SOLID GOLD; Except for the blue trim stuff.(Corvette news)(Product/Service Evaluation)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Dick Guldstrand is dapper. Make that dashing. And not just dashing for being 75 years old, either. He looks now, as he always has, like a movie star pirate from a 1930s film, the kind with real swashbuckling.

Guldstrand's background, however, is not in piracy, but in hot rodding. He started out in a '27 Ford on '32 frame rails that he built in high school. Then he raced sprint cars on the dangerous dirt tracks of Southern California in the days before Nomex, helmets, freeways or Disneyland.

He soon decided road-racing sports cars was safer, and by the early '60s was running Corvettes at Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans. For a while he drove a Grand Sport for Roger Penske. Then he switched to tuning Corvettes, with a shop right in the middle of the old Thunder Alley in Culver City, with neighbors like Ed Iskenderian, Stuart Hilborn, and Troutman and Barnes. He moved the shop to Burbank two years ago.

Over the years he's made Corvettes of his own design, too. There was the GS80 in 1986, then the GS90 (AW, June 5, 1995)-which would have had a stronger run had Chevy not up and canceled the ZR-1-and now Guldstrand has engineered the Signature Edition Anniversary Corvette, honoring the car's 50th anniversary.

Each one starts life in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where it rolls off the line as a 2003 Z06. It's then shipped direct to Michigan, where Katech, the same Katech that builds the C5R engines that race at Le Mans, goes to work. Among other changes, Katech bores and strokes the block from 3.9 x 3.6 inches to 4.1 x 4.0 and sleeves each cylinder. Katech leaves the rocker arms stock but adds stainless-steel valves, higher-lift cams, forged pistons, Carillo rods and a 4340 alloy steel forged crank. Compression ratio is 10.5:1. That and a few other tricks are enough for 500 hp at 5700 rpm and 520 lb-ft of torque at 4700, both measured at the flywheel. Measured at the rear wheels, it's 402 hp and 434 lb-ft.

Then Specter Werkes adds new front and rear end caps, side skirts, hood and interior. Jeff Nowicki designed the body and former Chevrolet designer John Schinella did the interior and colors. ...