion Advisors. Tonight, we have an opportunity to bring a piece of Le Mans to you. Sharing in the legend of Le Mans with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing.

And as your host, I’m delighted to introduce, not a driver, but a unique car. The [00:01:00] Camaradi USA Racing’s 1960 Corvette. It was built for international competition under the auspices of Chevrolet General Manager Ed Cole and Chief Engineer Zora Duntov. It went on to race successfully in Havana, Daytona, Sebring, the Nürburgring, Sweden.

Subs And at Le Mans. The only thing more amazing than this car’s creation and its race record is its survival. On the way to Britain’s famed Goodwood Circuit in August of 1960, it was crashed hard and left for dead. But miraculously, the shattered remains were preserved and discovered some 30 years later by Loren Lundberg.

And tonight we have a panel here to talk about the Camerati Corvettes history. This includes Richard Prince, author and official photographer for the GM Corvette race team, Dominic Testa, the current owner of the car and Chuck Schroedel, who was a member of the Camerati team at Le Mans in 1960. And with that, I’m your host, crew chief, Eric, from the motoring podcast [00:02:00] network.

Welcoming everyone to this evening with a legend. And with that, gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Richard Prince: Yes, sir. Thank you. Hello, Eric. Let me just start by saying thank you to the International Motor Racing Research Center in Watkins Glen and to the ACO for supporting us and making this evening possible.

Crew Chief Eric: Take us back to 1960.

And if I recall, this story starts with a gentleman named Lloyd Lucky Kastner. And it’s a story about how the team sort of came together in a not so orthodox way. Richard, why don’t you kick us off and kind of bring us up to speed about the Camerati Corvette?

Richard Prince: Yeah, Lloyd Lucky Kastner was one of those epic characters who cut his own path in life.

Some would describe him as one of the world’s great con men. He was a racing enthusiast and had big dreams about racing around the world in the biggest sports car racing events, including, of course, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He just didn’t have the funds to do it, but he had a gift for convincing other people.

To bend to [00:03:00] his will and support his racing and that’s exactly what he did. He formed camaraderie, which was an acronym or, or a, uh, conglomeration. It stood for Tasna motor racing research division formed the team. He invited. Anybody and everybody who wanted to pitch in a little bit of money to join his team was off and running in a 1960 with a pair of Corvettes that he intended to take to Europe and again, racing the biggest races of the season, including.

Crew Chief Eric: Memory serves, there were two Camerati Corvettes and only one remains. What happened to number five?

Richard Prince: Well, that’s an interesting but a sad story. Both cars were built together. They were equally equipped with all of the road racing options that Chevrolet then offered as well as a few special components.

That Chevrolet engineering supply to the top level racers of the era. Both cars went to Sebring. They had a star driver lineup led by Jim [00:04:00] Jeffords, who was a national champion and one of the best road racers of his era, Jim Jeffords car. One of the Camarotti Corvettes got damaged early in the race. It was probably over rev and it had likely some valve train damage that prevented it from revving past 5, 000 RPM.

The other car was being driven by Fred Gamble, who was the team manager, and he wasn’t even slated to drive there. He was on the entry list. He put himself down on the entry list because he was the team manager. He told me he did that just for a laugh, just so his name would appear in the program, and he could send a copy home to his family.

But one of the team’s contracted drivers, a guy named Skip Hudson, And instead of withdrawing the car, they, uh, said, well, you’re on the entry list. Go ahead and drive it. Fred started the race. He had never turned a practice lap at Sebring. Never ever drove the course. He just got in the car at the start and went.

Within an hour, he was called in because again, Jim Jeffords [00:05:00] car had some engine damage. Much to his dismay, he was ordered to give the car up. to Jim Jeffords. Lee Lilly, the team’s head mechanic, said to Fred, seeing how dejected he was, well, the other car is still running. If you want to get in it and, you know, kind of lumber around until the engine blows up, be my guest.

So Fred got in that car and ultimately after 12 hours, he entered the history books as one of only two drivers to ever complete the 12 hours of Sebring driving. All by himself. He, uh, respected a self imposed low red line to keep the engine alive, managed to actually turn some respectable laps. Toward the end, he lost gears 1 through 3 in the transmission, so he finished the race with a damaged engine and a damaged transmission, but finish it indeed.

One of the, uh, problems the car had toward the end was a fuel line broke, as it was effectively a production car, they were able to borrow a fuel line from a car that was parked in the spectator area. [00:06:00] They installed that, it cost quite a bit of time, but it worked and the car finished the race. When it finished, they returned that fuel line to the man who owned it.

And unfortunately, the next morning, one of the team’s mechanics got in that car, the car that Fred had driven solo for the entire 12 hours. He got in it, tried to start it, to move it, not knowing that the fuel line was missing. Fuel sprayed all over the place and it was an ignition source. The car caught fire and unfortunately it burned to the ground.

After Sebring, the Camaradi Corvette team was comprised of only one car, and that’s the car that we’re talking about here this evening.

Crew Chief Eric: Number four was not the first Corvette ever entered. At Lamar and even when it was at Lamar, it was partnered with the Cunningham Corvettes and similarly prepared. Its significance is that it was one of the few Corvettes to ever finish the race.

So what was Corvette’s track record up until that point, up until Camerati and Cunningham showed up in 1960?

Richard Prince: [00:07:00] By the mid 1950s, by 1956, Corvette was already establishing a reputation as a force to be reckoned with in production class. Sports car racing. The first serious effort was at Sebring in 56. Four car team led by John Fitch was entered there and they came away with two class wins.

That really launched Corvette’s success in production class sports car racing and it just grew from there. 1960 was actually the first time that Corvettes appeared at Le Mans. So the four cars, the three Cunningham cars and the Camerati car marked Corvettes first appearance at Le Mans.

Crew Chief Eric: Dominic, since you have the car and it’s gone through its restoration, one of our audience members asked ahead of time, if you could discuss the engine, the car’s modifications from stock, estimated power levels, any other details about the setup of the Camerati Corvette.

And if there are any differences you’ve discovered between it. and the Cunningham cars.

Domenic Testa: That car raced in the GT class. So they were [00:08:00] essentially production cars with a few modifications, such as there was some other seatbelts added. There was a roll bar, the engine and, um, the fuel injection from what I understand is essentially what would have been available on a production vehicle.

Now, the one big difference was during testing. And I think they test at that track in April. They determined that the big tank that was optioned with that car didn’t make the required number of laps with the capacity that was in that tank. So Chevrolet had to come up with some way to get it so that it would make it to the next fueling.

That car has a 37 gallon tank. You can see where they molded in to the tank an extra part of the tank to increase the capacity. And that was one of the things after the car was wrecked and it was found in Sweden, they knew it was something special because nobody had ever seen a fuel tank like that [00:09:00] before.

And we do have some production work orders and things from Chevrolet where they were told create these extra capacity tanks. Other than that, essentially it’s a production car.

Crew Chief Eric: Springs, shocks, brakes, all those kinds of things are the same as the production Corvette at the time.

Domenic Testa: It was the, the big brake, heavy suspension options that would have been available to anybody that, that ordered those items.

And power output of the motor,

Crew Chief Eric: that was

Domenic Testa: a V8 at that

Crew Chief Eric: point, they had gotten rid of the six cylinder.

Domenic Testa: Yeah, 283, and they call it 290 horsepower. There may have been, you know, some other modifications done to the engine that weren’t disclosed or whatever, you know, uh, in a number of conversations with Fred Gamble, he never really said one way or the other.

At that point, they were called 283 290s.

Crew Chief Eric: Have you ever had the ca does a C one race prepped weighs about 2800. Okay power to weight ratio for the camaraderie corvette[00:10:00]

Domenic Testa: Well, I think that had something to do, and Richard probably would know this better, it had something to do with the way they were numbered. I believe it was either cubic inches or horsepower relative to the weight, and that’s how they ended up with 1, because they were the largest cubic inch and heaviest cars.

Richard Prince: The engine displacement was the single most important variable back then in how the cars were classified. So the Corvette didn’t actually have a lot of competitors because there were very few sports cars in the world at that time that had relatively large displacement V8 engines,

Crew Chief Eric: but there were much larger, let’s say, Ferraris with V12s and things like that, because thinking about like the Mille Miglia, the way they number the cars, then that was about their starting time.

Like 451 is when you took off, you know, from Brescia and then did the race. So that’s really interesting that Le Mans incorporated a similar system in the car numbering. Based on power to weight. That’s actually really cool. That’s a very [00:11:00] interesting bit of history there that I don’t think many of us probably knew.

You talked about who drove the car at Sebring leading up to Le Mans and the other races that it did like the Nürburgring and so on, and we’ve heard in previous conversations about the race in Havana and its significance and things like that, the Camerati Corvette had a multitude of different drivers who drove the car.

At

Domenic Testa: Le Mans was, uh, Fred Gamble and Lee Lilly, and they were the drivers of Le Mans.

Crew Chief Eric: So two guys drove for 24 hours. That’s gotta be absolutely exhausting. Nowadays we do that with four drivers on many of the teams. Minimum drive times and all those kinds of things. Who drove the longest out of the two of them?

Was it Fred? Was it because of Sebring? He was so used to it?

Domenic Testa: I had an opportunity to speak with Fred a number of times on the telephone, and, uh, I never asked him that. And, uh, that’s a really good question and it never came up in a conversation. I never, I never really thought about that.

Crew Chief Eric: Now with the larger fuel tank, how often did they have to stop?

Do you have any idea how long they could go with that special fuel tank that they designed for the [00:12:00] car? They’re allowed to

Domenic Testa: stop every 25 laps to add fluids. The way the car was originally set up, it didn’t make the 25 laps. That’s when they added the extra capacity to the tank so that they would be able to get to the next.

point where they could refuel.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you have any idea of what their lap times were like? How close were Fred and Lee Lilly in terms of, you know, their consistency?

Domenic Testa: Most of the conversations with Fred at the time that we spoke was about 90. He passed away this past March at 92. He liked telling stories. You know, he really enjoyed talking about some of the antics that went on back in the time.

And I don’t know if it was because he didn’t remember a lot of the details or just enjoyed speaking about, you know, the camaraderie and that kind of stuff. But the lap times and stuff like that, in comparison between Fred and Lee, that it never really came up. There is a lot of documentation that’s available from that race.

And with a little bit of research, we probably could figure it out. Right now. I don’t know what that the answer to that is.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, we know they placed 10th [00:13:00] overall, which, you know, it’s not podium, but it’s nothing to sneeze at either for basically a self made team with some sketchy sponsorship, as Richard has alluded to in previous conversations.

So I’d say that’s a fair finish, regardless of lap times or otherwise, right? Something to be proud of.

Domenic Testa: Right. The number three Cunningham car won the GT class and came in 8th overall. The Camerati number four car came in two places behind, 10th. So it was the second place GT finisher of the four cars. The one car went out at about, uh, lap 20 and the two car went out at a lap about lap 200.

The camaraderie car did the entire 24 hours and completed 275 laps.

Crew Chief Eric: You mentioned the antics of being there in 1960 and talking to someone who was there. Well, let’s turn to Chuck Schrode for a moment. Somebody who was there, somebody who was in the pits with the car. Chuck, tell us how you went about getting involved in all this.

How did you go from [00:14:00] fan to spectator, enthusiast, to suddenly finding yourself in the pits?

Chuck Schroedel: Well, first of all, I can’t believe it’s 64 years ago this all happened. And thanks to Dom, this has kind of reopened a lot of my past. I hadn’t thought about LeMans until I got that very first call from Lauren Lundberg saying, are you Chuck Schroedel that was at LeMans, et cetera.

And I said, yes. And he told me what he was doing and he actually called me and wrote me letters, sent me pictures of the finished product. But the way I got involved at Le Mans, I went into the military in 1958 as an MP and I ended up being shipped to Orléans. At that particular point, my dream was to become a racer, motorcycles, because I had started in high school with Triumph Thunderbirds, thanks to uh, The movie with Marlon Brando, et cetera, on duty in the sedan.

I pulled the Colonel over who was driving a 56 Corvette. And I walked up to the car, I popped my salute, and he looked up and he said, What did I do? What did I do? And I said, Colonel, you didn’t do [00:15:00] anything. I’m just curious, would you be interested in selling your car? And he said, well, as a matter of fact, I would because I just remarried and I inherited two kids.

And there’s not room in this car for two kids. Three weeks later, I own the car. And the car actually started his life at a dealership in North Carolina owned by his brother. So I got a 1956 Corvette that had the two four barrels, Malry ignition, twin point in the distributor. And that got me started into cars.

And the very first event that I went to was only a one day deal in April. I bought the car in 59. Le Mans had already passed, Rennes, France had already passed, so I had one event the next spring to go to, which was the test session in April. One of the first people I bumped into was Briggs Cunningham.

Ginned up a conversation, etc. And they were kidding, saying, Well, you know, if we blow one of these engines, we can always take this one. And one of the head mechanics says, Briggs, it’s a 256, it’s not a 283. So that [00:16:00] got a laugh. So I hung with them for the day and did gopher stuff like I did with Camerati.

But when the day was over, Briggs wanted to give me a set of racing tires. And of course, the traveling secretary said, No, we can’t do that because of import taxes, etc. What we came into the country with, we have to leave with. So I lost my chance there for getting a set of racing tires. So time passed to June and I went to Le Mans.

The first people I bumped into was Camerati. And the first real person I bumped into was a guy named Ed Van Hove, H O E F. He was the former president of the Corvette Club. And at that point, he made me an honorary member of the Corvette Club. He gave me a badge and a deal for my jacket. So now, we’re getting closer to camaraderie acceptance.

He said, listen, I know what you’re doing, you’re kind of working with camaraderie, would you do us one favor? And I have a picture of him. The French photographer had done the movie Gigi in 1958, and he wanted to film the track. [00:17:00] They said, could you take him around in your Corvette? I said, well, we could put them in the trunk, but why don’t we take the hard top off and he can stand up and take all the pictures he wants.

If he wants to be closer to the ground, he can sit in the trunk and having a 56 Corvette at Lamont in 1960 is almost like having a pass. You don’t have to tell anybody anything. Cause if you come in and you say, well, I’m with the camaraderie team. I, oh, fine. Go ahead. So at that particular point is when I kind of became a gopher.

And the names of the drivers in 1960, they weren’t anybody really big back then, but just to name a few of what I was exposed to, the soldier being stationed there, Olivier Jeannabien, believe it or not, Jimmy Clark was driving, he was driving an Aston Martin. John Fitch, and we all know that name. Lee Lilly and Gamble, I met both of them.

