Paul Van Valkenburgh built his first classic ’23 T roadster hot rod while still in high school in Topeka, Kansas in the late 1950s. After engineering school he worked on Apollo rocket testing at Douglas Aircraft in California, and then used his wind-tunnel expertise to talk his way into an engineering job at Chevrolet Research and Development in the 1960’s. As a result of Chevy’s relationships with Roger Penske, Jim Hall at Chaparral, Smoky Yunick and others, Paul was connected with all sorts of vehicles and people in high-level racing in the late 60s and on through the 70’s. These connections were detailed in his authoritative book, “Chevrolet = Racing”. While working on joint projects between Chevy R&D and Penske Racing, he became friends with champion driver Mark Donohue and was asked by Mark to co-write Mark’s autobiography, “The Unfair Advantage”. He worked on various Chaparral race cars for endurance racing and the CanAm series, including the prototype of the legendary Chaparral 2J “sucker car” while at Chevy R&D and on loan to Chaparral in Midland, Texas.

He was also a talented driver, privately campaigning his home-built ’68 Camaro in the TransAm series against factory teams and world-famous drivers. On one occasion, he qualified Peter Revson’s TransAm car for Penske when Revson couldn’t make it to the track in time.

Paul became more and more involved in writing and was a well-known automotive journalist. He served as technical editor of Sports Car Graphic magazine and went on to write hundreds of articles for all the major automotive, racing, snowmobile and motorcycle magazines as well as publications from the New York Times to Encyclopedia Britannica. He personally built and developed custom automotive test equipment which he used to do most of the road tests for Road and Track and many other magazines in the 1980s and beyond. He published “Race Car Engineering and Mechanics”, still considered a classic book on the subject. As a consultant, he worked on government and private vehicle dynamics studies, testing everything from snowmobiles to school buses. He spent time building Human Powered Vehicles that at one time held world records in his class. Along the way he was an instructor for NASCAR drivers and taught courses in hybrid vehicle design at Cal State Long Beach.

He eventually moved away from the vehicle world and devoted later years to more people-related topics. His lifetime of dealing with migraines led him to spend years gathering data, participating in academic medical studies and constructing his own theories about migraine propagation in the brain.  He earned a masters degree in social work and applied his engineering background to topics in human relations. He also studied and published a book on the problem of tinnitus, and raised three sons.

Paul passed away on June 23, 2024 at the age of 83.