The Macho Machines

I am convinced that my old man was clairvoyant. I mean, why else would he, in the drab year of 1949, go down to his local Oldsmobile dealer and come home with the first hell-fire, running-sumbitch. hot-damn V8, Rocket 88 in the entire blasted county? You've got to admit that it was a trendy thing to do, what with all his neighbors lumping around in porthole Buick Road-masters and ultra-dumbo sedans like that. After all, the Oldsmobile Rocket 88 was what you used to call your "hot" car and, in a day when the guys in zooty pants and duck's-ass haircuts--automotive visigoths known among the decent folk as "hot rodders"--were cruisin' in '40 Ford flatheads, having a set of "wheels" like that could boost you to stardom overnight. There it was, in four-door, almond-green splendor, appearing one day in my own driveway: a chance to become a living legend on a learner's permit. The 88's appearance was deceiving. It looked like all the other bulging, Jell-O-mold American cars of the day. Tall and rather narrow, it featured tumorous fenders that gave it a strongly pneumatic quality, as if it had been doubled in size by an injection of compressed air.

The Oldsmobile stylists had fitted a grille composed of two massive chromed bars that presented a countenance resembling a despondent black bass. Inside sprawled a pair of bench seats coated with two-tone gray (text continued on page 162) broadcloth. The collective visual components of an Oldsmobile 88 made it appear about as rakish and sporting as a suburban bus, but that lumpy exterior concealed 135 stampeding horses--more power than had ever been stuffed into a middlebrow, medium-priced American sedan.

Now, 135 horsepower may seem rather tepid by today's standards, but in 1949 it seemed like enough to vault the Empire State Building and still have enough in reserve to burn rubber in front of a local ice-cream joint. Seated behind the immense steering wheel and peering across a hood so large that it looked as if someone had lashed a rowboat between the front fenders, I seemed headed for asphalt immortality. Puffing and straining their old Fords and Mercurys to the limit, the local hot shoes simply couldn't keep pace with my fleet Olds. Unfortunately, those moments of glory with the 88 were counted in sparse minutes. It was, after all, the family car and my opportunities to drive it were composed of rare, intemperate, bombastic, show-off bursts of speed around my home town. Then, two speeding tickets and a minor crash convinced my father that tamer machinery was needed in the household and he traded the Olds in on a sluglike six-cylinder DeSoto. Instant ignominy. Having been plunged from the top to the bottom of the local pecking order with one swift gesture, I was left to witness the beginning of that weirdo phenomenon of the so-called performance cars that Detroit poured onto the market for 20 years, steadily escalating until the entire episode crumbled from its own foolish excess.

It began with the Oldsmobile Rocket 88, make no mistake about that. In 1949, fast automobiles were about as much a factor in the American consciousness as porn flicks; decent Americans simply didn't have any awareness of them. A tiny, noisy clique of sports-car enthusiasts was growling around in spindly European roadsters, and a few hot rodders driving cut-down, hopped-up Thirties coupes and roadsters prowled Main Street after dark, but these enthusiasts operated outside the central scheme of things and had no meaning either to the general public or to the Detroit moguls who had built a majority of the automobiles. The fact that the Oldsmobile 88 was the first modern, quick American production car was accidental. General Motors had been working on a series of high-compression, short-stroke, overhead-valve, V8-engine designs since World War Two had ended, and top Oldsmobile engineer Gilbert Burrell had started work on a 303-cu.-in. Olds version in April 1947. The Cadillac division was creating a similar engine, but it was Burrell's design that would shake the automobile world as the famed Rocket Olds.

You must remember that in the late Forties. American cars were being towed around by some hopelessly dead-ass engines. Only Ford was producing a V8, and it was an antiquated, flathead model dating from the Thirties. Most manufacturers offered a series of immense, slow-revving, long-stroke straight sixes and eights that were archaic in the extreme. Burrell's engine (later to be known as the Kettering engine because it was produced in a new production facility named after the great G.M. designer Charles F. Kettering) arrived on this scene as a compact, high-winding powerhouse with incontestable advantages over its competition. It was light, it produced effortless torque and horsepower, it was smooth, thanks to its short stroke, and silent, due to its new hydraulic-valve-lifting mechanism. This Rocket engine, hooked up to Whirl away Hydra-Matic and installed in a collection of coupe, sedan and convertible bodies with Futuramic styling, was such a sensation that it even surprised the Oldsmobile management. Before the model year was completed, 192,000 Rocket engines had been built in the more luxurious 98 models and in the shorter, lighter (300-500 pounds) 88s.