I was a little bit closer to Fred Gamble, and as it turns out, and I found about this later, because we ended up palling around together for a while, [00:18:00] and then when I got out of the army, I went to the University of Florida. Well, it turns out that’s where Fred Gamble went to school. And a lot of the professors were asking me, you seem to be very interested in racing.

We had a fellow here by the name of Fred Gamble that was also very interested in racing. Well, that was before I had met him. So the two of us never got a chance to talk before he passed away, but I know we had the same professors, some of the other drivers that I was able to stand next to and listen to like Richie Ginther, Jacob Bonnier, Graham Hill.

I just noted a few and most of you people have heard of them. Dan Gurney, Walt Hansken, and he was driving the Cunningham. And as it turns out, as an MP in Orleans, part of our responsibility was the army hospital at La Chapelle in France. And that’s where they brought Walt Hansken after he had the terrible accident in a later April test session at Le Mans, and he passed away.

And he passed away in the same ward that I was on my back for 16 [00:19:00] days. So I kind of felt a closeness to Walt Hanskin, and then Chuck Day, and Mastin Gregory, Trentignon, Hans Harriman. All these guys were driving in the 1960 Le Mans. It was all new to me. The first thing I did when I got to France was I bought a cheap plastic Philips camera.

And I love taking pictures. Well, I’ve got lots of pictures. They’re mostly black and white. And one of the first pictures that I took was of the Camaradi Corvette with an AC Bristol behind it, which later became the Cobra, as we all know. And right across the way, you could see the other side of the retaining wall where the big accident in 1955 took place with Pierre Levesque.

One of the officials Took me over there and gave me a tour of that area. And I can remember that vaguely in 55 when it happened, as far as my duties with the Corvette goes, I can honestly tell you that I drove. The Corvette at Le Mans. Be it only in reverse and first. And the people in the pits [00:20:00] and the crews saw my Corvette, so they knew that I could drive a Corvette.

So they say, Chuck, pull the car up a little bit. So I get in and start it. I back it up, now pull it in over here, which I would do, so I could say I did drive it. And as Dom says when we show the car, he’s the only living person, that’s a heck of a testimony, that drove this car at Le Mans. And I’ll just add one other little detail.

I was kind of a gopher. I go get lunch. I get parts. We need this. We need that. And one of the tasks that I was asked to do with another mechanic, we had to set up lights on the two doors, the hood and the trunk. Because they were not aware of the fact that those numbers had to be lit. That was one of the things I got very involved with.

We found the wiring and the lights. I think we got the lights from another team because they had multiple lights. It was things like that that I would do.

Crew Chief Eric: What drove you to go visit Le Mans? You know, for those of us thinking about it today, maybe we’ve been there once and we checked that off our bucket [00:21:00] list.

Maybe it’s still a bucket list item. Why was Le Mans so important to you as an enthusiast? What made you want to go there and see the racing firsthand? And when you got there, what were your first impressions of the track and the facilities and of Le Mans in general?

Chuck Schroedel: The Super Bowl in Europe at that time is Le Mans.

And I was interested in sports cars. I got the old Sports Cars Illustrated magazine. I would read about it. Part of the problem in 1959, I got mono when I was in the army. And I was on my back, I told you, in La Chapelle, at the hospital where Wal Hanscom died. And I was on my back for 16 days, fed intravenously, et cetera.

And my biggest disappointment, it was in June, and I couldn’t go to the race. So, when I recovered, and stood up in bed, they said, well, you’ve earned Two weeks vacation out of this. You can do anything you want. Well, that lined up with Rennes, France. So, I wasn’t able to see the Aston Martin win Le Mans in 1959, but I went to Formula [00:22:00] One race in France, and really began to meet a lot of the drivers, etc.

And I realized, I don’t want motorcycles anymore. I want to drive race cars. And I hooked up, believe it or not, with people like Phil Hill. They were terrific. So that really got me started. I said, well, boy, I’m going to go to Le Mans next year with my Corvette, which I did. Everybody talks about Le Mans in France.

When I got there, I was just overwhelmed to see the names and see the faces of people that I had been reading about. When I ended up with Camerati, and we started in town, in Le Mans, at a garage they had rented. And that’s where we were doing all the work before we went out to the track. You asked me, how did I get involved in the different races?

Well, I go to the race with my Corvette. Montlery was a big oval right near Paris, and that was kind of the Indianapolis of its day. And I got to go to the races there. And that’s the first time that I saw formula cars, et cetera, which I ended up racing. As some of you know, I, [00:23:00] my last race was a NASCAR race at Watkins Glen in August of 1987.

And that ended my career, but most of my racing was done in a single seat or in formula cars in Brabham’s. The thing that really ended my racing career, we started a business called Springdale Racing, and we were the March distributor. The customers would go racing and I wouldn’t. And so that didn’t work out too good.

But anyway, I did a lot of racing. And so that’s my story there.

Crew Chief Eric: I got one more question for you about the good old days of Lamar. A lot of us try to look back through the lens of time and great way to depict what it was like is going to watch Steve McQueen’s movie Lamar, because it’s a bit of a snapshot of what it was like in those days.

I’m sure you’ve seen the movie, like all of us have. Is that accurate? You know, were the pits, the way they showed it, kind of dark and dank and dingy and, you know, all these kinds of things. And Le Mans stayed that way for a long time as we come to understand. What was it like? I’ve heard you tell this one other story about the Mulsanne [00:24:00] corner at the end of the straightaway that every car was required to have a shovel.

Chuck Schroedel: That’s correct. That’s correct, and I have pictures from my Philips camera. I’m looking at one of the pictures now of our pit setup at the end of the Molson Street. And when you go from flat out, it was what, maybe 8 miles, 7 miles along the straightaway. And you could, obviously it was constant sounds. I never slept, I stayed awake for the whole 24 hours with the boards.

And we were pitting next to the Camaradi Maserati team. So I would be sitting on the pit wall. It’s a walk from where I was, like the center field in a baseball stadium, is where the sand banks were. And the cars would go in too fast, go wide, and into the sand, and they’d get their shovel out and dig themselves out.

I do have pictures of our pits, and Maserati pit had a table set up with a tablecloth and food, etc. So, all I was supposed to do was we would get the messages on the telephone on times, what to flash, etc., and that’s what my job was. I wanted it. I stayed right there the whole time. [00:25:00] Very noisy. Very noisy.

Crew Chief Eric: So Richard, he brought up a little nugget of information that I wasn’t aware of.

There was a Camaradi Maserati team at the same time. How did that deal work out?

Richard Prince: Yeah, three cars. Lucky Kasner had no personal affinity for Corvette in particular. He ended up with the Corvettes because he connected with Fred Gamble. At an SCCA race at Okalaka Naval Air Base in Florida, Fred Gamble kind of partnered with CASNR.

Fred wrote a proposal, which he polished over a span of a couple of weeks to kind of get Camaradi going. It was a proposal in search of sponsorship. Fred conceived, as his presentation evolved, that they should have Sort of an American theme. He kind of envisioned it as analogous to the Olympics. An American team would field largely American drivers in an American car.

The first big sponsor they secured was Goodyear, and that [00:26:00] led to Chevrolet and the Corvette. But Lucky Kasner had no particular attachment to Corvette and was interested in racing for overall wins in addition to class wins. Was quite fond of pretty much anything that was fast. And the timing happened to be right for him.

Maserati was struggling were a near bankruptcy or about to enter bankruptcy. We’re struggling to field cars and to build cars and to even survive as a company, and they were looking for a capable team to represent them, but they didn’t have a lot of money because they were struggling financially. They ended up connecting with Lucky Kassner and Camerotti, and he became, in addition to racing the Corvettes, he became, at the same time, the de facto works operation for Maserati.

So at the same time, I think just about all of the races in the 1960 season, they were fielding the Corvette, they were also fielding typically more than one, but at least one Maserati in the [00:27:00] sports racing class or prototype class. For the overall win. So yeah, the Maseratis were a big part of Camerati’s operation.

Crew Chief Eric: So Chuck, did you ever get to meet the illustrious Lloyd Lucky Kastner?

Chuck Schroedel: Oh sure! The drivers for the Maseratis were Lucky Kastner and Jim Jeffords. They drove the number 25. And the 24 was Maston Gregory and Chuck Day. And Chuck Day remembered me in the Corvette from Le Mans, and he was also driving the Scarab when we got to Rennes, France.

So that’s why we kind of became friendly, because he remembered me from Le Mans.

Domenic Testa: I remember very clearly asking Fred Gamble, did he refer to Kasna as Lloyd or Lucky? And he said, well, lucky, of course, I thought that was kind of interesting. And I said, no, what was he like? And he referred to him as a bamboozling, flim flam artist.

Absolutely. He was able to convince Dow Chemical, which is a antifreeze manufacturer, uh, To sponsor his air cooled Porsches, [00:28:00] Fred used to laugh about it and he would say that he could sell anything to anybody. But he would also say that it was impossible not to like him and it was impossible to say no to him.

He’s an epic character and I’m so fascinated in the whole story of Lloyd Luckey Kazna. And, uh, one of the last times that Fred and I spoke, I asked him where Lucky came from, you know, where did the, the nickname come from? And to the best of his recollection, when Lloyd was a young man, he ran, got into some trouble or whatever, and his parents sent him away to military school.

Got in trouble in military school, and he ended up having to do the overnight watch. During the Christmas, New Year’s break one year, some students that he was in school with joking around said, well, aren’t you lucky? He liked the way it sounded and he actually adopted it himself. He gave himself the nickname Lucky Kasner.

So even at whatever, 13 years old, whatever he [00:29:00] was in military school, it was already the start of something big with him. He latched right onto that Lucky Kasner thing and he just took it for all it was

Chuck Schroedel: worth. And to be honest with you, the number 26 Maserati, Scarlatti is one of the drivers and Montereau.

And I didn’t know either of those people. But yes, you know, at that age, I was only like 22. I was just having a ball. And a lot of these faces and people didn’t mean a lot to me at that point. And the name Lucky Kastner was not a big draw for me. I knew he was basically the owner of the team. He certainly was very, very involved.

Domenic Testa: Sterling Moss and Lloyd Kastner. In 1961 won the Berg ring a thousand km in a Maserati Tippo 61. That’s true. Later that year in 1961, in that same car, Lloyd Kasner crashed the car at Pescara Grand Prix. He actually suffered some, uh, third degree burns after that crash, correct. In [00:30:00] April of 1965. Lloyd Kasner was driving, I think it was called a T 151, it was a modified Maserati.

He crashed at about 160 miles an hour, and that’s ultimately ended Lloyd Kasner. At 36 years old, he crashed that Maserati. It

Chuck Schroedel: was on the Mulsanne Street.

Domenic Testa: Yeah. Died from the injuries of that crash.

Crew Chief Eric: Talking about the speed of the Mulsanne, 165 miles an hour in the Maserati. I thought about this before when Chuck was talking about the racing at that time.

How fast was the Camaradi Corvette down the straightaway at top speed?

Domenic Testa: Oh, geez. Actually it’s recorded. Uh, the average speed in that race was 98 point something miles per hour. That’s the average lap speed. What’s it’s recorded top speed? 134, I believe. Okay.

Crew Chief Eric: You’re leading right into that, Dominic. Tell us what it’s like owning a piece of Le Mans history.

Domenic Testa: As Richard alluded to in the very beginning of our talk, epic characters that are involved in this whole story. It just goes beyond anything that I [00:31:00] had ever thought about. I first got involved in the car because I thought it was a cool race car and I heard a little bit about the story and it just seemed like a good thing to do at the time.

But after really digging into some of the People that were involved and having the ability to speak on a number of occasions with Fred Gamble, who was part of the comradery race team ownership and a driver and a journalist. And he went on to do so many more things. He went on to become Goodyear’s first director of international race car operations.

Very prolific writer wrote magazine articles and technical bulletins and things like that. It’s interesting that as Lloyd Kasner continued racing and at one point, Masten Gregory, Dan Gurney, Carol Shelby, Sterling Moss, uh, you know, the list goes on and on and on. He just couldn’t hold it together, which is part of what’s so interesting about it.

He had this great idea and he had him and Fred Gamble had this idea of the, this Olympic team. They just couldn’t hold it all together. [00:32:00] So. One by one, all these notable figures, you know, they would come and go. In around 1963, when Fred Gamble finally divorced himself from Camaradi, he ended up at a journalist’s luncheon and he runs into Carroll Shelby.

And before Fred went to work for Goodyear, Carroll Shelby made him his first sales manager. The small world. Yeah. Small world, illustrious career. That’s Chuck sitting in the Camaradi Corvette in the pits. At Lamont, you can see there’s a camera in the lower right hand side there. That’s somebody from the Chevrolet film crew was taking pictures.

There’s a great video narrated by Dr. Dick Thompson all about that 1960 race and standing in the back is Bob Wallace. And John Olson, these were two guys from New Zealand. Bob Wallace went on to a great career with Lamborghini. And John Olson is credited with building with Carroll Shelby the [00:33:00] first Daytona Coupe.

And these two gentlemen from New Zealand, both were part of the Camaradi team at Le Mans.

Crew Chief Eric: So I got a question for Chuck as you go through these pictures, kind of looking back at that one of him in the car. At that time, 1960, how were Americans received at Le Mans? What was it like being with an American car there today?

It’s accepted Corvette is part of the landscape along with other vehicles, you know, especially last year, Ford back on the scene at Lamar. What was it like to be there with Corvette? Is it sort of like garage 56 where everybody was sort of raising their eyebrow going, I don’t think they’re going to make it.

What was the vibe like at that time?

Chuck Schroedel: More eyes would open wide when I’d be in my 56 Corvette. For them to see a Corvette. I mean, that was like, what the hell is that? I really honestly spent the whole race, the end of the Mulsanne straight in the rain, et cetera. And I didn’t really get a feel. I didn’t notice anything in particular about the way they felt about the American team.

I just thought that we showed ourselves very, very [00:34:00] well. We were polite and I love my two years in France. I had no problem. It was a dream come true just to be involved with that team at that time. Because I had been reading about it all this time, so it was a thrill. It was a thrill.

Crew Chief Eric: So Richard, you talked a lot about Loren Lumberg and his quest to find the car, you know, almost in a Don Quixote sort of way.

