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Gary Duhaime
About this episode
Gary Duhaime shares his fascinating journey through the world of Porsches, detailing his 30-year ownership of a historic race car that won Le Mans. He recounts stories about notable figures in the Porsche community, including Bill Doyle and Marco Maranello, and discusses the car's restoration process, its racing history, and the challenges faced along the way. With insights into the automotive culture of the past and the evolution of car restoration, Gary's experiences highlight the passion and dedication that define the Porsche enthusiast community.
Topics:
le mans history
car restoration
porsche community
notable figures
racing culture
automotive history
personal stories
ownership journey
Gary Duhaime was the longtime owner of the 911 ST that Michael Keyser previously owned, raced and filmed The Speed Merchants with. Gary had the car for 30 years and this is some stories he shared about the car.
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Hyundai Santa Cruz
"...uham's Auto Restoration. I started the company in Santa Cruz 40 years ago. And I've carried that company with ..."
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Porsche 911
"So that's where it all started. It started with a 56 Volkswagen until I got into 9-11 engines. And I had what I would call, I always called them my gurus."
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Okay, let's get to it.
Gary Duham.
All right, as I talked about in Michael Kaiser podcast, the car ended up close to
my house so I said something about going over and like finding the guy.
Well, that's Gary Duham, so I went and found him and we sat down and this is the interview
we did.
So some of the things I want to talk about is he talked about the guy that top Bill Doyle.
He worked with Porsche at the races.
He says at Le Mans or something.
Anyway, it was called rent sport work.
It was in Santa Clara and the guy that ran it, the guy he's talking about that
he forgot the name is Jim Wellington.
I also wanted to comment, he kept calling this, oh, this is the car that won Le Mans.
I feel like it's more than that.
The Speed Merchant's movie, like it raced all the big races.
Like it was at Targa Floria.
Yes, it was at Le Mans.
It was at all the races.
Not only that, but it won some big races, especially for its class.
And Le Mans he's talking about it came in first in its class.
Like that was a big deal.
Like the car did a lot.
It's not just like it won Le Mans and that's all it did.
And then at one point, it sounds like I interrupt him because he's talking
about going to the different shows down in LA.
But prior to pressing record, we talked about the lit show.
We'd already had that conversation.
So I was telling him, yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
And then the last thing I wanted to talk about was he talks about the Sardine Factory.
And that's what in Michael Kaiser talked about how he got them all together
in the basement of that old building or something.
There was a long table and it was in Carmel or Monterey area.
So that's the same thing that Gary Duham's talking about when he says the Sardine Factory.
So anyway, this is what Gary Duham has to say with his 30 years of ownership of the car.
OK, so I read the book and like you said, not everything's accurate with the book.
I didn't know anything about you.
Right.
Maybe you can add on to Michael Kaiser's because I kind of said in the podcast
when you listen to it, the car ended up real close.
Ironically, to where I live.
So maybe I'll go knock on the guy's door.
So that's kind of where I'm at.
And now all of a sudden I'm finding all this other stuff about you.
So I guess we can just like go on a timeline because like you just said, like Bill Doyle,
I know that name.
I didn't know if you were just some average Joe or you've been in the business for a while.
So I guess we're just winging it.
I have a company that's called Duham's Auto Restoration.
I started the company in Santa Cruz 40 years ago.
And I've carried that company with me until I left Santa Cruz.
How did this whole thing?
I started, I grew up in Los Angeles and in Hollywood.
How did you get involved with cars?
I bought a 1956 Volkswagen small window, small round over the over window.
I had bought one of those.
At that time, I had already restored my 1958 Norton Dominator, which I still have today.
What is that?
It's a motorcycle.
OK, OK.
And I had restored this car.
And I started working on bipartite engine and flat Volkswagen engines.
Guy must have been, you know, I was like just a kid.
My first I was like a 1,100 cc engine, completely built this engine.
I was doing it in my in a house in Silver Lake.
I had a couple of roommates, you know, guys would come home
and I'd have engine parts in the oven, you know, heating stuff up
to put things together and doing all these, the paintwork and stuff.