The fledgling National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) instantly discovered the Rocket engine and Red Byron won the 1949 Grand National Championship at the wheel of a stubby 88 sedan. Olds would repeat as Grand National champ again in 1950. This Rocket 88 would top 90 mph off the showroom floor and accelerate from 0 to 60 in about 12 seconds--truly astounding achievements for a machine that anybody could own for approximately $2000. This level of performance had heretofore been reserved for a few high-priced luxury machines or a select number of carefully modified hot rods. Now speed became an egalitarian commodity, available to any welder or shoe salesman who chose to spend the money. This was of small import to the Oldsmobile management. Raw horsepower was a bonus by-product of the Rocket engine and played a minor role in the sales promotion of their automobiles. They chose instead to exploit the power plant's smoothness and torque (which in turn enhanced the effectiveness of their automatic transmission) and paid little attention to the fact that they were marketing the fastest medium-priced automobile ever to appear on the highway. As their advertising agency cranked out jingles urging America to "Make a date with a Rocket 88," the fact that their car was raising the nation's consciousness about automotive performance was ignored. After all, Oldsmobile produced cars for solid citizens and not thrill-hungry speed demons, and the news that people were out ripping up the highways of America in their new 88s caused hardly a ripple around the home office in Lansing. In fact, the NASCAR stock-car-racing program was allowed to fade away and by 1955 Oldsmobile had ended its brief flirtation with high performance and had dutifully returned to supplying dull, overweight, fat-daddy (but still sneakily fast) sedans to the solid burghers of middle America. In the meantime, other manufacturers, jolted in part by the incredible Oldsmobile Rocket, rushed to the drawing board to create the kind of equipment that would fit the nation's growing appetite for speed.

One might assume that this new generation of fast cars was aimed at the kids of the country. After all, the Fifties were the halcyon days of such quaint pastimes as drag racing and customizing cars, and it would stand to reason that Detroit would direct its marketing efforts at this age group. But this predated the so-called youth market by nearly a decade. The young drivers of the Fifties were nickel-and-dimers compared with the spoiled, overindulged teeny-tycoons of the Sixties. Fifties kids, if they could afford an automobile in the first place, were content with ragged used cars. Those who wanted to drive fast had to save their pennies for the purchase of such exotica as dual exhausts and high-compression heads and three-quarter cams that would in turn be bolted into their '39-'40 Fords and Mercurys. Considerably more money was expended for hardware-store junk like hood ornaments, necker's knobs, hubcap spinners, twin radio antennas, fake fender portholes, mud flaps, etc., which serve as a better bench mark of the general automotive taste of the period. (Nostalgia buffs will quite accurately describe the 1949-1951 Mercury convertibles as the youth-cult cars of the day. However, those machines, decked out in Continental spare-tire kits, fender skirts, Mell-O-Tone dual mufflers, etc., were intended purely for drive-in hopping and making out. They were smooth, sleek and slow-and, in the eyes of the true hot-car apostles, had a kind of sleazy decadence. While they played a major role in the automotive sociology of the period, they are a distinct subspecies of the American car genus.) Only a tiny segment of the young drivers in America got near new cars in the Fifties. Therefore, Detroit remained confident that high-powered automobiles were rich men's toys; that within the puritan ethic, speed was a hedonistic excess to be offered only to daffy gentlemen of means. Ergo, the first postwar generation of American super cars were exclusive, high-priced models, as they had been since the days when Duesenbergs, Marmons, Stutzes and Cords pounded the roads. It was within the natural order of things that big, expensive cars should be faster than their smaller, cheaper counterparts. A superiority in (continued on page 188) Macho Machines (continued from page 162) speed was a built-in component of luxury cars. One of the most memorable ruptures of that tradition came with the introduction of the Rocket 88, although several years would pass before the heresy would be repeated.

While Oldsmobile chose to ignore the potential of the 88, Chrysler responded in an oblique fashion in 1951 by introducing the expensive New Yorker series with 331-cu.-in., 180-hp V8 engines. They were boxy, towering, slab-sided machines with nearly equidistant hoods and trunk lids that conformed perfectly to the then-contemporary Chrysler "three-box" styling idiom; i.e., all corporation cars of that period resembled a trio of packing crates--two on the bottom, one on the top--fused together to form a crude auto body. Yet inside its clumsy form, the New Yorker carried a marvelous engine, complete with a short-stroke, double-rocker-shaft, overhead-valve, high-compression layout and, most important, hemispherical combustion chambers--the famed "hemi" that would become synonymous with Chrysler performance in years to come. The "hemi"--although it had been used in aircraft power plants for years--was a major breakthrough. It was so efficient that the new Chrysler V8, labeled the Firepower, produced 16 percent more power than the rival Cadillac engine with exactly the same displacement. It would propel the leviathan New Yorkers down the road at nearly 125 mph and in modified form it powered the famous Cunningham sports cars at LeMans and elsewhere, and ran in a variety of racing cars from Indianapolis to Bonneville to the Mexican Road Race.