What attracted him to the Camaradi Corvette? Was it its beauty? Presence at Lamar. Was it? It’s finished. Was it the history? You analyzed a lot of his story. Can you share more about what drew him to try to find the car?

Richard Prince: Dominic mentioned that a big part of his attraction to the car is the cast of larger than life characters that surround its story and Lauren Lundberg’s right up there with Lloyd Lucky Kastner and Chuck and some of the other truly remarkable people.

Lauren. Was a super passionate Corvette enthusiast. He crossed paths with the car completely by accident. Dominic [00:35:00] mentioned Bob Wallace, a New Zealander who was hired on as a mechanic for the team during the 1960s season. When the car was going from Sweden after the Swedish Grand Prix and after Joe Bonnier set some new Swedish national speed records on public roads with the car.

It was next going to Great Britain and it was driven from race to race. There was no trail or no transporter, which I think was typical of the era. So Bob Wallace was driving the car and it was he who crashed it in Sweden. Fred Gamble was in their support vehicle, a Ford station wagon. Oddly enough, Bob Wallace left Camerati after the, uh, 60 season and went to work for a Ferrari team for the next four years.

And then in 64, he went to work for Lamborghini initially as a mechanic and up, he was slated to do a little bit of test driving, but his skill and his acumen quickly led to his rise in [00:36:00] the company. He became their chief test driver and. Was instrumental in every Lamborghini that the company produced for the next 10 years.

When Ferruccio Lamborghini sold the company in 19, I believe, 75, Bob Wallace didn’t want to stay on with the new owner. So he was from New Zealand. He had lived much of the past 15 or so years in Italy. He and his wife literally opened up a map book and decided that they were going to move to the United States.

And they picked Phoenix, Arizona, because it was warm. And because there was enough of a population there to support a business, he intended to open up an independent Ferrari and a Lamborghini repair and race prep shop. So he and his wife moved to Phoenix and Lauren Lundberg lived in Glendale, Arizona. He was 10 minutes from Bob Wallace’s shop by sheer coincidence.

Another Corvette enthusiast named Mike Pillsbury was on a phone call with Loren Lundberg, and Loren was trying to convince Mike to [00:37:00] bring his car, one of the Cunningham team cars that Mike Pillsbury had found and restored, to a Southwest NCRS, National Corvette Restorer Society show. And in the course of the conversation, Mike Pillsbury said, Hey, you’re, you’re near Phoenix.

You must know Bob Wallace. And Loren Lundberg said, No, I don’t know Bob Wallace. Mike Pillsbury told him, well, he was with the Camerati team. In 1960, and he was there at Le Mans with the car, be an interesting guy, you ought to look him up. So that’s what started Loren Lundberg’s journey with the Camerati car.

He went and visited Bob Wallace. It was a combination of, he loved C1 Corvettes, he recognized the intrinsic interest. And worth and I don’t mean financial worth because for Lauren, it was never about money. It was the historic value of a car that had not only competed at Le Mans, which in and of itself is remarkable for the time period, but a car that had actually finished Le Mans.

So he instantly became fascinated with the car and [00:38:00] he wants to know, where is it? What’s happened to it? And Bob Wallace, told him the sad story that he had crashed the car, it rolled several times, and ended up a shattered mess. And Lauren Lundberg didn’t accept that it was just thrown away, what happened to it?

And Bob Wallace said, we assumed it was scrap. And he pulled out a photo of the car, a crime scene photo, from the wreck, showing exactly what the car looked like. You know, it was an accident photo. Bob Wallace’s attitude was, look at what, you know, what was left of it. I’m sure it was, you know, disposed of.

And Lauren Lundberg said, but you don’t know for sure, do you? And Bob Wallace acknowledged that he didn’t know for sure. He and Fred Gamble had taken what they deemed the only salvageable parts out of the car, which was the engine and transmission. And they gave the remains to the first Swedish policeman who had showed up at the accident scene.

Their idea was, well, the car was sort of somewhat famous at that point, Completed the 24 hours of Le Mans, and it had just been driven by [00:39:00] Bonnier, who was Sweden’s first Formula One driver and first Formula One winner to some national public road speed records. So their idea was the policeman was nice to them, and he could probably sell a few bits and pieces off the car as souvenirs before it went to the scrapyard, but he didn’t know for sure.

Lauren Lundberg very quickly became obsessed, and again, I think it was his. Attachment to Corvettes, his fascination with Corvette history, and his recognition that a Le Mans finishing Corvette from that time period was truly a remarkable piece of machinery. And though extraordinarily remote, if in fact this car did survive, it was worth investigating and if possible, acquiring it.

After five years of pre internet, Old fashioned, tenacious detective work with an incredible sequence of unrelated, incredibly intensely lucky coincidences. Loren found the car [00:40:00] and he was able to buy it in 1995, 35 years after it left the United States. He, uh, shipped it back and it came back to the west coast to the port of Long Beach.

Crew Chief Eric: That quest, that journey, the car gets fully restored. Dominic, you’ve got some pictures of it now. We’ve seen the pictures from the center conversation. It was on display at the IMRRC. As Lauren got older, like in a lot of cases, especially with collector cars, that enthusiast passes away and then the family goes, I don’t know what to do with dad’s cars or grandpa’s cars or whatever.

So it went up on the market. What drew you to the Camaradi Corvette? Was it the Le Mans story? Was it something else? Had you met Loren in the past and was his excitement about it that drew you in? What made you decide you wanted to own a piece of Le Mans history?

Domenic Testa: I had never met Loren. Shortly before I actually saw the car in a NCRS driveline ad for sale, I had watched a movie called The Quest.

And the quest was a movie all about the number [00:41:00] three car and John Fitch and going back to Lamar. And it just piqued my interest that a car like number four car was up for sale. So I responded to the ad with the car for sale from the, you know, that I saw the NCS driveline. And at that point, Lauren’s family, just as you said, they didn’t know what to do with the car.

The car was in the garage. You know, I spoke with his wife a couple of times. She advertised it, but she really didn’t know what she wanted to do with it. So, some time went by. Eventually, we hooked back up. Lauren had passed away. She was selling the house that they lived in. And, uh, she called me on a Monday, and she said, I’m moving out of the house on Friday.

If you want the car, just make a reasonable offer. Now, I live in New York. The car was in Arizona. She said, come to Arizona. You have to be here by Friday and the car has to be out of the garage by Friday because I’m vacating the house for the new owners to take possession. That’s Saturday. [00:42:00] Just so happened that it was Barrett Jackson that weekend.

So I was able to find reliable. One of the car carriers that had a spot. Available to get the car back to New York. So I flew to Arizona to Lauren’s house, looked at the car, car carrier came and met us there. We made the deal, put the car in the car carrier, got back to New York. Funny story, we’re in Lauren’s garage and there’s the car.

Speaking with his wife and Lauren’s son actually came to the garage while we were there finishing the deal up. Mrs. Lundberg said to me, you know, you bought the car and there’s, there’s all this other stuff that’s in the garage that belonged to Lauren. And I don’t know what any of it is, but if you don’t take it, I’m going to throw it all out.

I’m like, well, let me take a look at it and see what it is. I mean, you know, I came for the car. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t really expect anything else. And there were file boxes of photographs and correspondences. It was that whole five year search that Richard was just [00:43:00] referring to, all documented, thrown in these file boxes.

Mrs. Lundberg’s like, you’re welcome to take it if you want it. Most of it, I didn’t even know what I was looking at because I, I really honestly didn’t know. The extent of the story I knew, you know, about obviously the race and I, you know, I learned about the four cars that went to the race, but I really didn’t have this whole back story.

So we’re taking this paperwork and we’re putting it inside the car to travel back to New York. The intake manifold was off the car and the fuel injection unit was in the trunk. We’re filling up garbage bags and we’re stuffing the engine compartment with garbage bags full of all this paperwork, haphazardly, just everything that we could fit in the car, we fit in the car.

So I get it back and this is actually how I met Chuck. Now I got the car back and I have these boxes and boxes and boxes of paperwork. And it was, you know, we just kind of threw it all together. It was in no particular order or, or anything like that. And what I would do is every day [00:44:00] on my way to work is I would just grab a handful.

Of stuff from the boxes and try and sort it into some kind of order, date order or subject order or whatever. And I mean, it was literally file boxes full of paperwork and I’m going through this stuff 1 day and I see a handwritten note on the side of a letter from Lauren to Chuck. with a phone number, and it said Chuck Schroedel, a phone number, and the town that Chuck lived in, it said Bedford, New York.

Now, my office is in Valhalla, New York, which is like 15 minutes away from Bedford, New York, and I’m like, how could this, this can’t possibly be it? I mean, it just adds to this epic story of, like, the stuff that, most of it’s not even believable. What’s the worst that could happen? I dial the number up, man answered the phone, The way Chuck always answers the phone, Chuck Schroedel.

And I’m like, uh, excuse me, but, uh, you Chuck Schroedel that had something to do with the Le Mans race in 1960 Corvette. And he’s like, yeah, that’s [00:45:00] me. What’s it to you? And that was it. That started the whole thing. And I mean, ever since that day, Chuck and I, we probably talk at least once a week or sometimes a couple of times a week.

And we’ve become great friends and, you know, just another one of the epic characters that go with the camaraderie story.

Chuck Schroedel: You know, Dom, one of the amazing things here is, when you called, that call was separated by a number of years from the same call I got from Lauren. And I was stunned. I said, you have to be kidding.

I just went through this. And then when you explained the story, subsequently, you brought the car to a show in Armonk, which is like five minutes from my house. When I saw the car, I just, I had a hard time. I couldn’t believe it. Yeah,

Domenic Testa: that

Chuck Schroedel: picture

Domenic Testa: that I have up now, that is Chuck Schroedel sitting in the car 63 years after he sat in the car in the LeMans pit.

And that was at Armonk, New York. And what we tried to do, you know, being a bunch of goofball amateur [00:46:00] photographers, we tried to recreate that picture with that picture.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, Dominic, you’ve become part of this cast of characters of the Camerati story, but it begs the question, what are some of the future plans for the car?

You’re its caretaker. You’re its custodian now. Where is it going to be shown? Are you driving it? What are you doing it with it? What’s the future of the car?

Domenic Testa: I do every now and again, try and take it for a little ride, but it’s not registered. Try and keep that to a minimum. It’s a lot of fun driving the car.

It’s really a lot of fun. We’re going to be at the Boston concourse up in Boston, Massachusetts with the car. And then we’re going to be at the Newport concourse. Up in Newport, Rhode Island, maybe if everything works out, according to plan, it may be on a long term display at pretty prestigious museum one in Kentucky.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Down down in Kentucky.

Crew Chief Eric: That was actually going to be my next question whether or not it was going to end up at the National Corvette Museum or not, which would be absolutely epic ending for this card. Not an ending, but [00:47:00] a resting place. Yes.

Domenic Testa: Yes, it’s actually, I could use a little bit of a rest.

We had a very hectic show season this year. If everything comes together and all the stars are aligned and you know, I’ve agreed to bring it down, it all depends on whether we could work the details out with the museum.

Chuck Schroedel: Lauren and Dom have kept this thing going and thanks to Dom, I went with him on a weekend to Watkins Glen to the museum where the car was on display.

And that’s where I met Richard. And I saw the reception of the car at the museum at Watkins Glen, and I have to tell you, I just, I can’t thank Dom enough for what he’s doing with that car. It’s unbelievable.

Crew Chief Eric: In this crazy story of the restoration of the car and the cast of the characters, and we’ve kind of glossed over some things, and I urge people to go back and listen to a longer presentation that you guys did with the IMRRC as part of this Summer Center conversation, where you, Richard, and Chuck go into way more detail about even the discovery of the car and things like that.

One of the things I took away from that presentation was the original motor is lost at sea [00:48:00] somewhere off the coast of Australia, but I went back to the other camaraderie Corvette when I was listening to that part of the story when it burned to the ground and all these kinds of things. It reminded me of other cars that have suffered from catastrophic fires.

Even last year at Car Week, there was a Ferrari that was found in a barn that had suffered from a fire and somebody was going to put it back together and this and that. Has there been any talk to find the other Camerati Corvette? Does anybody know where it is? Does it still exist anymore or was it crushed?

What’s its story? I did ask Fred Gamble

Domenic Testa: about it in 1960 after the fire at Sebring. The best of his recollection at this point was it was, uh, it was a total loss and, you know, discarded or scrapped or whatever.

Crew Chief Eric: Or maybe that lucky person still has it in a barn, just like the number four, right? Could be.

You never know.

Domenic Testa: That’s actually the reason that the Cunningham crew was able to crew three cars. at Le Mans is because the three car took the place of the second Camaradi car. It [00:49:00] was, originally it was laid out to be two Cunningham cars, the one and two, and three and four would have been the two spots for Camaradi.

But when they lost the car at Sebring, I guess either Ed Cole or Zora Duntov or whatever kind of got annoyed with Lloyd Luckey. Instead of replacing a car to the Camaradi team, they worked out a third car. to the Cunningham team, and if you look at the serial numbers of the four cars, the one and two are kind of similar.

The four car is kind of similar, and the three car, which was the one that replaced the Camaradi three car, is way out of sequence from, um, the other cars.

Crew Chief Eric: So as we move into the final piece of this, we actually have a question from the crowd, and this is for the panel. And Terry writes, with the focus being on this wonderful era of Corvette, Do you gentlemen have any thoughts on Corvettes conversion or transition to the modern day mid engine car?

Should they have continued their legacy of the front [00:50:00] engine design that started with cars like the Camerati Corvette? Does it feel right to have gone in this distinctive difference that we have now? What do you guys think about modern Le Mans and team Corvette and racing and all those kinds of things?

And I’ll start with Chuck because I know you have some opinions about this.

Chuck Schroedel: I can appreciate what everybody is going through that owns a Corvette, because when I got my 56 Corvette, the only thing I could not do was get the car into bed with me. I was so in love with that car. I was part of it until I sold my racing car business, and I sold the car probably in 74, which was a big mistake.

But I loved it. that car. I loved everything about it. I did everything to it. I consider myself a past true Corvette owner, so I can appreciate.

Crew Chief Eric: Dominic, your thoughts on modern Corvette racing compared to the Camerati Corvette?

Domenic Testa: One of the things that we’re trying to work out with the National Corvette Museum is, uh, if I’m fortunate enough to Camerati car.

I’m trying to work out a museum delivery of [00:51:00] a new C8. You know, maybe we can get them both at the National Corvette Museum at the same time the, uh, the old GT style C1 car and delivery of the new C8.

