Gene Hackman 1930-2025

Mark Cole looks back at his racing career

Above: image credit, Toyota North America media archives

Hollywood actor Gene Hackman came to fame in his 1971 movie The French Connection, which (like Steve McQueen’s Bullitt) featured a car chase under the Brooklyn subway. Hackman said he did “perhaps 60% of the driving; I left the tough stuff to Bill Hickman.”
I knew nothing about Hackman’s later racing exploits until I was researching my Ultimate McLaren F1 GTR book in 2018, when I noticed that 1995 Le Mans 24 Hours winner Masanori Sekiya (the first Japanese victor) had shared a Toyota with Hackman 12 years earlier at Daytona.

After chatting to Sekiya about it, I put that nugget on one side, hoping to use it one day. That day has sadly come earlier than expected, with reports of Hackman’s still-unexplained death together with his wife at their Santa Fe home last month (February).
While his Hollywood contemporaries Steve McQueen and Paul Newman also showed outstanding talent as racing drivers, finishing second overall at Sebring and Le Mans respectively, Hackman had the skills to take him to celebrity race wins, and he also competed in the 1983 Daytona 24 Hours for Dan Gurney’s All American Eagles Toyota GTU team.

Above: image credit, Toyota North America media archives

Sharing a 300 bhp Toyota Celica turbo with Sekiya and Kaoru Hoshino, they qualified fifth in GTU but retired with gearbox failure before the fifth hour. “He was a steady driver, maybe not as quick as us, but he was not a car-breaker,” Masanori told me. “And for us Japanese raceboys it was an honour to be driving with a Hollywood star!”

‘Popeye’ would race again with AAR in the same year’s Riverside 6 Hours, this time finishing 5th in GTU with Wally Dallenbach Jr and Margie Smith-Haas. In 1984 he joined Walt Preston’s Mazda RX-7 GTU team to race at Sebring and Riverside, but both ended with early engine failures.

He had started racing when invited to compete in the 1980 Long Beach ProCelebrity Toyota Celica GT event and, sharing with Parnelli Jones, won first time out. His interest piqued, he signed up for Bob Bondurant’s Formula Ford school, another graduate of which was Grand Prix star James Garner.

“Gene was the most impressive of the celebrities I trained,’ said Bondurant. “He was one of the most mild-mannered men I’ve ever met, but who would fully commit with a ‘win, or crash trying to win’ mindset.” As well as racing in SCCA events, he would win further ProCelebrity races at Watkins Glen.

Like McQueen and Newman, Hackman was a multiple OSCAR winner (five, including two for Best Actor), and decided that he was indeed a better actor than driver, and stopped competing at the end of the 1980s.

“Would I have chosen racing over acting? I’ve thought about it quite a bit. I have a feeling I wouldn’t have stayed in racing. I don’t think I have the personality to be a real racing professional.

“You can learn some of the skills of racing, you can learn all the mechanical things, but there’s a certain part of it that really no-one can teach you – that killer instinct. You have to be very competitive. You need to have that edge about you. The good ones all have that.

“There’s a lot of excitement, it’s a big buck deal and you’re around a lot of hot machinery, it's great to be in all that.”