But automotive tastes were changing radically by the time the hot Chrysler New Yorkerse stablished their reputation. The European sports-car movement was spreading across the land and nimble roadsters such as the MG and the Jaguar were triggering new awareness for such qualities as handling, braking and steering, in addition to raw speed. Suddenly, Detroit discovered "sport" and tried to ladle a dollop into its product mix, much as a chef might add wine to a pallid sauce. The first serious efforts came in 1954, when the Thunderbird and the Corvette appeared as the first domestic sports cars. They were, in fact, little more than softly sprung, slow-running, sluggish-handling, two-seat modifications of existing Ford and Chevrolet rolling stock and they made little serious impact on the enthusiast market. However, they did indicate a recognition of the new trend toward sportier cars and some men at Chrysler division--notably the late Bob Rodger, the brilliant, taciturn chief engineer who had been responsible for much of the company's racing successes--realized that both Ford and Chevrolet were capable of transforming these new machines into first-class performance cars. (As it turned out, Chevrolet transformed the Corvette into America's only mass-produced sports car, while Ford those to sell the Thunderbird as a tamer, more luxurious "personal" car.)

Rodger was convinced that Chrysler had to counter the G.M. and Ford overtures toward the enthusiast market. None of the cars being readied for the 1955 lineup had the necessary pizzazz to fill the bill, although there was neither the time nor the funds to develop an entirely new model. He found the solution through a brilliant improvisation. Taking the basic New Yorker hardtop, which for 1955 had a rather softly curved yet lean body shape designed by the late Virgil Exner (who would be remembered for his later finned excesses known as the Forward Look), he installed a modified version of his 331-cu.-in. monster hemi V8 and added heavier front suspension pieces and a large, bold, egg-crate grille scavenged from the Imperial luxury car plus the rear-quarter molding from the low-priced Windsor.

Wire wheels, of which a three-year supply was lying around after failing as an option on the Imperial, were available at extra cost. By adding a hot cam and a new manifold accommodating a pair of four-barrel carburetors, the engine's power was boosted from 235 hp to 300 hp. Hence the new car, which had been rushed into production in less than a year and arrived on the market in January 1955, was called the C-300. It was a sensational machine, one of the milestone automobiles built in the United States.

A 1955 Chrysler C-300 (later to be known simply as the 300) would touch 140 mph right off the showroom floor. Thanks to its special tires, wide-rim wheels and carefully tuned suspension, it was amazingly stable in corners, considering its 125-inch wheelbase and its bulk of two tons. A pair of the first 300s off the production line--red coupes--were taken to the corporation's proving grounds at Chelsea, Michigan, where they toured the high-speed test track at nearly 140 mph for 24 consecutive hours. Shortly after the 300 was introduced, Carl Kiekhaefer, the crusty, outspoken engineering genius who had developed the Mercury outboard motors, entered NASCAR Grand National stock-car racing with a team of noisy, refrigerator-white coupes. Employing the best stock-car drivers available and using tactics and organizational methods befitting the top European Grand Prix teams, Kiekhaefer's 300s dominated stock-car racing in the mid-Fifties, blowing the previously unbeatable Hudson Hornets and Olds 88s off the tracks.

Hence, the C-300 made its appearance in 1955 with the justifiable billing as "America's greatest performing motorcar." Ironically, many of the 1692 domestic customers (33 cars were exported) were unhappy with their new car. They had expected a smooth, silent luxury machine, not a hard-riding, rough-idling semiracer, and numerous complaints flowed into the corporate headquarters. Nevertheless, the 300--low volume, high price, hard ride and all--was a success. It managed to veer Chrysler toward a sportier, gutsier public image and provided a reservoir of technology that led to much of the corporate stock-car and drag-racing successes of the Sixties. The car was built until 1965, when the 300L disappeared from the market. By then it had become clumsy and overweight, an ostentatious replica of the lithe originals that still stand among the quickest road cars ever built in America.

As late as 1955, with enthusiasm for all types of motor sport blossoming across the nation, most of Detroit persisted in the notion that speed was a frivolous commodity to be doled out to the upper classes at premium prices. Some men at Chevrolet, including chief engineer Edward N. Cole and his staff, believed otherwise. Their 1955 Chevy blew the entire American automobile market wide open. It was a compact little machine, with a low roof, smooth, organic fender lines and a bold. Ferrari like grille treatment. It looked tough and racy, although it was a Chevy--cheap, reliable and available at the local dealership. In this sense, it was the first postwar American automobile to exploit the egalitarian appeal of high performance. It was the first working man's racer.