Crew Chief Eric: We need a Camerati Tribute car at the next Le Mans. That’s what we really need. Somebody needs to do a

Domenic Testa: livery.

Yeah, that would be cool. Maybe we could turn the new C8 they take delivery of at the museum into a Camerati Tribute car.

Allonte Barakat: Never know.

Crew Chief Eric: So Richard,

Domenic Testa: you’re

Crew Chief Eric: still involved with General Motors. What are your thoughts on modern day team Corvette racing?

Richard Prince: I could probably speak for a week on, in answering that question.

A change is often disruptive and for a lot of people it’s traumatic, especially when it pertains to something that they’re super passionate about. I’ve enjoyed the great privilege of working for a lot of different car companies. The bulk of my work has been for General Motors, but I’ve done photography for just about all of the world’s major car makers, including a lot of the iconic performance brands like Aston Martin and Audi and Bentley and Ferrari [00:52:00] and Mercedes and Porsche.

Every brand has its enthusiasts, but I really do believe that no group is as intense and as passionate and fiercely loyal as is the Corvette Lovers. When people are so personally, emotionally invested and so passionate about something, change can be a powerful tool. a big issue. And this has been the case all along in Corvette’s history.

My Corvette journey began 50 years ago. I can say from my own experience and even from my understanding of Corvette history prior to that, that every major change has been disruptive and it has caused turmoil when they went from open headlights to rotating headlights. And then when they went from Pop up headlights back to open headlights, even when the shape of the tail lamps changed recently, it was a big problem for a lot of people.

Of course, some people like the change. No change has been quite so profound. Of [00:53:00] course, as the change to the mid engine car, which came with a C8 introduced in 2020. It is a big disruptor. It not only completely changes the architecture of the car, but it really profoundly changes the appearance. It goes from that traditional front engine GT look with the long nose and the cockpit set back to a mid engine look.

The engine behind the passengers and it changes the proportions of the cars quite dramatically. So I understand why Some people don’t like it, and I also appreciate why some people are in love with it. Inevitably, we can’t deny the laws of physics, and it was just that. It was the laws of physics that propelled the change, and also the march of technology that allowed it.

AAA explored mid engine architecture as far back as the late 1950s. And on a relatively low volume car like Corvette, it was just simply not feasible economically, logistically, technologically feasible, but today with computer aided design and 3D printing and [00:54:00] incredible advances in technology, it is feasible and the front engine architecture really reached the limits of its performance potential with the C7.

So, it was inevitable, it was the only way forward if Corvette is going to keep moving forward. As far as the racing goes, I’ve been with the modern Corvette race program since its inception in 1997 when they began testing. I can say, in my opinion, the Corvette race program today is in the best place it’s ever been.

And that’s simply because of the transition to the GT3 platform. Previously, The cars that raced in one place weren’t homologated to race in another place, and it was prohibitively expensive to build two or three different versions of the same race car. Finally, the manufacturers and the sanctioning bodies have come together.

Now, GT3 is the specification for production based GT racing around the world, so GT3 homologated cars, which the [00:55:00] C8R Z06 is, Are eligible to race in every major sports car racing series around the world. So that together with the change in Chevrolet’s business model, they’ve gone from a full factory program, which is what it’s been for the past 27 years.

They’ve gone to a customer based program. Chevrolet is partnering with different teams. In different series around the world and supporting those teams, but the teams have more autonomy and are acting more independently. That business model in conjunction with the GT3 specification and its eligibility has resulted in more Corvettes racing in more places around the world than ever before.

This year, that includes two different teams in IMSA, a team in WAC, a team in the SRO, and next year, I’m not at liberty to say exactly where and who, but I’ll say that there will be even more Corvettes racing in even more places around the world. So if you’re a Corvette race [00:56:00] fan, putting aside preferences for the aesthetic and so on, The good news is there are more Corvettes racing in more places than ever before, and moving forward, that is only going to grow even further.

Wherever you are in the world, whatever race series is your favorite, you are likely to eventually see Corvettes, and when I say eventually, it’s going to be sooner than later, racing in that series. From my perspective, I love the fact that there are more teams racing more Corvettes than ever before.

Crew Chief Eric: And on that, I want to turn the microphone over to ACO USA President David Lowe.

For some closing thoughts.

David Lowe: What an incredible evening. Thank you Eric for pulling this together and to Richard and Dominique and to Chuck. It’s an honor to have you contribute to this very, very important program for the ACO USA members. For me, it was very enlightening. I really enjoyed the story. And again, I look forward to a chance to meet you all, possibly up at Watkins Glen here in the near future.

Thank

Crew Chief Eric: you. Tonight’s episode was brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research [00:57:00] Center, whose charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports and stories like those of the Camerati Corvette. The IMRRC’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

And it welcomes serious researchers and the casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures, and special events. To learn more, be sure to check out www. racingarchives. org or follow them on social media at IMRRC.

And on behalf of everyone here and those listening at home, thank you for sharing your stories with us, and we hope you enjoyed this presentation and look forward to more Evenings with a Legend throughout the season. Dominic, Richard, and Chuck, thank you all for spending your evening with us and sharing this most interesting, um, Corner of Lamont’s history with us a story that probably many haven’t heard, but are going to repeat from this [00:58:00] point forward.

And Dominic, a special hats off to you for being the continued custodian of such an interesting piece of Lamont’s history.

Domenic Testa: Thanks, Eric. And again, thanks to the International Motor Racing Research Center at Watkins Glen and the ACO for inviting us. It’s an honor for me. Thank you.

Richard Prince: Thank you very much.

Domenic Testa: Thanks a lot.

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Crew Chief Eric: com. This episode has been brought to you by the Automobile Club of the West and the ACO USA. From the awe inspiring speed demons that have graced the track to the courageous drivers who have pushed the limits of endurance, the 24 Hours of Le Mans is an automotive spectacle like no other.

For over a century, the 24 Hours of Le Mans has urged manufacturers to innovate for the benefit of future motorists, and it’s a celebration of the relentless pursuit of speed and excellence in the world of motorsports. To learn more [01:01:00] about or to become a member of the ACO USA, look no further than www.

lemans. org, click on English in the upper right corner, and then click on the ACO members tab for club offers. Once you’ve become a member, you can follow all the action on the Facebook group, ACO USA members club, and become part of the legend with future evening with the legend meetups.

Hello, hello, hello.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our Motoring Podcast Network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like the Exotic Car Marketplace, The Motoring Historian, Brake Fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.

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episode.

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Brake Fix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.

Crew Chief Eric: The following presentation focuses on the amazing history of the Camerati Corvette that finished 10th in the 1960 24 Hours of Le Mans. The panel of folks you’re about to hear from consisted of Richard Prince, author and official photographer of the GM Corvette race team, Dominic Testa, the current owner of the car, Chuck Schroedel, who was a member of the Camerati team at Le Mans in 1960, and a special guest appearance by Laura Clauser, the GM sports car racing program manager.

Each member of the panel gave their insight into the history of the Camerati Corvette. Chuck’s commentary from actually being there in 1960 was especially memorable. Ms. Clauser ended the presentation by taking us from Corvette racing in 1960 to the 2024 Corvette racing programs competing not [00:01:00] only in the United States, but in the race series around the world.

The audience consisted of a great, enthusiastic crowd of race fans, and we extend our thanks to the Rochester Corvette Club, which had multiple beautiful Corvettes parked outside of the IMRRC, adding to the fun of the event. Please sit back and enjoy the following presentation.

Richard Prince: Thank you everybody for joining us this evening and thank you, uh, especially for your support of the International Motor Racing Research Center.

We’re here, myself, Dominic, his wife, and Chuck, because we also believe in the mission of the center and are happy to support it. So thank you. We’re here to talk about a Corvette, but in a much larger sense, a way, way bigger story than a single car. I think many of you know part of my livelihood is writing about and photographing cars for editorial publications.

My most recent encounter with this car came as a result of a story that I did about it. I knew the car for pretty close to 30 years because the prior [00:02:00] owner, the man who rescued it was an acquaintance of mine through the National Corvette Restorer’s Society. So I crossed paths with the car many years ago on several occasions, but I never really dug deep and came to an appreciation of the story.

I began writing in 1992, so it’s more than 30 years now. And I can say after considerably more than 2000 magazine articles, This is clearly the most interesting story that I’ve ever come across. That’s what really inspired us getting together this evening. It is really the greatest Corvette story. It’s just so unbelievable every step of the way.

A lot of that has to do with the incredible cast of characters who are a part of this. Dominic and Chuck, they are two epic characters in their own right. Each one, uh, a part of the history of this car. Dominic more recently, Chuck going back to 1960. I’ll let him tell you the story of [00:03:00] how he came to be in Le Mans.

He went there as a spectator, as a Corvette enthusiast, went home a crew member. Obviously that’s a memory that can be cherished for all these many years. I’m going to summarize the story of this car and what really makes it so incredible. The story of the Camarotti team and the Camarotti Corvettes begins with the gentleman Lloyd Lucky Kastner.

He was born in New York City in 1928. Very bright guy, but above all else he had an unbreakable power to convince anybody to do anything that he wanted. Was alternately referred to as a genius and a consummate con man. Was graduated from the University of Miami with a degree in business administration.

Decided he wanted to be an airline pilot. The Got the training, got the license, and went to work for Pan American Airways around 1950. And he flew for them for four years. Got interested in racing. Did some SCCA club racing. Pan Am changed his route. He used to fly to Miami, to South America. They wanted [00:04:00] him to fly transatlantic, and he didn’t want to do it.

So he quit. It’s a little gray how this happened, but he ended up a Cadillac dealer in Miami, and he sold new cars, used cars, and that only exacerbated his interest in racing. He got more and more involved, and unfortunately, his taste in race cars far exceeded his ability to buy them, so he got the bright idea to convince other people to pay for his Ferraris and his Maseratis.

In March of 1959, at a, an SCCA club race, on the Naval Air Station there, in Opelika, he grabbed the announcer’s microphone. And he welcomed anybody who wanted to, to join him as a member of his racing club to help fund his way to Europe so he could race at Le Mans, the Nürburgring, Targa Florio, everywhere else.

And that was met with some scorn because he was talking to racers, any one of whom would have gladly welcomed the opportunity to go to Europe on somebody else’s dime. But never underestimate again the power of Lucky Kastner. You know, I’ll tell you one [00:05:00] super quick story about him that really summarizes his persuasive powers.

At one point, later on, he convinced the Dow Chemical Company to be his racing sponsor. At that time, Dow Chemical was the world’s largest producer of automotive antifreeze. Lucky Kastner was racing air cooled Porsches. One person at that race who, uh, didn’t laugh at Lucky was a man named Fred Gamble. Fred was a young journalist, recent college grad and an avid racer.

And he thought this whole thing sounded like a grand adventure. So he approached Lucky and said, Hey, I’m in, I’ll fund my own way. I want to go with you to Europe and service your PR guy. I’ll pay for everything. And I’ll just make my own way doing magazine stories about the racing. Lucky took him up on his offer.

Instead of having him tag along as the PR guy, he said, we’re going to be essentially partners in this. Fred Gamble took several weeks and [00:06:00] crafted a beautiful sponsorship proposal. He envisioned this as sort of like the American Olympic team of racing because he knew Lucky Kastner that if anybody could sell it, it was him.

Lucky Kastner and Fred took the proposal and they, without that much effort, landed Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company as a primary sponsor. Goodyear promised money, tires, technical support. Lucky Kastner then leveraged that. He had Goodyear Tire, this must be a legitimate operation, right? He had no money, no cars, no team, but he had Goodyear Tires.

That was in March of 1959. By the summer, he had arranged a meeting with Ed Cole and Zora Duntov. Ed Cole was then the general manager of Chevrolet, and Duntov was not yet chief engineer. I think his title at that time was director of high performance cars for Chevrolet. A marriage was made in heaven.

Chevrolet agreed to provide Camerati Racing with two Corvettes, two complete competition prepped cars, [00:07:00] Rochester fuel injection, four speed posi rear, heavy duty brake and suspension, wide wheels, 24 gallon fuel tanks. Those cars were delivered through Don Steven Chevrolet in Miami. The dealership initially did the race preparation.

Those cars had a shakedown in Daytona Speedway. From there, they got loaded on a boat and went to Havana, Cuba, for what was called the Gran Premio de la Havana. It was a major GT race in Cuba before trouble really broke out there. Jim Jeffords drove one of the Camaradi cars to a GT win there, and the team was very happy.

After the race in Cuba, the next event was the 12 Hours of Sebring and that was another epic event at the time. Then as now, it was America’s premier endurance race. It was the birthplace of American endurance racing. By 1960, it was a major event that attracted competitors from all over the world. Fred Gamble was the team manager at that point, and he filled [00:08:00] out the paperwork and he put himself down as a reserve driver.

He told me it was really just for a laugh, he wanted to see his name in the program. He never expected to drive. The contractor driver for that car, Skip Hudson, didn’t show. So Lucky Kastner said to Fred, if you want to drive it, drive it. Fred Gamble drove. Jim Jeffords was in the other car in the opening hour.

Jim Jeffords car had an issue, probably a valve train failure of some sort. It wouldn’t rev over 5, 000 RPMs. He was the star racer. So he came in with a broken car. Fred Gamble was ordered to bring his car in and turn it over to Jim Jeffords, which was a crushing blow. But the team’s chief mechanic, Lee Lilly, said to Fred, Well, the other car’s still running.

If you want to mosey around until it blows up, be my guest. So Fred got in that car, drove it carefully, and it just kept on going and going and going. End of that story is, that car finished the race with one driver, Fred [00:09:00] Gamble, and I believe it is only the second occurrence in Sebring history where one person drove the entire 12 hours.

The car had one problem. It had a fuel line fail. They borrowed a fuel line off of a production Corvette, finished the race, then removed the fuel line to give it back to the guy who owned it. The next morning, a mechanic with the team went to move that car. It had no fuel line on it. He cranked it. It sprayed fuel all over.

The car caught fire and it burned to the ground. That Camerati Corvette, sadly, is no longer with us. The other surviving car is the car that is here with us today, and that went on to lead a most remarkable life. After Sebring, it was entered in the Targa Florio, which was, by any account, the most difficult, dangerous, treacherous race in the world at the time.

