Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman was found dead in his Santa Fe, New Mexico home yesterday, along with his wife and one of their three dogs. The cause of death is unknown as of yet. Though best known for his work on screen, off screen Hackman was a motorsports enthusiast. He competed in a number of endurance races, most famously behind the wheel of a Toyota Celica at the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona.
Hackman won an Academy Award for Best Actor for portraying the tough cop Popeye Doyle in 1971’s French Connection. One of the film’s centerpiece action sequences features him behind the wheel of a Pontiac Le Mans in pursuit of a bad guy. It was deemed one of the best movie car chases at the time (though the suspect was on a train), and according to the Los Angeles Times Hackman did about 60 percent of his own stunt driving.
Hackman told the paper that he caught the racing bug after competing in the first Toyota Pro/Celebrity Race at the Long Beach Grand Prix in a 1977 Celica Liftback. With his interest piqued, the Unforgiven actor enrolled in Bob Bondurant’s racing school and drove Formula Fords in SCCA until the early 1980s.
“Then I started racing sports cars–Mazda RX7s, Toyota Celicas. They were full-out race cars, but on the outside they looked like a street version of a car,” Hackman told the Times. “And they’re rented. It sounds kind of strange to rent a race car. But the person doing it has to know who you are and they have to know that you’re capable.”
Hackman would go on to compete in more Toyota Pro/Celebrity races, which at the time were held all over the country. These races would have stars and pro drivers duking it out in identically prepped Toyotas, but there would be two winners, one from each class. Hackman won several races in the Celebrity class, at Long Beach, Watkins Glen, and Riverside International Raceway.
Soon Hackman joined the pros, when he joined Dan Gurney’s All-American racers and drove one of three Celicas at the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona. The cars, based on both coupe and Liftback body styles, were built Kent racing with partial tube-frame chassis and heavily modified bodies designed by aerodynamicist Hiro Fujimori. The twin-cam 16-valve engines put out 300 horsepower with tuning from TOM’s and TRD.
For the enduro Hackman drove the No.99 car with future JTCC and JGTC champion Kaoru Hoshino and Masanori Sekiya, who would go on to become the first Japanese driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The trio climbed as high as 16th position before retiring due to transmission issues and finishing an overall 57th in a field of 79. Later that year Hackman would finish 16th at the 6 Hours of Riverside in the No.97 Celica.
In 1984 Hackman returned to IMSA, this time c0-driving a Mazda RX-7 with art collector Whitney Ganz. Hackman competed at both the 12 Hours of Sebring and the 6 Hours of Riverside, both times incurring DNFs. A Mazda claimed to have been driven by him is currently for sale in Los Angeles.
Dan Gurney became a spokesperson for the second-gen Supra. Hackman would’ve made a great one, but he instead he did Kirin Dry beer commercials in Japan. However, the Crimson Tide actor did drive a Toyota in his down time. “On normal roads, I don’t drive fast anymore. I don’t efhackmaven drive any exotic cars anymore. Probably, it’s because if you’re racing, you don’t need them,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Before I started [racing], I had Ferraris and Porsches and all that kind of thing,” Now I have two trucks–a Toyota and a Nissan. I can’t speed in those.”
Eventually Hackman realized to become a pro driver at a national level he would have to race more than his acting schedule would allow. It’s also a bit amusing that the consummate tough guy thought he wasn’t tough enough for racing.
He revealed to the Times, “I think you need a tougher personality than I have. You have to be harder than I’m capable of… 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.”
Gene Hackman retired from acting in 2004 and mostly evaded the limelight living in Santa Fe. However, the paparazzi caught up with him in 2023 hear his New Mexico home and photographed the then-93-year-old actor getting into his facelifted second-generation Tundra, a Toyota man till the end.
Hackman shared his racing philosophy with the Times: “In order to be really good, you have to be absolutely the opposite. You must be extremely careful. You have to think in a very orderly fashion. What you do is you try to slow everything down instead of getting yourself all excited and expending a lot of energy. Instead, you try to slow it all down so you can go quicker. It’s a very strange process,” he explained. ““Do I ever feel fear? Yeah. You always get a rush–adrenaline, certainly. But the driving in ‘The French Connection’ was much more frightening than anything I ever did on a track.”
How cool … he will be missed.