The '55 Chevy would later become the most desirable teenage hot rod of them all, the first Chevrolet to dislodge Fords of all vintages from their traditional eminence within this age group, but it was not marketed with kids in mind. Discovery of the youth market still lay ahead and Chevrolet merely proceeded to sell its new product in conventional fashion with a special emphasis on its acceleration and smoothness. The key to the 1955 Chevrolet's amazing performance was its sensational power plant, perhaps the most significant engine ever to appear in a mass-produced car. Its 265cu.-in., 162-hp (180-hp optional) V8 was the lightest, hottest, highest-revving power plant available outside the exotic mechanisms being stuffed into Ferraris and Maseratis. After 25 years of offering sedate, stone-solid, slow-turning sixes, Chevrolet shed its dowdy reputation with a cheap, everyman's automobile that would scoot from a standstill to 60 mph in under ten seconds and exceed 100 mph on the top end--thereby meeting a pair of impressive 1955 performance parameters. Cole, who was to father the Corvair and the Chevy II before rising to the presidency of General Motors, wrought a masterpiece in his little V8. Thanks to advanced casting techniques, which cut the over-all weight of the engine block and an exquisitely simple rocker-arm mechanism that permitted high rpms without damage, people instantly discovered that the compact, short-stroke unit could be hot-rodded to produce astronomical amounts of horsepower. Almost overnight, the engine was being bolted into racing cars and boats of all descriptions and America's awareness of performance increased to incredible levels. This so-called small-block Chevy would in later 283-cu.-in. and 327-cu.-in. forms become the most widely used and respected high-performance engine in the world and would compete successfully in practically every firm of motor racing. It would spawn a multimillion-dollar a ftermarket of speed accessories and, most important, would give Chevy an unassailable lead over its archrival Ford in the growing market for high-performance automobiles.

Chevrolet led the way in the boom year of 1955 that saw total U. S. automobile sales reach an all-time high of 7.920,186. It sold 1,722,745 cars, an increase of 350,000 over 1954. Significantly, 778,076 of that total were the sensational V8 models. This marked the moment when horsepower, performance, "hot cars"--call it what you like--became a serious factor in the American mentality. Suddenly, car buyers burst out of their rather pinched, conservative stance dating from the austerity and crisis mentality of the Depression and World War Two. The prosperity of the Eisenhower years was beginning to flower and a contagious sense of freedom and mobility seemed to center on automobiles, where fins, triple-tone pastel paint jobs, nut ball accessories and hot engines became big business. It may have been an outlet for the frustrations of the Cold War, the McCarthy Red baiting and the mounting paranoia about nuclear destruction, but the lust for speed and power in the family car of the Fifties probably related to the subtle pressures bearing down on Americans of that decade. Perhaps for the first time men were realizing that their ability to cope with events on an individual basis was slipping away; that committees of men in gray-flannel suits were increasingly governing their destinies, and they somehow viewed the potency of their automobile as a substitute for the loss of influence over their own lives. The message of hot cars was not lost on Semon "Bunky" Knudsen, the hard-driving son of former G.M. president W. S. "Bill" Knudsen. "Performance sells cars," Bunky was heard to say repeatedly as he embarked on ramrodding the lackluster, maiden-aunt Pontiac division out of the mire of sixth place in domestic-car sales in 1955. (Pontiac was so weak that only its foundry was turning a profit and G.M. was considering dropping the line entirely.) Within a few years. Knudsen had introduced a series of high-performance V8s installed in a racy collection of cars called Grand Prix, Bonneville, etc., all marketed with the same hokey, musde-flexing, squint-eyed, he-man advertising that had transformed Marlboro from a ladies' light-inhaler into the favorite cigarette of tattooed cowboys. This image change was so successful for Pontiac that its new "Wide-Track Cats" surged into third place in sales by 1961 and boosted Knudsen toward the top of General Motors' management.

By 1956, almost everybody in the auto business had recognized that "hot cars" did wonders for sales. The Big Three all supported the booming sport of stock-car racing and increasing effort was devoted to building and designing fast road machines. The Corvette, which had begun life with one of Chevy's traditional ironclad sixes under its hood, had by 1957 been transformed into a legitimate, two-place sports car. A four-speed Borg-War-ner T-10 transmission was made available, plus an optional Rochester fuel-injection system providing one horsepower for each of its 283 cubic inches (a significant achievement for a passenger car) and the "fuelie 'Vettes" of that era would whistle along at 140 mph in stock form. Ford hesitated slightly in 1956 and trimmed its performance campaign in behalf of a major crusade to sell America safety with seat belts, padded dashes, etc. That undertaking ended in failure and Ford turned with new resolve to boosting horsepower and top speed, leaving American Motors--at that time the fusty standard-bearer for the Grange Hall motorists of America--to grouse, via national advertisements: "Glamorizing raw horsepower and high speed to promote the sale of cars is not in the public interest, and Rambler will have no part of it."