It was held on public roads in the mountains of Sicily, and one lap took almost 45 miles. They ended the race shortly after, because so many people ended up getting [00:10:00] killed there. Drivers, spectators. It unfortunately did not get to Italy in time for that race, so it missed the Targa Florio. And it’s kind of sad to think it didn’t have that race on its resume now, but it’s also probably a good thing because that race was so dangerous, and the Corvette was relatively heavy and relatively powerful, and we might not be here tonight if it got to the Targa Florio because it was probably better than a 50 50 chance that it would have crashed there.

After the Targa Florio, went to the Nürburgring, the only solid axle car to compete at the Nürburgring. And after that, it went to Le Mans. Obviously there were very, very few Corvettes in the early days that competed there, let alone finish there. So that was a truly remarkable accomplishment and testament to, of course, the good wrenching of our friend Chuck and the good driving of, again, Fred Gamble and Lee Lilly.

After Le Mans, the car went to Sweden. Where it competed in the Swedish Grand Prix. I think Lucky Kasner drove it there and he actually won the [00:11:00] GT category there in the car. The day after the race, Joe Bonier, he was Sweden’s first Formula one driver and the first Swede to win a Formula One race. So he was quite a star at the time.

He drove the Corvette to several new national speed records for production cars on public roads in Sweden. And it was a great publicity venture for Camerati and for Chevrolet as well. After that, the car’s next stop was Goodwood for the Tourist Trophy in England. The team did not own a trailer. They had a 59 Ford station wagon that they used to haul tools and spares, and the car was driven from one race to the next.

So Fred Gamble was in the station wagon, and a man named Bob Wallace was driving the Corvette. Bob Wallace was an Australian who wrenched on the car. He was hired as a mechanic before Le Mans and was to stay with the team the rest of the season. Bob Wallace was at the wheel of the Corvette. They [00:12:00] stopped for lunch and according to Fred Gamble, Bob Wallace maybe had one or two many drinks and he fell asleep at the wheel and he crashed the Corvette while still in Sweden.

He went off the road into a ditch and rolled several times, landed on its It’s wheels, but as you can see, it was very, very badly damaged. Bob Wallace went off to the hospital, was okay. The car ended up in a garage in the town where it crashed. Fred Gamble and Bob Wallace removed the engine and transmission, which they deemed to be the only pieces left of any use.

Because they were treated well by the local police, they simply gave the car to the first policeman who showed up at the accident scene. And they presumed that he would maybe keep a few pieces, maybe sell a few pieces off of it because the car was sort of now famous in Sweden. It was a new national speed record holder driven by a Formula One star.

Off they went, and that was thought to be the end of the Camaradi Corvette. As an aside, the [00:13:00] engine and transmission went back to the team’s shop in Modena. Fred Gamble and Bob Wallace quickly sold it to a guy named Hans Tanner. Hans Tanner had a business called TechMac. He was an American, and he had this agency that served as an intermediary between overseas enthusiasts who owned Ferraris and Maseratis, and the factories.

So, if you were an American, or a Canadian, or a New Zealander, or a Frenchman, and you didn’t speak Italian, and you couldn’t deal with the Ferrari factory, you had Hans Tonner, and you’d send your Ferrari to him, and he would bring it to the factory, and he would, of course, be paid for that service. A gentleman sent Hans a 250F Maserati, a Formula One Grand Prix Maserati, that was supposed to go to the Maserati factory to get rebuilt.

Hans Tanner decided the car really should have an American V8. So he had Bob Wallace and Fred Gamble install the Corvette’s engine into this Grand Prix [00:14:00] Maserati. And then he sold the car to a guy in New Zealand. It wasn’t his car to sell, but he sold it anyway. The Maserati was uncontrollable. It had wrong weight distribution and too much power.

And it was wrecked. The engine came out of the Maserati, went into an offshore racing boat, that boat sunk and that engine, as far as we know, is still off the coast of Australia. The, the engine is still there. If anybody’s ambitious and wants maybe to get the original engine for Dominic’s car, you know where it is.

This was in August of 1960. Fast forward 30 years. There’s a man named Loren Lundberg. He lives in Glendale, Arizona. He was a Corvette enthusiast. And a friend of mine, a good guy and an epic character. He got involved in organizing a race car display for an NCRS Southwest chapter meet. He had a list of some people to call to ask if they would be kind enough to bring their race cars for this display.

On that list was a man named Mike Pillsbury. Mike Pillsbury, another character, one day was in a [00:15:00] junkyard in Southern California and he saw the remains of a 1960 Corvette and Mike Pillsbury was a Corvette expert. Though the car was in very, very rough shape, he knew that he was looking at something special.

It was a heavy duty brake and suspension fuel injected Corvette that at one time had had a 37 gallon gas tank in it. And Mike Pillsbury knew that the 37 gallon tank was not a production item. They were made by Chevrolet. About a dozen of these were made and they went to Briggs Cunningham’s team, and they went to the Camerati team for Le Mans.

The tank was made for Le Mans. That car turned out to be the number two Cunningham car. Mike Pillsbury took it out of the junkyard, researched it, verified it, restored it, and Loren Lundberg called him to see if he would be so kind as to bring his car to this NCRS display. And in the course of the conversation, Pillsbury said, Hey, you live in Glendale, Arizona.

You must know Bob Wallace. And Lauren Lundberg said, I don’t know Bob Wallace. Who’s Bob Wallace? And [00:16:00] Mike Pillsbury said, Oh, Bob Wallace was involved with Le Mans. He was one of the mechanics with the Camerati team. And he’s got a foreign car shop in Phoenix. So, Lorne Lundberg’s ears perked up and he said, I’m going to pay Bob Wallace a visit.

Bob Wallace, as I said, was an Australian. He lived in Italy for more than 15 years. After Camerati, he went to work for an Italian team racing Ferraris. And in 1964, he went to work for Lamborghini, initially as a mechanic, but quickly rose in that organization to become the chief test driver. And a very influential person at Lamborghini.

So over the next 10 years, from 1965 until 1975, he profoundly influenced every car that Lamborghini made. In 1975, Ferruccio Lamborghini sold the company and Bob Wallace didn’t want to stay with new owners. So he quit. He and his wife considered going back to Australia, staying in Italy. Just like that, they decided America’s where they ought to be.[00:17:00]

They had no connection, no reason to go any one particular place. They wanted to go someplace warm, and they wanted to go someplace with a decent population, because he intended to open up an independent Ferrari shop. They picked Phoenix, Arizona. So the same Bob Wallace that wrenched on and crashed the Camerati Corvette ended up in Phoenix, Arizona.

Lauren Lundberg was 10 minutes away, went to see him. Bob Wallace pulled that photo out of his desk drawer and said this was the end of the car. And Lauren Lundberg questioned him, said is it really the end? Maybe it survived, maybe somebody fixed it. And Bob Wallace said honestly I don’t know. Told him the story, we gave it to the cop, last I saw of it.

But look at it, I doubt it survived. Well, Lauren Lundberg became focused. Let’s just say that anybody see the John wick movies? Yeah. Lauren Lundberg was the John wick of Corvette people. He was determined to find out if this car survived and if it didn’t where it ended up. [00:18:00] And again, this was 1990, no internet.

He had to do with the old fashioned way. He had some names. He had a country, last known in Sweden. Bob Wallace said Fred Gamble was really the key. He kind of ran the whole operation, and he’s somebody you should speak with. But he didn’t know where he was. He hadn’t spoken with him in 30 years. All he remembered was that Fred Gamble was involved with skiing in Colorado.

So, Loren Lundberg contacted ski associations, ski magazines, trying to find Fred Gamble. No luck. Then one day, Loren Lundberg was putting away some old issues of Road and Track magazine and thumbing through them, and something caught his eye in an old issue of Road and Track. It was a letter to the editor from somebody named Fred Gamble.

And it gave his city in the state of Colorado. Loren Lundberg called information, got Fred Gamble’s phone number and address. sent him a letter asking him six questions about the Camaradi Corvette. Didn’t know if he’d get a response. A few days later, he got an eight page [00:19:00] letter that started with, Well, you asked for it, you’re gonna get it.

Fred Gamble, who passed away only a few months ago, Had almost a photographic memory and this was his life. After Camerati, he went to work for Goodyear Tire and Rubber as their race operations manager. He set up their whole race operations in Europe and was intimately involved with virtually every form of racing in the sixties into the seventies, land speed racing with Craig Breedlove.

He was part of Ford’s effort at Le Mans, Carroll Shelby, Shelby American, all the Cobra racing. He saved all his stuff and he remembered everything. He didn’t know where the car ended up. He like Bob Wallace presumed that it just ended up thrown away because look at it. Well, Loren Lundberg wrote scores of letters, he contacted the Swedish embassy, he got a map out, he looked at the most likely route from the location in Sweden where the car had raced to Goodwood [00:20:00] in England, he wrote the Swedish consulate and asked for every police agency on that route.

His brother was involved with the Chrysler Town and Country Club. Woody Station Wagons? His brother happened to know a club member in Sweden, gave Loren the guy’s contact information. Loren contacted him. It took a while, but that man sent Loren information about the police agencies and about how accident reports are made.

Ultimately, he wrote letters to every police agency that could have possibly taken the accident report. This is, at this point, it was about 32 years. Lucky Loren, one of his letters landed in the hands of a man named Stig Johansen. Stig was a car enthusiast and a police officer. He was determined to help Loren.

It was the agency that took the report. The report was still in the files, complete with photos and a detailed account of what had happened. And the name of the police officer who had written the report, who was the police officer who was [00:21:00] given the car. Lauren did make contact with him. He had given the car to the shop where it landed, and it was still there as far as he knew six months later.

After that, he lost contact with it, but Lauren had renewed hope and renewed enthusiasm because now he knew the car had not simply been disposed of immediately. It was still alive six months later. And if you look at what was there, you have to say, well, maybe somebody did try to fix this car. Endless letters and endless efforts.

Later, Lauren Lundberg found the car, Steve Johanson, the police officer who made it his business to help Lauren. The last thing Lauren asked him for was, Can you give me a list, the whereabouts of every 1960 Corvette that is road registered on the road in Sweden? Stig’s reply was, a letter several weeks later, I have better news than that.

Not only do you not need every 1960 Corvette that’s registered in Sweden, I found the car. [00:22:00] It is the car. And it was the car. 1995, when Loren finally did find it, the garage owner presumably sold it. It, it went to an enthusiast who more or less put it back together. It was obviously very difficult to source Corvette parts in Sweden and to come to any understanding of how the cars were originally put together and where you could get new parts for them.

So the owner presumably did the best that he could and he basically glued the shattered body back together. Got the car basically back together and I believe on the road again. Kept it for some time, he sold it and a subsequent owner decided the car needed to be properly restored. He took it apart to restore it and never got any further than that.

And that’s the man that Loren Lundberg made contact with. It was in Stockholm, Sweden at that point. Remarkably, because the car only had a couple of owners after Camerati, and [00:23:00] because parts were not readily available, nobody threw anything out. The guys that owned this car saved everything. That is one of the factory Chevrolet Engineering 37 gallon gas tanks.

Interestingly, you’ll see the sort of square protrusion that was not part of the original tank. Le Mans was full of very strict rules about adding water, adding oil. There was a rule about adding gasoline. The car had to make a certain minimum number of laps before fuel could be added. And those fuel injected Chevy V8s were very thirsty.

Even with 37 gallons of fuel, the car could not make the minimum number of laps. So they actually extended the fuel tanks. These parts were still with the car. The car still retained its original chassis, its heavy duty brake and suspension setup, specially built original KONI racing shocks. There was a lot there of value, but it needed a major restoration.

Here we are, this was 1995. It was loaded in a shipping container in Sweden, and then it went to Germany, where it was put on a ship bound for [00:24:00] Long Beach, California. This was 35 years after the car left the United States. It was back home. Lauren picked the car up in the port in Long Beach and he drove it 400 miles across California, across the Mojave Desert, and halfway across Arizona to get back to his home in Glendale.

The car had traveled 5, 500 miles to get to Glendale, Arizona, and Lauren proceeded to restore it in his garage. Lauren had a lot of work to do and richly deserved owning that car. After all the effort that he put in to find it, get it back to the United States and then restore it. And he was a fixture at Corvette shows for the next almost 30 years that he owned the car.

I’ll tell you one story about Loren that sort of summarizes him. It’s like Lucky Kassner and the anti freeze sponsorship for his air cooled Porsches. He was a wacky guy. He was a brilliant guy and super devoted to the car. Loren loved that car so much, he had a giant chain. It looked like it was holding the boat anchor on the [00:25:00] ship that brought the car back to the United States.

At the car shows Overnight, he would chain his Corvette to a utility pole or something. Because he loved the car so much, he was worried somebody might swipe it. That brings us to Dominic Testa. Lauren passed away in 2021. His family decided to sell the car. And its next caretaker is the gentleman sitting here.

Dominic, I’ll let you hear the story from his lips. I’m not sure that he knew what he was getting involved with or exactly what inspired him to buy that car. But I can tell you that he is every bit as devoted and in love with the car and the story and the people that it’s brought him in contact with as was Lauren Lundberg.

With that, I will turn it over to Mr. Testa to tell us his story.

You’re welcome.

Domenic Testa: Thank you very much. You know, we talk so much about restoring cars and what’s correct and, [00:26:00] you know, all the specifications and colors and post clamps and fonts for race car numbers and all that. And to me, the car is so much more than that. It’s people and the places that it’s been to and all the things that I’ve learned since being involved with it.

It’s more than just one of the two cars that finished Le Mans. It raced in Havana at a time in 1960, when Castro was just taking over in Cuba. The last time that there was an international race in Cuba, Jim Jeffords, who was a great race car driver, drove it to great success in Cuba. To me, it represents like the American dream.

You think in 1960 and Kennedy and saying, we’re going to make it to the moon and back and all of the things that were going on in the world at the time, the United States puts together a team of four Corvettes never happened before. Sends them over to race at Lamont against Ferrari and Maserati and all these other cars and does remarkably well for cars that went [00:27:00] there.

It’s one of the two that completed the 24 hours. All the other races, to its credit, raced at the Nürburgring. The only straight axle Corvette ever to race at the Nürburgring. And Sebring, Iron Man Gamble, was his nickname because he refused to get out of the car. He raced the entire 12 hours. Iron Man Gamble, I mean, these people are like cartoon characters.

They’re, they’re like, uh, mythical figures in all of our lives. Fred Gamble went on to work. If you look over in the research center, there’s pictures of Fred Gamble with Bruce McLaren, Dan Gurney, and A. J. Foyt. All these people that were wrapped up in racing at the time. Fred Gamble was right there in the middle of it.