So I started spending all my days every day at this Volkswagen.
It was a Porsche Volkswagen shop and learning under a guy, a German master.
And that's where it all started is with this 56 Volkswagen.
And then from there, that was in Los Angeles and Hollywood.
From Hollywood, I moved up to Santa Cruz.
And then in Santa Cruz, I started to do Ham's auto restoration
and had ran Cato, Mark Militich and all these different Porsche guys.
Bill Doyle, it was called JB Beetle.
That was your shop?
Are you sure?
That was that was that was Bill Doyle shop.
And he was right next door to my facility,
meaning Bill Doyle was, I mean, that guy ended up being
a renowned engine builder working on the four cam engines.
Right.
So that's where it all started.
It started with a 56 Volkswagen until I got into 9-11 engines.
And I had what I would call, I always called them my gurus.
You know, they're the guys that really knew what was going on.
I'm thinking back into
rent sport work and then the owner of that.
This guy was Mr.
Tweaky. He hired Bill Doyle.
His name isn't coming to my mind, but this was in Santa Cruz.
Nope. This was in Santa Clara.
Now, this is a guy that actually worked with the Porsche factory
at Le Mans.
He's he's really made the six ninety twos
and then Bill ended up down at honest engines, I believe,
in Los Angeles and Long Beach.
So you started building the Volkswagen's, which, you know, you were in Hollywood,
then you came up to Santa Cruz and that's when you like kind of ran
past with like Bill Doyle and stuff like that.
What's that?
That's me with another guy
when I had a shop down in West Hollywood, California.
Which one's you?
I'm the long hair guy.
They both have kind of a long hair, but I guess you're the one on the right.
On your right, yeah.
OK, that's where it all started.
I I'm a guitar player.
I was playing a guitar as in a band back in the days.
So go on.
OK, so someone turned you on to the car in the auto trader.
No, Courtney Cranton is the guy that found the car and the auto trader.
Courtney Cranton and I were both Porsche buffs.
He's a contractor.
Something I learned from Courtney in the world of contracting
is that you get in big jobs and when somebody doesn't pay you
and you end up in litigation, it just takes and changes your world
from one day to the next day you're you're flying the next day
you're broke.
And I've watched Courtney go through this this cyclic part of life
through my whole relationship with him.
He'll get into a big job and something will happen.
And the next thing he knows is all his money is tied up.
And so that's what happened.
He had this car.
He had his aspiration was he is going to put that race car back together.
He couldn't do it.
And he knew I had all these parts that might be, you know, work out a deal.
And I bought the car from him. Right.
So Courtney found the car in the auto trader.
And he was in Canada, I believe it was
just vacationing or something.
And he ended up just reading through stuff one day.
And then he starts looking through this auto trader
because he's always looking for stuff.
And he comes across this car and it was like this car that had won
Le Mans. It was a race car. Right.
So Courtney sees this thing and a guy named Don Lindley.
Had purchased the car from Michael Kaiser and Don Lindley.
By the way, this guy was an engineer.
And supposedly he had manufactured a machine
that made the first rubber like latex gloves
rather than just sitting there and putting that thing on perpetuity
and making like one cent of glove or whatever for the rest of his life.
He just sold it out and he ended up with a bunch of money.
You know, back then the race car thing.
Same thing with Michael Kaiser.
I mean, to go and make a movie to race the car.
We're talking about these guys were having a blast
to spend in freaking gobs of money.
I mean, I can't even imagine what it would cost for him
to make that movie to speed merchants of them.
This is the same time that McQueen was doing Le Mans.
And so that was like maybe untimely
because now you're competing against what Steve McQueen
So this guy Lindley has his car.
I had to advertise it in the auto trader
and Courtney comes across it and he gets ahold of the guy
and he says, well, come on down. I'll show you the car.
He drives down to Hollywood and it's up in Laurel Canyon in a garage.
I mean, there are so many pictures of where the things up on a wall
are into a wall or, you know, it's a guy named Brian Colnich
who raced the car at Sebring.
But he was telling me that he knew Lindley.
He says the guy get in the car, you know, 100 miles an hour
and lose control of it just constantly.