In point of fact, a number of automobile executives were becoming alarmed about the horsepower race and finally, in 1957, they agreed to support an American Automobile Manufacturer's Association ban on the advertising and promotion of horsepower and speed. Nobody seriously observed the pact. By the Sixties, Chevrolet was selling a bored-out Turbo-Fire 409-cu.-in. engine that had been converted from an existing 348-cu.-in. power plant salvaged from its truck line. Those cumbersome, finned coupes and convertibles were fast enough to cause the Beach Boys--the true bards of the car freaks--to rhapsodize "She's real fine, my four-oh-nine."

At the same time, Ford was on the market with a potent 406-cu.-in. engine, Pontiac was dominating big-time stock-car races with its 421 "Super Duty" power plants and Dodge and Plymouth were on the scene with vibrating, ram-manifold 413s. America simply refused to slake its thirst for gutsy automobiles and everywhere, from wide city streets to the most remote rural roads, great, black smears of rubber began to scar the pavement surface in testimony to the cultish worship of acceleration. "Street racing"--impromptu drag duels on public thoroughfares--became the standard competitive venue for the monster machines and the still nights of the American summer began to rumble with the far-off thunder of straining, unmuffled engines and the angry yowl of spinning, frying rubber.

The car craze was out of control. In 1963, Ford announced it was canceling its adherence to the 1957 AMA ban and was going motor racing on a full scale--a multimillion-dollar effort that would bring the company victories at Indianapolis. Daytona, LeMans and at countless other major race tracks within the next five years. Chrysler plunged into stock-car and drag competition with a vengeance. General Motors refused to break the bonds of the AMA ban, although two of its divisions, Chevrolet and Pontiac, were racing with elaborate, sub-rosy engineering support for such established racing stars as Texan Jim Hall and his Chaparrals, California hot rodder Mickey Thompson and Florida stock-car wizard Smokey Yunick. The Ford re-entry into racing was made public prior to its winning a massive victory in the 1963 Daytona 500 stock-car race--the event where much of the Detroit competition activities had been taking place. Several months later, Frederic Donner and James Gordon, the president and chairman of General Motors, dropped the lid on all racing efforts within their corporation. They publicly reaffirmed their corporation's allegiance to the 1957 AMA performance ban and privately ordered the management at Chevrolet and Pontiac to dispose of their entire inventory of racing cars and equipment and to cancel all outside contracts--including those with pro racing drivers--within 90 days.

This left Pontiac in a nasty position. Knudsen, who had made the division a power in stock-car and drag competition, had gone on to the top post at Chevrolet, leaving his former chief engineer. E. M. "Pete" Estes, in charge. Sales had been surging, thanks to Pontiac's sensational performance image, but more pizzazz, not less, was needed in the face of the disaster surrounding its Tempest compact. Pontiac had participated in Detroit's brief flirtation with small cars in the early Sixties by introducing a revolutionary but underdeveloped small sedan named the Tempest. It employed, among other new components, a curved drive shaft and a transaxle (a transmission mounted at the rear of the car in company with the differential) coupled to a swing-axle suspension. While unique, these devices broke, splintered, cracked and ruptured with such regularity that the Tempest became a warranty nightmare for Pontiac. Steps had been taken to correct this in the 1964 model year by transforming the car into a solid, quite conventional intermediate that shared the same chassis with the new Chevelle and the Buick Skylark, but serious advertising and marketing efforts were necessary to cleanse the residual bad taste of the original machine. What's more, the so-called youth-market hype was operating at full force. Every huckster in the country had discovered kids and all of them were out trying to hawk their wares to this new body of miniconsumers. Kids were indeed the fastest growing segment of the population in the early Sixties and when someone calculated that 20 percent of all cars were owned by teenagers and that they spent 1.5 billion dollars a year on entertainment, Detroit was on the trail like a hungry wolf. Ford leaped in with the shamelessly cornball "Ford Caravan Folk Jazz Wing Ding" show tours of college campuses, teen fairs, rod-and-custom-show exhibits, and an advertising campaign featuring "The Lively Ones." Perhaps most important, Ford indicated that it would appear in 1964 with a small, smartly styled coupe, named the Mustang, aimed at the heart and soul of the Pepsi generation.