To me, the biggest part of this story is after finding the car, and very frankly, I got involved with the car kind of like on a whim, it was for sale, kind of lingering around for a little bit, it didn’t sell immediately, Lauren had passed away, his wife was kind of aggravated with having it in the garage, she wanted it out of there.

It really was [00:28:00] just an accident, getting involved with it. But getting to know Fred Gamble, after a couple of years of speaking with him on a regular basis, we became friends. You know, the stories and places he had been, things he had done, the stuff that he had collected over the years. It’s just amazing.

Most of his archives are at the research center, but he did hold on to some stuff. And every now and again, I would get something in the mail, just like these little dribs and drabs of photos and notes and things like that. One day I get something in the mail and it’s a picture of Craig Breedlove standing next to the spirit of America, signed by Fred Gamble.

You know, he was responsible with Goodyear for developing the tires that the spirit of America set the land speed record. At the time. So, uh, as I got to know him, at the time he was around 90 years old. He was living by himself in Honolulu. After he sold his skiing business in Colorado, he moved to Honolulu.

The whole thing was kind of odd to me. He was 90 years old, he lived by [00:29:00] himself. And every now and again, I would get things in the mail from him, and I couldn’t quite understand it. One day, I was talking to him, and I said, Fred, why are you sending me this stuff? I mean, he had a son, he had a brother. Don’t you think this stuff should be with them?

And he was like, nah, my son really I never really cared too much about what I did, you know, all of this stuff. You have the car, I would really rather you have it. I have an amazing assortment of these little dribs and drabs of stuff that didn’t make it to the research center archives that he sent me.

Because he was getting older and I was kind of worried about him, I would call him every Saturday afternoon. He was in Honolulu, we were here in New York. Around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I’d call him up, which was like 10 o’clock in the morning his time, and we would just chat for a little bit. And he would tell me some stories, and every now and again, he’d remember something, and say, oh, you know, by the way, um, here’s this Walt Arfon story, or, uh, whatever.

One day, I called him on a Saturday afternoon, and he didn’t pick up the phone. And I thought, well, you know, maybe he was busy doing something, or in [00:30:00] the bathroom, or, you know, who knows what. I didn’t want to bother him. I waited an hour or so, I called him again, and he didn’t pick up the phone. I said, you know what, I’m gonna wait till tomorrow and try him again tomorrow.

He had no computer, no cell phone, no, no, he didn’t like any of that stuff. Just called him on his landline in his apartment. Sunday came and went, didn’t pick up the phone. Like a week goes by. And I’m sitting at the kitchen counter with my wife. I can’t get a hold of Fred. I don’t know what’s going on. I tried him again, tried him again, tried him again.

And she says, well, you know, maybe we should try and call somebody to see if he’s okay. So I ended up calling the Waikiki Police Department, which had a substation right around the corner from where he lived, and they were happy enough to send a police officer to do a well check on him. And it turned out he had slipped and fell and wasn’t feeling too good.

And he was, you know, they found him in his chair and he’s like, no, I’m okay. And the, actually the police officer handed my cell phone to him and I talked to him for a couple of minutes. Yeah, that, that was that. But that’s, to me, what this car is all about. You know, we all talk about restoring cars and painting [00:31:00] cars and all, all this other stuff.

It’s, it’s all these people. As Richard had said, Loren Lundberg, kind of a wacky guy, kept meticulous records. Unbelievably meticulous records in his search to find this car. When I went to buy the car, his wife wanted the car out of the garage and she said, You know, I have all this other stuff. If you don’t take it with you and the car, I’m just throwing it out because I’ve been stepping over for the last 20 years.

I want it out of here. So I open up one of the boxes and I look at it, and it’s photographs, and it’s correspondences, and it’s telegrams, and it’s this and that. And I’m like, throw it out. With the reliable car carrier, it’s out in front of the house, and I’m putting stuff in the trunk and throwing things on the front seat, and filling up plastic bags with stuff, and putting it under the engine compartment.

So the car gets home, now I have these piles of papers, no rhyme or reason to any of it. So what I would do is every day on my way to [00:32:00] work, I would just grab a handful of the stuff and I would take it with me. And I tried to organize it and get it in some sort of date order or subject order or whatever.

Now my office was in Westchester at the time, so I’m flipping through the papers one day and there’s a letter in his stuff, and in the sidebar of the letter was some handwritten notes and a man’s name and a telephone number. And the man’s name was Chuck Schroedel. And it had an address, Bedford, New York.

Well, I was in Valhalla in Westchester. And Bedford is probably. 10 miles away. So I’m sitting in my office. Chuck is sitting at home. I have the car. He was there at Le Mans in 1960, and I have a cell phone number, and I’m like, this can’t even really be. What could it hurt? Let me call the number. I dial it up.

Two or three rings later, he answers the phone. Chuck Schroedel, excuse me, but are you Chuck Schroedel that was at Lemans in 1960? And he’s like, yeah, what’s it to you?[00:33:00]

It’s the start of a beautiful friendship. We’ve become fast friends. I try and travel around with him as much as we can. We’ve done a lot of things together. We’ve talked a lot together. And he’s told me a lot of the things that he’s done. Amazing guy, from race car driver, military police officer, New York Rangers goalie.

It’s just amazing. So, yeah, the car’s great, restorations are great, paint jobs are really cool, black and white rims on the car, really cool. I asked Fred Gamble one day, he was a journalist and wrote lots of articles, and every time you’d ask him something, it was like a two hour explanation. So I said, Fred, and I was kind of intimidated by him, because it was Fred Gamble.

I said, Fred, what’s the deal with the black and white rims that you see in all the pictures? And he was the Goodyear guy, right? Thinking I’m going to get this technical explanation on why it was whatever. And he says, that’s all we could get our hands on. What? That’s [00:34:00] all you could get your hands on? And that was it.

That’s all we could get our hands on. That’s what it’s about to me. The people that I met, Richard Prince, did a wonderful article in Corvette magazine, took awesome pictures. We talk Corvette and lots of other stuff all the time. Pip and everybody at the research center. Chuck, I can’t thank you enough for all you do for me every day, every minute.

My wife for putting up with me. It’s just been more than I could have ever hoped for. Unfortunately, uh, as Richard mentioned, Fred passed away a couple of months ago. You were probably the last person to have any kind of in depth conversation with when you were doing the research for the article. Really happy you got a chance to talk to him.

He was a incredible character. The stuff that legends are made of. That’s what it’s about to me. It’s about the people. Cause great, people are better.

Richard Prince: Thank you, Dominic. Next up is, I would have to say the [00:35:00] star of our show. It’s simply amazing that somebody is with us who was at that race in 1960 and who was an integral part of it. As I said, it was a very unlikely sequence of events. The whole car story is an unlikely sequence of events. And how Chuck Schroeder ended up in Le Mans and a Corvette enthusiast.

I’ll ask Chuck to come up here and tell us a little something of his story, how he ended up with the Corvette that he owned, and how he ended up at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1960. I can tell you, the days are long gone when you can just show up on a whim and find yourself, you know, Crewing on one of the entrances there,

It’s not happening anymore, but it was entirely possible in 1960. And Chuck Roell is the man who did it,

Chuck Schroedel: first of all, if it wasn’t for Lauren Lundberg and Dom Teca there, how the, I get emotional. [00:36:00] He’s responsible for that Corvette living and what Lauren went through to get that car. And then to sit there and watch Dickey Thompson, the dentist, you probably knew he was a dentist, to watch him With his white shirt like I wear.

You know I was in the army. I went in in the late 50s. You can always tell by the shirt. I’m looking at Dickie Thompson in the film. And the car is next door! The same car that he’s talking about is next door. It just, it’s not possible. And then with Fred Gamble. I come to find out later. I majored in journalism at the University of Florida.

I went in after the army. In 1966. 1966. This is when I got out, and I entered in 1961. I was a journalism major, as was Fred. And I didn’t really put this together. There was no reason to put this together. But I remember some of my professors saying, you know, geez, eight years ago, there was another guy that went through school here.

[00:37:00] And he used to write about the same things you write about. You know, drafting at Daytona. Things like that having to do with cars. And then I come to find out, as we progress, he also went to the University of Florida. As did I. It’s just very, very hard to believe. How did I get involved with Corvettes? I’m a Corvette man.

We got a bunch of Corvette people here. As an MP in Orléans, France. Orléans is the proper way you pronounce it. I pulled a Lieutenant Colonel over in the car. I pulled the Colonel over and I walked up to the window of the car, you know, and I, and I saluted him and he looked at me. He said, what did I do?

What did I do? I say, Colonel, you didn’t do anything. I want to know if you’re interested in selling the car. And he looked at me and he said, you know, it’s funny you say that. I just remarried and I inherited two kids. And he says, you can see there’s one seat here. Yes, I will sell you the car. Three weeks later, I owned the car [00:38:00] in France, a 56 Corvette, and it came from his brother and it was loaded.

It had all the right stuff. It was a three speed. There was no such thing as, you know, as a four speed in the 56. So I got the car in heaven because I was a gearhead in high school, as we all are. Every one of you is a gearhead. My gearhead part was motorcycles, and when I went to Europe, I had the idea. of being a motorcycle champion racer.

So the time goes by and I had been in the hospital. And by the way, the hospital that I was at was in Orleans, France. One of the things on our post was the hospital at La Chapelle. And we had to guard that hospital. We had other posts. I was at Comzee headquarters. It turns out that Walt Hansken had a very bad accident at Le Mans testing.

They airlifted him. To my hospital through the same gates and everything. So a lot of these things are starting to come together. I got sick and I [00:39:00] ended up in that hospital 16 straight days on my back with mono and a closed throat. I woke up on the 17th day. I was virtually perfect. And the doctor said that’s what’s going to happen.

I got two weeks leave out of this. And I was hoping that I would be able to go to Le Mans, but I was on my back for the 59 Le Mans. So time goes by, the following April comes up, and I said, I know there’s a testing day at Le Mans. So I went to the testing day. I had my Corvette. And you can go anywhere in France in those years, in a 56 Corvette, because you must be somebody.

You have to. So I got to Le Mans. The first person I run into is Briggs Cunningham. And he’s there doing that testing. We hit it off. It was very nice. You know, I was in the military. I’m young. I’m like 21 years old, 22 years old. And he said to one of his mechanics, you know, if we have a problem with the engines, here’s the engine that we can use in this Corvette.

And the mechanic says, [00:40:00] Briggs, it’s a 265. You can’t put that in our Corvette. So that was my first inkling of Le Mans. I had known about Le Mans. And I was so psyched, I couldn’t believe that I was there. So time goes by, June comes up, and I’m going to Le Mans with my Corvette. And at that point is when I hooked up with the Camerati Corvette.

And all the cars were together, as you know. The Cunningham Corvette, in that garage, you saw that one picture. They weren’t really showing the Camerati car, but it was there. So I’m a gopher. I’m not a mechanic. I am a gopher. I really am so un celebrity, it’s unbelievable. The only celebrity part that I have is, I’m the only living person who sat in that car and drove it at Le Mans.

Be it only in reverse and first. But I did drive it. So, you know, because they saw I had the Corvette, so I must know what I’m doing, right? So, hop in the car, just back it up. We’ve got to do this, [00:41:00] we’ve got to do that. And pull it up. So I did drive the car. So they said, do you want to pit? At the end of the Molson Street, we all know the Molson Street’s the longest straightaway, a sharp right hand turn where every car was required to have a shovel.

If you missed the turn, you’d end up in the stand bank. And so the birdcage Maseratis, And the Corvette would be signaled at the end of the Mulsanne Street. The cars would come around the corner. You would hold out the signs, etc. The whole 24 hours. It rained early. And that was at that age. What do you care?

You’re in the army. It rains. So we go through the 24 hours. And I really didn’t know quite what was happening. You couldn’t get near the place. So I had my car, we had the Ford station wagon, so it was kind of time to go home, and that was my big experience at Le Mans. Well, life goes on. I went to work, I got a job with IBM, I graduated from the University of Florida, and in 1995, the phone rings, and I pick it up, Chuck Schroeder.

He says, Are you the Chuck Schroeder that [00:42:00] was at Rouen’s France? I said, Yes, who is this? It was Loren. He says, I have that Corvette. Well, I didn’t know what had happened to it. There’s no way. He explained what had happened, and he says, Can you give me some tips on the car? And I really couldn’t. I just had such vague memories.

I remember we put the lights on the door to light up the number. Chuck, go see if you can find some wire from Cunningham. See if you can get this. So I was a total gopher. But there I was with these Corvettes and my baby sitting outside, so that really opened the doors for me. I didn’t add much to the table, but I have that letter that he wrote me, which Dom has, explaining, can you answer these questions, which I really couldn’t do.

So I only talked to him twice, and I always wondered, I said, I wonder whatever happened over this, get into 2020, etc. The years go by, kind of lost contract of what had happened. Until the phone rings again, you know, deja vu. I pick up the phone, Chuck Schroedel. He says, are you the Chuck Schroedel? [00:43:00] You can’t make it up.

And it was Dom. He says, well, I have the car. You got to be kidding. So he explained what had happened. So he says, would you like to do a couple of shows? One of the first shows was in Armonk. I live in Bedford. It’s like six, seven. It’s actually 7. 5 miles from Bedford to Armonk. That’s where IBM corporate headquarters is.

And I was working in Irma. I said, geez, I’d love to do it. So he says, well, I’ve got all these pictures and everything. At the show, at one of the office buildings, it’s a Corvette Club meeting. And there’s Corvettes everywhere. And Dom has got the Corvette there. He’s got a picture of me sitting in the car.

We duplicated the picture. And we had the picture taken 65 years later. You know, I’m like, come on. So, we did the show together, and we struck up a friendship. We had a lot in common. What I brought to the table was, yes, I’m the last living soul that actually drove the car [00:44:00] alone.

Richard Prince: That’s an accomplishment in and of itself.

Oh, and I actually could shift.

Chuck Schroedel: One thing you might find kind of interesting, there’s a picture of me with the Rangers. I got very involved with auto racing myself. And I race Brabham’s, et cetera. And I had Springdale racing and we had the March dealership and we were so far over our head. It was unbelievable.

My crew chief with our first Lotus, I had a Lotus 20. We were only in business for about two years. Fred Opert. Charlie Gibson, these are all people, he was the first person that we sold a March to. Everything was starting to come around, and this guy gets me involved with the past years. So now I’m starting to rethink, and I do have pictures.