It was just like, you know, somebody at one of these video games
where he and he couldn't drive.
So it was a virtually ready racing.
So after he pretty much smashed this thing up,
he decided that he's going to sell the car.
He'd gone through all his money having fun, whatever he was doing
and had the trophy wife, I remember talking to somebody about it.
He had had the girlfriends had everything going for him
and is just having a blast and they just go through it fast.
So the car went up for sale and Courtney Cranton,
he and a friend of his picked the car up, threw it into a U-Haul
and hauled it up to Santa Cruz.
Well, were you going to ask a question?
Well, going back to the Lindley,
I mean, reading about him sounded like and what you're telling me,
it sounds like he's an absolute nut.
He was an engineer, like you said,
but that doesn't mean you're an engineer in all aspects of life.
So he just thought, well, I'll be able to work on the car.
Ended up mostly Michael Kaiser's mechanic
when he had spare time would come over and be like, no, no, no
and try to like guide him.
But a lot of the stuff he wanted to save money.
So he was like doing a lot of the mechanics on the car himself,
which the car never ran right.
And he had just barely like went to school just enough,
driver's school, just enough to get a racing license.
And then the other guy you were talking about, Brian.
Golnich. Golnich.
It was only his second year of racing.
Uh-huh.
And so, I mean, they were just kind of amateur hour.
I mean, that's what it sounded like to me.
And then sometimes Lindley would get a little bit cocky
and be like, OK, I want to start driving
rather than getting the professional to drive first
and setting the car up to sound like it was crazy.
All this car was just it was really in bad shape.
But it had all been pulled out.
You should see the welds on the door where they used to pull
and they pulled the thing back out and got it relative.
They got it straight enough where they were they were racing
the car sideways, whatever they, you know,
that's what racing was back in those days.
My 59 GT, the Speedster, that car, you should have seen that thing.
I mean, these guys took this Carrera Speedster.
So you're looking at something today where you're going,
this is like one of the rarest curves in the world.
These guys took and they wanted to put slicks on the back of it.
So they just they took a zip gun and just cut off the fenders.
Then they took and and they riveted chicken wire
and they molded the chicken wire.
So they got that they could curvature for the wide body.
And they got that.
And then they just fiberglassed over it.
And then they popped holes in it for the clutch, for instance.
You've got the firewall that's separating the engine compartment
from the front of the car.
Just cut a hole through it, double panel.
I mean, just to repair that loan is just like, you know,
you had to completely disassemble the car, but they didn't care.
I mean, these guys were racing.
And so, you know, whatever it took, nuts and bolts,
you throw them in there, you get in the car, you're racing.
You hit the wall, you pull it out, you go, you keep.
It's just was it was fun times.
And so, you know, nobody was looking at, you know, well,
someday this car is going to be, you know,
but the ST, I had this shop and I had purchased
a lot of different parts from guys along the way.
And I had a later model, like a 1980, 81.
I had all the body parts for this thing.
But the ST is a long nose.
There's a designation for it. Long hood pre-impact.
Yeah. And so and so they've got the dual batteries.
All this stuff is just demolished, you know, or a lot of work to fix it.
And getting all the parts, I said, screw it.
We'll just cut off the nose.
We'll weld on this later nose.
We'll put the fenders.
We'll put this thing.
We'll just make a different car out of it.
So what, you know?
And so that's pretty much where the whole thing started with me.
I had a lot of hours into transforming the car
into a later model car when we came back from lunch
and the car was gone.
I had a shop that was in near Soquel
and the Soquel River went along, decided to shop.
It was elevated.
So there's a large pad.
The building was there was like a warehouse
and the car was sitting on the pad in the parking lot
when Rand and I left for lunch one day
and we came back and the car's gone.
And I'm going, where the heck's the car?
And we start looking and we go over and we look
and somebody had taken and pushed the car
off the edge of the parking lot.
And it rolled down and landed upside down.
The doors had opened, just demolished the thing.
And we'd been working on it for some time.
At that time, we had a wrecker come.
They had to come with the crane and grab the car.