Pontiac was badly handicapped. Like most of the car builders, it had built its performance reputation around thinly disguised racing cars that ran at tracks. Potent street machines accounted for a small percentage of actual sales simply because Pontiac buyers were still seeking image rather than outright speed. But with all track competition now canceled, Pontiac was forced to seek new avenues to exploit the growing youth market and to maintain its racy reputation. Chevrolet had the Corvette and the Corvair Monza, but Pontiac had only its big, expensive Grand Prix, Catalina and Bonneville models--hardly the ideal vehicles to attract teenagers. The men who broached this problem were Estes and his chief engineer, an ambitious, darkly handsome Detroit native named John Z. DeLorean (whose later exploits as the long-haired, modishly dressed general manager of Chevrolet made him the industry's most controversial and visible executive), plus Jim Wangers, a bright, rather pudgy performance expert who had won national drag-racing championships driving Pontiacs in 1960, 1962 and 1963 while working for the division's advertising agency, MacManus, John & Adams. It was during a meeting in early 1963, described by Wangers, who now represents a magazine-publishing company in Detroit, as a "what if?" session, that the magic answer appeared. What if, suggested a young assistant engineer named Bill Collins, the company took the muscular 389 V8 used in its full-sized models and dropped it into the new, intermediate Tempest? Pontiac would then have a ballsy, tough, low-priced performance car for the youth market that might blur the memories of the tarnished Tempest. It was immediately agreed that the car had enormous potential, although Estes had reservations about getting such a hairy model approved by the G.M. moguls.

Work proceeded on the creation through the summer of 1963. Wangers and DeLorean searched for a name that would produce the kind of competition-oriented aura they wanted and finally chose GTO--a direct rip-off from a lightweight, V12 Ferrari grand-touring coupe being produced in minuscule quantities in Italy. It stood for Grand Turismo Omologato (roughly translated as a car "homologated" or registered for international grand-touring competition). The sports-car purists moaned about the Pontiac theft of the Ferrari name and not one Pontiac dealer in a hundred understood what it meant, but it embodied the identity Wangers sought in a name plate and he proceeded with a full-blown ad campaign.

Two GTO versions were planned as options for the Tempest LeMans coupe: a 325-hp, single four-barrel-carburetor base model to be introduced first and a balls-to-the-wall 348-hp hardtop with three two-barrel carbs (Tri-Power) to be announced in mid-1964. Both types were in clear violation of the Donner/Gordon antiracing and performance edict and Estes pluckily set out to bypass the corporate hierarchy to get the GTO on the market. He took the car into the field and announced it to his dealers before submitting it to the G.M. brass for final approval. Even Frank Bridge, the tough, conservative sales manager of Pontiac, was against the car and Wangers recalls an angry session where fisticuffs nearly broke out between Bridge and DeLorean in an argument over the wisdom of trying to market such a radical machine.

Born amid internal G.M. acrimony and intrigue, the GTO arrived on the market in 1964 inspectacular fashion. The skeptical Bridge could be dragooned into accepting only 5000 models of the car for production, while G.M. management sulkily permitted the car to reach the showrooms simply because the dealer response had been so positive about its sales potential. The salesmen recognized that the regular Tempest was another variation on the basic G.M. body structure that formed the Buick Skylark, Chevrolet Chevelle and Oldsmobile Cutlass. All were crisply styled, rather long-tailed, plain-Jane intermediates that would appeal to essentially the same segment of the public. But the Pontiac dealers instantly saw the GTO, with its simple, functional grille treatment, its wider tires, lower stance and sporty accessories, as an opportunity to penetrate a new portion of the market--a portion that was unreachable to their competition. At that point, few of them had driven the machine and therefore had no inkling of the GTO's greatest appeal, its stupendous acceleration. It was a runnin' son of a bitch. The basic 325-hp version was spectacular, but the Tri-Power, 348-hp hardtop that reached the public in the winter of 1964 was beyond the wildest fantasies of the most avid horsepower freak. Possessed of incredible low-end torque, the GTO had initial acceleration that would blow the doors off anything on the road, including the vaunted 327 fuel-injected Corvette. The car was built for short-haul blasts of power. While any number of cars would outrun it in flat-out speed, its 0-60 time of approximately six seconds was astounding for a machine that could be purchased for under $3000.

The visceral excitement of driving a Tri-Power GTO (or Goat, as it was almost instantly nicknamed, much to the distress of Pontiac and its ad agency) was unparalleled for the time. The sounds--the harsh rumble of the exhaust, the howling of the U. S. Royal Tiger Paw Red-line tires on the pavement and the unearthly sucking noise of the air being gulped through the carburetors, coupled with the raw sensation of being bashed into the seat back by the forward thrust of the car--were enough to make every kid in America think he was the fastest, toughest driver in the world. The car was pure macho, filled to the brim with hokey gadgets like bucket seats, tachometer, hood scoops, wood-rimmed steering wheel, etc., to enhance the Mittyesque urgings of the grocery boys behind the wheel. It was not a particularly sophisticated machine; it would not corner or brake with much alacrity. The GTO would do one thing--accelerate to 60-70 mph in blistering fashion--and that was all that was necessary. "Let's face it," said one industry observer of the day, "buying a GTO is like getting two inches added to your cock."