German Phillips plastic camera. I hooked up with Lance Reventlow at Rems France, I met Jill Sage. Oh, this is a great life. And he’s opening up everything for me. And I’m going through these pictures and I said, Oh my God, he’d love to see [00:45:00] these. And here’s the birdcage at Le Mans. It was an unbelievable experience, which I’m still experiencing.

Well, I got to race here. My last race was in 1987 in a cup race, because my wife at that time was a merchandising manager for us. Tobacco skull bandit. She had to register all the products to sell the licensing fees. And I was interested in buses. And I started a little bus company. And the chairman of the board of U.

S. Tobacco said to Debbie, Do you think Chuck could put together a bus trip to the Poconos? And we’ll take U. S. Tobacco to see our Skull Bandit. Debbie comes to me and says, You’re not going to believe what Lou wants to do. I said, I could do that. I have a lot of people that know buses. So I had my restored 1964 Greyhound.

True. 35 foot Greyhound. And I got some of my friends with buses. We show up in Greenwich, Connecticut at corporate headquarters. Everybody’s getting on. And I was doing fine until I got to the track and I [00:46:00] started hearing the cars. I was bit again. So I started to get back into racing. I went to the Buck Baker.

Well, I kind of joined forces, became partners with him for about three years. We got very involved with the Skull Band. Oh, I even dipped for a while. My cuff, right? And I said, I’m not going to sit on the back porch of a house in a rocking chair and say I should have done that. After the Buckbaker driving school, of which Jeff Gordon showed up shortly thereafter.

So I went to the school, did some ARCA races, and the last race was in August. In the cup race, Rusty Wallace won the race. And I started last, but guess where I finished? Glass. It was an experience, and I did it. I got out of the car, got into my Pontiac station wagon, and drove home, and do you think I was high?

I, I had done it, and it was over. In between there, [00:47:00] the other fantasy was hockey, and I was the practice goalie for the New York Rangers from 1968, 1969, up until 82. Have we heard of Eddie Jockaman, Jill Villamere? I’m in the locker room, they’re putting their pads on. I’m actually shaking. So I did that for 11 years, while I was with IBM, and IBM loved it.

Oh my god. You’ve got to come see a presentation that Chuck’s putting on to the customers. He’s a practice goalie, by the way, with the Rangers. So, and I used to bring in goalie sticks from Jockaman and give them away. So anyway, listen, I’m going on and on and on. I don’t know if anybody has a question, but that’s kind of where we, let me,

Richard Prince: we will invite questions in the end.

We have one more surprise for you. First of all, let me just thank Chuck for being here with us.

One more superstar in [00:48:00] the world of Corvettes and Corvette racing. We are very privileged to have here with us tonight. Laura Clouser. Laura is the General Motors program manager for all of GM’s sports car racing programs. So she is the program manager for both Corvette racing and Cadillac racing. And she was kind enough to carve out a little bit of time from a very busy weekend and a very busy month and a very busy year and a very busy life.

She was in Le Mans for a little more than two weeks. And was only home for a very short period of time before coming to Watkins Glen. And after this, she’s off to the next adventure. She is the only person I know who travels more than I do. She is very rarely home, so it’s really, really kind of her to give us a little bit of her time tonight.

Laura Klauser: I really don’t know how I follow something like this. This is impressive. We are not going to talk about [00:49:00] how old I was or not. Oh,

Richard Prince: you weren’t even a gleam in your pappy’s eye.

Laura Klauser: My parents might not have even been alive. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Although they were high school sweethearts. So, uh, I was relatively early on in their relationship with marriage.

So. Very nice to see all of you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for celebrating the wonderful thing that is Corvette. Whether it’s in the racing form or the production form, we truly do have the best fans and customers in the world for Corvette Racing and Corvette, the brand. In fact, getting to know all the other OEs that we race against and, uh, developing good friendships and relationships with them.

They are truly jealous of what we have in Corvette, which is quite an honor for us, especially representing General Motors up here, very much an honor for the company. So thank you all of you for the part that you play. From that standpoint. So here we are at Watkins Glen. We’ve got our brand new GT3 car that launched this year.

Qualifying went well. So it’s going to be quite a very busy race. The grid is [00:50:00] very full, which means that it’s been challenging to get a free lap during practice session. Qualifying was nice to finally see what are the cars actually capable of because we really couldn’t assess that with the practices.

But now we’re going to get back into everyone’s on track at the same time. And a lot of tomorrow is going to be staying out of trouble, which sometimes you just need a little bit of luck in racing. And that’s how you can be successful. We’re looking forward to that. But You said you wanted to wait until questions at the end, or do you want to open up?

Richard Prince: Welcome to, yeah.

Laura Klauser: Instead of me rambling on, I’d rather just know what do you guys want to know, and I can answer your questions. That’s easier for me.

Richard Prince: I have a question. Yes, Richard, what Can you just briefly explain to people where Corvettes are racing, who’s racing them this year? Because most of the fans, even the really devoted fans, are so used to one full factory program raced for 20 plus years, and now I find that people are oftentimes a little bit confused about who’s racing where.

Laura Klauser: That’s a fair point. Yes, we were [00:51:00] doing the same thing in Corvette racing for over 20 years, and then we changed it. Dun, dun, dun. It’s been fun. So what has happened in the history behind that? We have always been in a class that was factory GT racing. That was an offering that was available in Imsa and then also over at Lamar.

And we’ve been taking advantage of that. Well, that offering has gone away. So at the end of the GTLM class in IMSA, and then at the end of the GTE class at WEC slash LMA, which was last year, was the last year for that, the world of GT has pivoted to the GT3 platform for GT racing. How GT3 works is it is a customer racing based platform.

Meaning that per regulations, anyone who makes a GT three car has to build at least 20 of them in the first two years of the homologation for the race car. And the intent in the spirit of the rules are that you’re going to sell those cars and they are going to race wherever GT three cars could race.

When we got the news that that’s what IMSA was going to be changing to, and that’s what the [00:52:00] WECC was going to be changing to, we said, okay, this is going to be a really cool opportunity for us to expand the Corvette racing family, to put Corvettes in series that really we had never been able to do in the past because they weren’t eligible to race, and to meet new teams out there and build new relationships with different entities.

So what we are doing this year, IMSA is one of the few GT three series that still allows you to have a full pro lineup. So we have Pratt Miller running our pro cars in IMSA. And then we have an amateur team that races in GTD, which is A. W. A. They have a single car entry right now running with gory Fedani being the bronze driver that is Behind the wheel of that car, complimented with a silver and a gold driver for his lineup.

And then across the pond, the team that was just racing at Le Mans races in the WEC is called TF Sport. They are located in the U. K. So they’re a British team. They have always been a fierce competitor over at Le Mans. They were [00:53:00] running Aston Martins prior to switching to Corvette. We have been very pleased with the with how well they’re doing.

We’ve learned a lot through this customer racing experience, and we’ve definitely learned how we can help get everyone up to speed with different ways and then things that you have to let the team do on their own because they are a customer. So after we made it through Lamar this year, I’d say we have quite a to do list of how to get better for next year.

But the team has been right there with us hand in hand, which is exciting for us to keep growing there. And then we have a team D. X. D. T. That races to Corvettes in S. R. O. North America. So they come to track similar to the ones that M. S. A. Races at. They’re a sprint racing series, though, so their longest race is 60 minutes, and they actually accomplished the first win for the platform.

So in Coda, they won not only race one, but race two. to because they do double header weekends with the Corvette. So that was super exciting. That’s just the start. We’re going to be growing. In fact, Richard mentioned that I’m not in the country much longer after this race. On Tuesday, Christie Bagney, who’s the GT three program manager and [00:54:00] I get on the plane and head over to Belgium.

We’re gonna be at the spot 24 race. We will not have a Corvette in the race, but we will be interfacing with all the teams over there as well as the other always that we race against in GT three. And the thought is to continue to network and relationships and figure out where we’re going to place the next handful of cars.

I think we’re building number 12 right now, or something along those lines. Super exciting to see where we’re going to go. We have potentials in Europe, we have potentials in Asia, and then we can always grow grids here in the U. S. as well between SRO and IMSA. More Corvettes will be popping up.

Crowd: I typically write Richard my technical questions.

Sometimes he answers, sometimes he doesn’t. I only answer when I know the answer. Usually they wind up in a magazine. So the technical question I have, I’m the Corvette Racing Reporter for two Corvette clubs. We’ve been talking with some of the issues that have transpired. Clarify for us. The Z06 engine and all of the accessory and all the auxiliary parts are a [00:55:00] carryover from prior GT3 R racing.

Starter motors, alternators, clutches, and yet we see some issues with those basic parts. In the current car, and a lot of us are saying, Why are we having problems with these when we think that these are carry over parts from prior years? And why are we having issues?

Laura Klauser: Okay, I think I can tackle this. We’re gonna back up a second.

The race car that we launched in 2020. The C eight R was not production spec. So we use the C8R as the very first LT6 form of the engine to start working with it before you knew about the Z06 that came a couple years later, which actually it was very challenging in the racing aspect. Some of the timing got delayed due to COVID and all those type of things, but we had to race the race car and not really talk about the engine because we didn’t want to give anything away on the production side for, I think, almost two years.

Before we were allowed to actually start speaking about it. That’s why you [00:56:00] never saw any pictures of the engine or the car missing pieces that you could see the engine. That was all something that we had to be extremely careful about. So the engine that was in the C8R was the first go at it. It was purpose built for that race car.

And then we took those lessons and learnings and we brought that back to production so that they can make the production version of the LT6 even better. Full circle, we launched the GT3 car here this year. The engine that is in the GT3 car is about 90 percent production components, so it is almost identical to the engine that is in any one C8 Z06, that happens to be lucky enough to have one.

What is different is we’ve packaged it a little bit lower in the race car, so we made some modifications to the sump underneath so that it can sit lower in the car, but everything above is all production that you see in there. Parts like the alternator and some of those accessory drives are not production, they are built for the race car, and the reason being is the packaging to meet the rules and regulations for the GT3 class, we had to move some stuff around.[00:57:00]

The rear node in the back of the car is unique to the race car. The frame, that the car is built around comes from Bowling Green. So that is just like the Corvettes that you guys own and love. The cage obviously that we build in is unique to the race car. And then the body panels, we use the production body panels as the starting point and inspiration, but they’re made out of carbon.

So they are so So we have kind of a mix of some of the production, but the main components that are production are the frame, and then the engine itself, and then the rest of it are built around racing. Now, some of the parts that we’re using in the C8 GT3 were very similar to what we ran in C8R, so we have been working between the two and understanding the lessons that we could carry over.

We did still find some unique things. It is no secret that the launch of the car in Daytona for the GT3 was a little rough. But for those with short memories, when we launched the C8R in 2020, that Daytona was a little rough, too. So, it’s kind of a symptom of a brand new race car. Not making excuses, but there is no GT3 [00:58:00] car so far that has launched without problems for the first couple races.

And a lot of it is IMSA starts us off at the Super Bowl. We literally have the 24 hour race is the very first race for the car, which is challenging in any aspect, but what has been really inspiring and a huge amount of credit goes to Christie, the GM team that supports her, the Pratt and Miller team that supports the program.

If you look at what happened in Daytona and compare it to what we just had in Le Mans, we had a couple things in Le Mans we were working on, but the car’s finished. They both took the checker. It was such a huge step forward. We’re very excited, you know, that we feel like we’ve got our arms around a lot of the things we were dealing with back in Daytona.

And we’ve done a lot of hardening of the car and made it stronger. The alternator has been definitely a sticking point. We’ve done a little bit of work too, but we’re getting there. And rock on wood, it was not an alternator failure at Le Mans. So that was super exciting.

Crew Chief Eric: Thank you very much. Of course.

Rick Hughey: The Corvette Challenge was such a big thing.

Will that ever come back in the world of racing and marketing?

Laura Klauser: You know it’s funny, so I didn’t even know [00:59:00] we did a Corvette Challenge until I started coming to corrals in these things and everyone keeps bringing up the Corvette Challenge. So I appreciate that you guys all were excited about it. But I kid, we have looked at stuff along those lines.

I will say this. We really need to get a full arm around grasp of what we’re doing with this GT three program and how we support our customers before we go chasing something like that. What we don’t want to do is bite off more than we can chew. And we leave people that are buying these cars out to dry because we just don’t have the manpower or the support to make sure that everyone’s successful.

So it’s actually why we have released the cars so soon. Slowly in the grand scheme of things and why you only see seven race cars now running around the world versus doing all 20 at once. We wanted to step into this so that we left our customers in a situation where when they needed something, they could pick up the phone and call and get us and we weren’t busy chasing somebody else’s problem.

So I’d say that it’s going to take us probably a couple of years to really feel like we’ve got our feet on the ground solid and we’ve got a GT three program that is healthy. The [01:00:00] customers have what they need, that we’re able to grow at the rate we want to grow, and then we could consider something along those lines.

Crowd: Are you satisfied with where the standing is so far with the GT3 program, what’s the progress from where you kind of expect it to be at this point? That’d be my first question. I have a second question, which is, big news today, we’re running, meeting, headline, uh, meeting, uh, is there any, where is this going to take headline, driver, another team?

Mhm.

Laura Klauser: We’ll do the Cadillac one first because it’s easy. We’re not ready to talk about drivers for next year yet. So for the Corvette question, I would say that when we were getting ourselves ready to go to Daytona this year, we knew that it was not going to be perfect again. If you look back at history, there is no such thing as a perfect launch.

It was all going to be about how we reacted to everything that we dealt with. Now, was the list a little bit longer than we were hoping for at Daytona? Yeah, it [01:01:00] was. But we very quickly formed the SWAT team, if you will, that’s been chasing down every issue that came up. Not one issue has been brushed under the rug.

They are all tracked. They are all scanned. considering and looking how we progress from Daytona being the first race. And as we went race by race, Christy has a great chart that I love, that she lists out each of the issues that we had, and then she tracks it race by race. And you can see red was, we have this issue, yellow was, we got a plan, we’re getting there, green was, solved.

And you can watch the Reds decrease and the green increase. I mean, that, frankly, is why we were able to do what we did at Lamont finished with both cars and not have all the issues that we saw back at Daytona. So I am very, very proud of the work that everyone’s done. And I’d say at this point, we had had Lamont similar to Daytona.