We had the car pulled up, removed,
and there was a big trash can.
One of these kinds of you roll and and we had them put the car.
It was still upside down on top of the trash can.
And we had this big sign and it says engineering.
And we put that on the front of the garbage can.
And here's the car upside down with the doors open.
It's all crashed up and we've got a picture of Rand and I.
I'll find that for you.
So I was like, OK, well, what am I going to do with this thing now?
So at that point, I just put it in the back of the shop
and pretty much forgot about it.
I moved up to Davenport up in the up in the mountains of Santa Cruz.
I remember bringing the car up there.
It sat in a barn for the longest time.
And then I ended up moving to Bethel Island.
I brought the car up here.
And at that time, I was pretty much working
mostly on the 59 Carrera Speedster.
And this is when I met Urs Gretner and he was doing the work.
He started hearing about this ST.
He's gone, dude, do you realize how rare that car?
What that car is, the history behind the car?
At that time, you know, so as we started going into it more and more,
it was like, this thing's got some history.
And then we come to find out, you know, and some do is always the yak yak.
Yeah, this car won Le Mans.
Well, everybody says, yeah, my car won.
You know, you don't know who to believe or what to believe.
But then we just started looking into it.
So who was Willis Gretner again?
Urs Gretner.
I was down at a Porsche event in Los Angeles
and went into one of the shops because that's what you can do is you
they'll give you a list of all the different Porsche shops.
Yeah, I go down every day.
Yeah, yeah. OK, so I wonder if you've been by my booth.
I've gone since.
Probably.
2016.
Yeah, there's no doubt I have.
Yeah. So any rate.
Yeah, so I was in this shop and I'm looking at this this exhaust system
and it was stainless steel and it was and the welds on this thing
which is like and I'm going, who the heck's got a laser welder
that set up CNC in this case is not a laser welder.
It's Urs Gretner.
And I said, where's Urs Gretner?
Went to Urs Gretner shop and met him.
And then he started working on the 59.
When Mark Militich had been working on it, we were putting panels on.
Mark would use what's called a MiG welder.
Urs Gretner is a gas welder.
I mean, you know, I was going, well, what's the pros and cons behind that?
And I'm standing next to a 59 Carrera GS GT Speedster.
Right. And he walks up and he says, well, you see, you see this weld here
and he takes out of his pocket a screwdriver.
And he goes, wham!
And puts it through the side of my car.
Now, can you imagine standing there and watching that happening?
This guy's just puts this thing right on this weld split.
And he says, now look at the holey's.
I'm sitting there and my breath is.
And I go, what did you just do?
And you go up and he says, you see,
it's cracked on each side of his holey's.
And he is absolutely right.
And that's what happens.
He says, you know, you're going to put a $10,000 paint job on this thing.
And he says, in five years, you're going to see a crack going.
He'd never worked on the DST.
And it was at Urs Gretner shop that I met.
There's a man. His name is Marco Maranello.
Marco Maranello, it works with the Porsche factory.
In fact, at that time, he had the archives.
There was a gentleman by the last name of Lang, L-A-N-G.
His son died.
Did something happen with his son?
And he died and his father ended up with the archives.
And then they ended up going over to Marco Maranello.
So this guy has all the stuff on the car.
And I started speaking with him
and I actually flew to Switzerland to meet him.
And what he wanted to know is on these cars,
you've got a plate that's inside that that's aluminum
and they're riveted to the body.
Those plates, people have made fraudulent stuff.
And so you really can't get off of that.
They can be transferred because they take the Revit's out,
take one off of one car, put it on another car.
Well, in the dashboard of the car,
just above the ashtray, if you've got the padding off of the dash,
there's a number that's stamped right in the center of the car.
That's the identifier. That's what we went on.
It's a production number.
So I'm in Zurich at Marco Maranello shop
and he's standing and he's got this book in his hand.
Now, this is something I'd almost like to make a short movie out of.
This man stands about six, four.
He's a big man, right?
And he's got the book in his hand and I'm sitting in a chair
and he looks at me and he says,
so tell me a faulty son number on the dashboard.