Estes and company touched a nerve with their car--the first unabashed, Main Street Hero Car in history. Despite chronic clutch and rear-end failures (which Pontiac bravely backed with full warranty), 31,000 GTOs were sold and it is estimated that number could have been doubled if production capability had been available. Heady with success, the GTO creators added further styling sex and 12 hp to the car in 1965, while making it a full model line rather than a spin-off of the Tempest. It could be purchased as a coupe, hardtop or convertible and sales were so brisk that Wangers could see a chance for total domination of the kid market. So could others. Chevrolet leaped in with its SS 396 Chevelle and Oldsmobile arrived with the 4-4-2. Ford tried for a piece of the street-racer action with a gussied-up Fair-lane GT, a Comet Cyclone, plus the hairy, limited-production Shelby GT 350, a modified Mustang coupe that was so elemental one journalist commented that driving it reminded him of handling a "brand-new, clapped-out racing car." But Pontiac was far in the lead with the GTO. Not only was it the first on the market but it provided the biggest bang for the buck and, thanks to Wangers, it was the best promoted. He tried to engage the Beach Boys to do a song about the car and when he found that their price was too high, he got an obscure Florida group called Ronnie and the Daytonas to record, on the equally obscure Amy-Mala-Bell label, GTO, whose immortal lyrics rhapsodized:

Little GTO

You're really looking fine

Three deuces and a four-speed

And a 389

Listen to her teching up now

Listen to her whine

Come and turn it on, wind it up,blow it out, GTO.

Wangers and his agency people then set about marketing the tune, which soared on the Top 40 charts. (A group named Jan and Dean also recorded a similar effort called Lil' GTO.) It was later estimated that these songs were played over 7,000.000 times on commercial radio, the promotional benefits of which are inestimable, except that the 1965 model sold 68.000 units. This was accomplished without any attempt by Pontiac to compete in organized racing competition.

The GTO was a pure, unabashed street racer and while Ford and Chrysler were winning all the drag and stock-car races in sight, Pontiac was selling all the so-called performance cars.

In 1966, Chrysler introduced the 426-cu.-in. Street Hemi, a detuned version of its famous racing engine that belted out 425 hp and remains the high-water mark in sheer neck-snapping overkill among American production cars. The Hemis, packaged in middleweight Dodge Coronets and Chargers and Plymouth Belvederes, would easily outaccelerate the GTO while running an honest 150-mph top speed. They were monster cars, bulging with more power than even the zaniest road drivers dared use for more than a few seconds at a time, and in the end they had little effect on the over-all market. While the Hemis were sold in small quantities until 1971, their crankiness, which caused them to foul plugs and misbehave in city traffic, plus their substantial cost, limited their appeal. They were, in fact, placed on the open market to meet minimum production requirements set down by NASCAR to qualify them for racing competition and Chrysler never intended them to displace the GTO as the favorite of the acne set. But they stand as a bench mark in outright power that may never be surpassed by an American passenger automobile.

Sales for the GTO leaped to 83,000 units in 1966 and Wangers was furiously cranking out promotion gimmicks that ranged from Thom McAn GTO shoes to cereal premiums. At that point, everybody in Detroit, including American Motors, was in the muscle-car market with overbored, hotted-up cars decked out in hood scoops, wacky racing stripes, decals, fancy wheels and enough styling hokum to embarrass even the most ostentatious car nut. But Pontiac, thanks to Wangers and DeLorean, who was now the division's general manager, had an uncanny sense of young America's relationship with cars and was exploiting that understanding to its fullest. Wangers was driving hard at the Tiger image (that having found its genesis in the original Tiger Paw tires in 1964) in advertising, giveaways, magazine stories and another song, Gee-To Tiger, sung by a California group formed by the agency called, you guessed it, The Tigers.

"Let's face it," recalled Wangers recently, "there is no real excuse for a medium-priced G.M. car like the Pontiac, Olds or Buick. A buyer can find any conceivable kind of car he needs in either a Chevrolet or a Cadillac showroom. The Pontiac must be built on a strong image to obscure the fact that it is not what it really is: either a fancy Chevrolet or a low-line Caddy. We used the GTO image of youth to infuse the entire Pontiac line with a feeling of excitement. In that sense, the GTO was the key to the total Pontiac marketing scheme for half a decade."