That would have been a big deal and a problem. But since we did not, we see like, okay, we were able to get Our hands around all of this, and I think it’s a bright future for GT3 and Corvette.

Crew Chief Brad: But at the start of the season, there were two cars in [01:02:00] GTE and now there’s only one. What is happening in this second car?

Are you not contractually obligated to be racing that car and doing something with it?

Laura Klauser: This is the fun part of customer racing. This is why factory racing, in some ways, is a lot easier, because you have a lot more control. When you Own the budget for the whole thing. And you, you know, are picking your team, you’re picking drivers, you’re picking all the things along that with customer racing.

We are at the mercy of what the customer is going to do. We are very selective about what teams we’re working with, and we try to vet as much as we can. But at the end of the day, if a driver and in the case of a W. A. Each of the bronze drivers own those vehicles. If he decides he doesn’t want to do this anymore for whatever his reasons, There’s nothing we can do to tell him otherwise, right?

It’s his money. He can choose to make that decision. And since he owns the car, it’s his car, where it’s going to land or who’s going to buy it. We’re not sure. We’re kind of waiting to see like the rest of the world, uh, to find [01:03:00] out at this moment in time, we’re not entirely sure where it is, but it’s stored somewhere, probably collecting dust.

And as he’s trying to work out where he’s going to move it along, but I’d say that this has been probably the biggest lesson for our leadership to learn. And then for us too, is that you can’t control everything and that sometimes you don’t, again, you have to just react or you have to roll with the punches and make sure that you set up who you have for success and try to convince them to be good partners and show them the benefit of being good partners.

The more that you lean in to letting us be a partners, the more we can provide you with support and help you be successful.

Alana Roberts: I actually have a question for Chuck. What you’ve got to do is quite inaccessible today. Where do you think racing is really going, and how is it getting to see it now, I guess?

Chuck Schroedel: The big complaint that I have, because I was out of racing for a while, is this IMSA series was very confusing to me.

I’ll be the first to tell you. I’m trying to read the different classes. Dom and I are struggling because it is really relatively new because this Corvette deal with Dom [01:04:00] got me back into it. I’ve always been a fan of Formula One. I don’t like to telecast. They don’t do a thing for me talking about non issues and I want to learn more about Formula One, but it’s almost after the opening lap.

It’s a non event. I’d like to see the media and I’d like to see Chevrolet, etc. Try to reach out and put it in a terms that everybody understands. I mean, why does it have to be so confusing? And I thought I understood some of it. So that would be racing to me. I mean, I look at a guy like Kyle Larson. He is not human, I can tell you right now.

Eight years ago, seven years ago, in the sprint cars, I saw him and I told Joanne, I said, this guy is ridiculous. And it turns out he is ridiculous. The guy can drive anything. You’ve got to be kidding. He does it with a sprint car, a midget, it doesn’t matter. That was fun, I really understood that. I could see the competition, and I understood totally what was [01:05:00] going on.

But honestly, I’m I was a little lost today. Let’s see. They have the white numbers and the yellow numbers. This is the JV team and tomorrow is the varsity. I mean, that’s kind of where I was. So you asked me where is racing going? It’s not going down. NASCAR is having some problems. There’s no question. I was very involved with it with the skull bandit and the names that we all know.

Bobby Allison. Those are names that we can relate to. But I don’t know if everybody’s relating to it as much. And we’re trying, like IBM, Hey, the customer’s right. There’s a culture. So let’s keep the culture there. Let’s get the customer. You’ve got to listen to them. What do they want to see? I’m going on, and I apologize.

Hopefully that helped.

No, it

Crowd: didn’t. I also have a question for Chuck and Dom, and maybe also Richard. Obviously, everything that’s happened with the 1960 [01:06:00] Corvette is really incredible and so full of history. And you guys tell it in a really fascinating and incredible way. Simultaneously, obviously, there’s so much of it there.

And I guess what I kind of want to know is, do you ever forget anything? being told in a long format, sort of physical way, do you ever foresee it becoming like a book?

Richard Prince: Dominic has grand visions and no limits, has already asked me repeatedly to write a book, and I keep encouraging him to write a book. Yeah, it’s, it’s book worthy because of the people, and we only really scratch the surface.

You could write a book about Lloyd Lucky Kastner, one of the epic conmen slash geniuses of racing in American on the international stage. It’s worthy of it. The problem for me, personally, is books have to be a labor of love. Car books are not a good way to earn a living. I’m already cramming three lifetimes into the one lifetime that I have between my devotion to I do the photography for General Motors.

[01:07:00] I do production car photography for GM and other car companies. Even though the editorial world has shrunk dramatically just in the last few years, I’m still writing three or four articles every month, and I write a column every month, and I have a family. To attend to, and my beloved dogs to attend to, and the car hobby.

Every time I go away on a long trip, my wife or my son brings another project car home. So, the short answer to your question is, yes, it deserves either a book on his own or certainly to be part of a larger book, and I think it’ll happen one day. It’s just not the right time, certainly for me, but it could be the right time for Dominic.

Crowd: Yes, and, yes,

Richard Prince: but. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for your question, though.

Crowd: Will GM dive more into electric racing to improve Padawan and also make. Fun electric vehicles. I don’t want boring electric cars. I want fun electric cars. Could those have a say? Oh. [01:08:00]

Laura Klauser: So, electric racing is a very interesting topic. At the moment, if we look at what we love about what we do in sports car racing, long 24 hour endurance races at circuits like Le Mans with a three mile straight, the electric technology is not there to support that right now.

In Le Mans, I don’t even know how many laps you would get. In a car like that before you have to come in and charge because you’re at watt quite a bit for that Situation, but so what we are doing, especially with the hyper car with the Cadillac is to find a way to mate the electric technology of the hybrid with the combustion engine and to really get the goodness out of both.

So what that means is that we solve the problem of drivers not being able to launch the car out of the pits because now they do push a button, the electric motor takes them out, the engine fires up before they hit the track and away they go. And then also the electric engine will give us a boost depending on where we’re out of the track and help us control the power to the regulations that we [01:09:00] have on the torque So it’s finding those ways to incorporate both and lean on each other.

And it’s been fantastic learning for us because yes, there’s still the combustion engine in the car, but the control system that we have to create to power everything and how we get it to talk to each other and integrate and what we’re doing with the braking system and how we’re regenerating energy from that.

That is all good knowledge that can help us as we look to an electric future with production as well. Plus the simulation work that we do. We have a ton of lightweighting studies happen to get mass out of the car, learning new materials, new technologies there that we can then apply in the production. I mean, we’ve gotten to the point at GM that 3D printing happens on the production line.

We 3D print parts for our trucks and that is a big, long one that we produce out of the plants every day. So this is stuff that we spearhead in racing and then we bring it forward to production. So it’s trying to see the goodness out of the opportunities available. But in terms of seeing a fully electric racing.

Formula E definitely is getting better each year that they go. I [01:10:00] don’t see an electric car replacing what we do at Rolex 24 here at Watkins Glen at Le Mans in the near future. I think that’s probably not even in the medium future. We got a little bit while to go from a technology standpoint and with charging, and how we will bring the battery in and get it all juiced up again.

I know, well, and I will say, honey, when we launched the Cadillac, we weren’t sure how marketing was going to react to it, because we are looking at the EVs with the Cadillac, and you listen to the Cadillac LMDH car launch, and if you don’t smile when that engine fires off, something is wrong with you. So, and they jumped right in and embraced it.

We are unofficially the best sounding race car, I think, on the track. That’s a very biased opinion. But a lot of people told me that too, so I just say it. So I’m good.

Crowd: I can make that official. I’ve had British people tell me the American car sounded the best at Le Mans, so there, there you go. Kind of on the development cycle, it’s the second year [01:11:00] on the Cadillac, new Cadillac prototype.

What kind of changes from the first year of the development cycle to the second year? What kind of lessons have you learned from that first year, and what are you kind of trying to do? What’s your kind of goals you want to accomplish in that second year of development?

Laura Klauser: A lot of our areas that we were able to work on was the control system, and a lot of that’s based on the fact that that is not constrained as much from the homologation.

We cannot change any body panels on the car. We are strictly locked into what we submitted. The engine, we can’t really modify that too much. Those things are locked down. So, really, it’s the electrons. How they talk to each other and how the systems work, that’s the stuff that we can work on and change. So we’ve, you know, looked at our control systems, we’ve worked with the suppliers that support us there, seeing how can we be more efficient and how everything talks to each other so we’re not overloading systems.

So I’d say the biggest gain that we had from Rolex last year to Rolex this year and Le Mans to Le Mans was that. We know the car better now and everything talks to each other and the system’s much better.

Crowd: Uh, I believe the ACO, especially, uh, this year, has been [01:12:00] sort of trying to generate interest and trying to generate class going forward for, uh, not electric vehicles, but hydrogen power vehicles.

I recall several years ago now, GM Chevrolet had a pilot program for a hydrogen powered Equinox, uh, here in New York. Is that something that GM would look into for racing, or based on the outcome of that pilot program, is that something that GM’s not really interested in pushing forward with?

Laura Klauser: We still have some hydrogen work.

We actually joined forces with Honda a few years back to work on the hydrogen space. I think just making sure that we keep our toes in technology that’s out there. I would say that, yes, we’re sitting in those meetings where they’re trying to figure out how that looks. The years keep getting pushed in terms of what that would launch.

So I think we’re, at the moment, sitting at the table, listening, you know, seeing what they’re coming up with, doing a little bit of studies behind the scenes, but. We need to get a little further along with that technology as well, similar to electric. It needs to be at a point where it makes sense.

[01:13:00] Sometimes, we as the OE can drive that, sometimes the sanctioning body will just make up their mind that no fooling, this is what you’re doing, either you’re in or you’re out. And in that case, we will make a decision.

Crowd: I know that you guys are trying to compete in both Insta and Black with the Cadillac prototype.

I also heard that after Mimosa’s series, there were some worries that the kind of carryover of being able to participate in both series might make you uncompetitive in the World Endurance Championship. Are there any upgrades that would be planned for the, uh, Cadillacs versus Bihing in terms of temperature that would now be applicable to the ones in NSUP?

Laura Klauser: No, the car has to be the same. So if we make a change, it has to be approved, therefore eligible to race in both. I would say that we’re always working to make sure that we’ve got the best possible package, whether we’re racing over in the WEC or racing in NSUP. But always shooting towards that point. At the end of the day, we won’t be able to have changes that are only applicable to one series.

Crowd: Will the potential Formula One program have any effect on the [01:14:00] Cadillac sports car program?

Laura Klauser: We are very excited for the opportunity to grow motorsports with F1 and it will be a great addition to our motorsports program. Well,

we We get a little bit drunk.

You’ve never been in this house.

Laura Klauser: Some of the really cool things you guys were watching earlier, too. Yeah. When are you coming back? We could use some extra help.

Crowd: Briefly mentioned 3D printing on a mass scale in your assemblies. I know Alec recently released a documentary on a prototype, and in that mentioned that he used, uh, Metal 3D printing for the first time ever in a race car. I was curious, what kind of process do you use for the 3D printing? Because I know there’s a few ways to do metal 3D [01:15:00] printing.

What kind of results are you seeing? Are you guys happy with the results that you’re seeing? Are you living up to the stress test, you know, thermal cycling, all that stuff? I’m just curious to see what you guys have thought of using 3D printing components in a race car.

Laura Klauser: I’m not an expert in this space, so I can’t answer your first part of your question, but what I can tell you is what that has enabled us to do is to fully mass optimize the parts that we print.

So, one of the biggest pieces we have on the Cadillac that’s printed is the oil tank. It’s big. The reason that we print that is that we can create a design that only has walls where we need them for the proper volume and the proper delivery to the engine, and no material anywhere else. And so we’re able to pull.

Substantial mass out of a part that if we tried to machine it, we would have had to carry all this extra bit for either hooking it into the machining portion or because you just couldn’t machine around that piece. And in terms of how it’s holding up, we have now completed our fourth 24 hour race with the platform.

Those components have all been [01:16:00] rock solid again, wood. We’re very, very pleased with how that’s all worked out. I mean, I think it’s, it’s pretty much the gold standard going forward for as we design engines and whatnot. We want to do there because mass is frankly the number one enemy of a race car. I mean, there’s other things that people like to talk about, but if you’re too heavy, you have such an impact of everything else you’re trying to do, that it becomes a problem.

If the mass is in the wrong spot of the race car, that makes it challenging as well. And that could really mess up set up and things that you’re working through. So anytime we can pull mass out, we’re looking into that. And then the section about he has a

Richard Prince: faculty OP, that’s a different discussion. Okay, well, to Laura.

very much for your time. I know it’s super, super valuable, given

Laura Klauser: your ridiculous schedule. Anything for you, Richard.

Richard Prince: Well, I’ll let Kip say the final words, but before I turn the mic over to him, I [01:17:00] just want to say on my behalf, and I’m sure I’m speaking on behalf of the Teslas and Chuck as well, thank you very much for joining us this evening, for your questions, and certainly for your enthusiastic support for Corvette Racing, the Corvette Racing program, and for the production cars.

Both Corvettes and everything else that GM makes. I’m gonna just go out on a limb here and say that there are a few Corvettes in the garages and maybe, um, some Escalades, some pickup trucks pulling the car trailer, pulling the boat trailer, et cetera. So thank you very, very, very much. Because if you did not support the racing and the company, we would all have to find honest work.

And that’s the last thing in the world any of us want. So. Well,

Kip Zeiter: I don’t know about you, but I thought that was just fantastic.

Again, she did [01:18:00] this last year and it was amazing. I want to thank Richard. I want to thank Dominic. The show is really all about Chuck Schroeder. I had not met Chuck until yesterday and I can’t wait to hang out with this guy more. He’s just so good. Thank you everybody for coming.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center.

Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series. The center’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world. The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events.

To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives. org. This episode is also brought to you by the Society of Automotive Historians. They encourage research into any aspect of automotive history. The SAH actively supports the compilation and preservation of papers. [01:19:00] Organizational records, print ephemera and images to safeguard, as well as to broaden and deepen the understanding of motorized wheeled land transportation through the modern age and into the future.

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This episode was brought you in-part by the International Motor Racing Research Center who’s charter is to collect, share and preserve the history of motorsports, and stories like those of Rob Dyson. The IMRRC’s collection embodies the speed, drama and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world. And welcomes serious researchers and the casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls, and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more, be sure to check out www.racingarchives.org or follow them on social media @imrrc