So I read this number to him and he just looks at me
and he drops the book
and he just kind of started sliding down the line.
He says, where did you get that car?
He was just completely blown away.
So I went back and then I learned of
through Earth's Gretner again of Marco Halter
and Marco Halter actually flew
Marco Maranello to Bethel Island.
And here they are to see this car for the first time.
And they went through that thing with a fine tooth comb.
All the parts, unfortunately, the original engine.
And this has always been something curious in my mind
because I could almost remember being with Courtney Cranton
in his garage and he had this engine that had titanium rods.
It would have been the engine that came out of that car.
And I don't recall, but, you know, when I bought the car,
all I had was the transmission.
The engine wasn't in it.
And so they went through this thing
and we started a process of trying to authenticate the car.
And we spent some time.
It was maybe two or three years.
I got hold of the people at AutoTrader,
was introduced to one of the people that handles their archives there.
And she found the original article.
Then Marco came up with something where the car was raced
and the numbers, the other serial number that's on the plate,
were published with the car as it was racing.
And that was as it was said by Marco Maranello,
that's the nail in the coffin.
And that's when he brought it to Porsche
and they started the restoration on it.
And he's the current owner.
No, he's the the guy that worked with Porsche.
No, OK. Halter is the current owner. OK.
And so Marco put together,
he gathered a number of drivers, like there were eight
to ten guys that had driven the car.
They might have been Le Mans winners and at the Sardine factory.
This is many years ago.
First time I was it wasn't the first time I met Michael Kaiser,
but kind of first time I met Brian Golnich.
But all of these people, he brought them all together to celebrate
this car and the rebirth of it.
And I got to tell the story about this car
that was being put together as a nineteen eighty one or eighty two
nine eleven, whatever it might have been, short nose.
And if we had finished that car today,
somebody could be driving that car down the road
and never have the slightest idea that that car had won Le Mans in 1972.
So the fact that the thing got pushed off this thing
and rolled down into this gully and got demolished
and got put aside again and sat there for years
because I had the car for over 30 years.
And then finally the day came where, you know, time had passed.
It's just that's a pretty amazing story.
Yeah. Where does this three fifty six GTGS come in?
I bought that car through Rensport Works.
Bill Doyle was the agent, more or less, on me purchasing that car.
The car was for sale.
I don't think I had nailed it down.
I might have, I don't recall, but I knew that it was $30,000
for me to purchase that car at that time.
That was a whole bunch of money.
And I remember me trying to get my father
to come up with some of the money to buy that car.
And he comes in my shop and the car had come from Costa Rica
and it had sat outside for years.
There was no floor in it at all.
And my dad comes, I said, dad, I've got to buy this car.
And I need I need another $15,000.
He comes up and looks at the car and he goes, Gary,
there's no floor in the car.
And I go, dad, it's the Freddie Flintstone car.
I said, you just get in it and you start running.
And I said, it really saves on gas.
My dad looks at me and he says, you have lost your mind.
I'm leaving and got back in the car and just drove off.
And I'm standing there going, but I was able to put it together.
And I brought in a partner and bought that car for $30,000.
And this was what year?
Oh, yeah, it was 2007, 2008, maybe.
I can't. I have to go back through my arc.
I was in.
So when did you buy the ST?
The ST, I bought that car probably in 1975, 76.
How long did Courtney own it for?
Just he didn't own it for a very long time, like just a year months.
Yeah. And I started the transformation of the car.
And then I just drove the thing around for the next 30 years.
The Carrera right now is in its final stages.
The restorations of these cars, I have been so blessed
in finding that people I brought into it are so dedicated.
And they're so like, look, what happened when I got hold of the car?
I'm sitting there, I'm putting this thing together and cutting the nose off.
And he's like, what are you doing?
When I've seen what a real artisan can do is like, for instance,
this guy, Urs Gretner, if you were to give him six different types of metals,
flat and sheets, right?
And say, I want you to make a ball.
I want you to make a perfect sphere.
He could actually put together a ball for you.
All done.
All gas welded in this thing would be just a round ball.
And you go, how could you do that?
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Now get out there and enjoy the cars and the people.
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