The first inklings of change came in 1967. Ed Cole, by then a G.M. corporate power, recognized that rising Government and consumerist pressure would not tolerate the use of such blatant horsepower adjuncts as triple carburetors and ordered them removed from the GTO (and from the Olds 4-4-2, which also offered them as an option). In an attempt to compensate for their loss, the GTO's engine was increased to 400 cubic inches and a large Quadra-Jet four-barrel carburetor was substituted. A production problem caused the initial batch of the new 400 engines to reach the public with flawed valve guides and Pontiac experienced 2000 total engine failures in the first 90 days of the model year. To make matters worse, the four-barrel version lacked the brutal low-speed torque of the old 389 Tri-Power and the news passed quickly among the young customers. Sales of the GTO, which was still being built on a restyled variation of the 1964 body, slipped to 60,000 units.

DeLorean and company bounced back in 1968 with a brand-new GTO, completely redesigned with an all-plastic Enduro nose and a graceful, rakish shape. But the old blood-and-guts machine was gone forever. Many of the record 103,000 GTOs sold that year went out the door with such fripperies as automatic transmission and air conditioning. The supercar had gone middle American, removing itself from the hard-core audience that had generated its original appeal. At this point, the so-called Pony cars or sporty cars such as Camaro and Pontiac's own Firebird were on the scene and attracting widespread attention from the youth market; but it was Plymouth that elbowed into the low-price niche vacated by the GTO. In 1968, the Road Runner honked onto the scene, complete with a horn that duplicated the "beep-beep" call of its Warner Bros, cartoon namesake. The car was a variation of the low-line, stripped Belvedere business coupe that had been suggested by an automotive journalist to then-Plymouth vice-president and general manager Bob Anderson, a close friend of DeLorean's. The journalist had argued that the present line-up of performance cars was too elaborate and expensive for the young buyer to afford. He had suggested a bare-bones street racer, with ultracheap taxicab seats, no chrome trim and a minimum of accessories. It would offer high performance at a bargain price in the neighborhood of $2500. Anderson, who is now president of Rockwell International, immediately sensed the potential of such a bizarre automobile. Moving decisively, he rushed the Road Runner, complete with a husky 383-cu.-in. engine, into the showrooms in a matter of months, although many of his management teammates thought the car would be a dud. A mere 9500 were planned for 1968. Before the year was out, 45,000 Road Runners had been sold. Ironically, success was its downfall. As demand increased, the car was gussied up, first with more comfortable seats, then with a burgeoning list of trim and accessory options. After a couple of model cycles, the simple, stark machine that had caused such a flurry had been puffed and padded into just another overdecorated, overpriced, overpowered car from the Detroit gadgetland.

Wangers realized that the muscle car, as embodied in the Road Runner, was beginning to parody itself and produced a spin-off of the 1969 GTO (perhaps the most sophisticated, best-performing version of them all) called The Judge. This was an unabashed spoof of the entire concept and carried all kinds of silly props, including giant art-nouveau decals and a useless trunk spoiler. Despite his efforts (done without further references to the Tiger after the G.M. management had ordered a cancellation of that sort of feline imagery the previous year), 1969 GTO sales slumped to 65,000, then collapsed to 38,000 in 1970.

By then, substantial social forces had been marshaled to repel what had become a bizarre brand of overkill in automotive marketing. Chrysler's Six-Packs and Super Birds, Buick's Gran Sport, Ford's Cobra Jets, American Motors' Machineys, etc., of that era were grotesque in the extreme and the few decent performance cars that were available, including the superb Camaro Z-28 and the Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am, weren't selling for a variety of reasons. The insurance for such a car could cost a young single man over $1000 a year, and the increasingly complicated antipollution plumbing was removing much of the power and response from the engines, no matter how large their displacement. Moreover, the new generation of drivers was evidencing a concern for the environment and a fresh spirit of antimaterialism that ran counter to the excesses of speed and potency that the muscle cars represented. To many of them, a ten-speed racing bike was a more valid symbol of status than a smoking, 400-hp hot rod.

DeLorean and Wangers and the others who pushed the macho-car concept to its ultimate are gone from Pontiac, having been replaced with more detached, less flamboyant men. Their 1973 GTO model came full circle and was offered as a performance option for the Tempest LeMans--by now a much tamer pussycat than the old 1964 coupe. They will try again this year with a resurrection of the GTO in the form of a hot variation of the Ventura, itself a Pontiac offspring of the aging Chevrolet Nova that has been around since 1968. Few people think it will work. The time of the macho cars is gone. Those heady days when the young studs of America speed-shifted their way to manhood packed inside two tons of bucking steel are as passé as the cuckoo rock-around-the-clock drag-strip honeymoon that spawned them. In a way, it's too bad. Grocery boys will never find that extra two inches more easily.