Misguided devotion killed the whole concept.
I remember the first thing I did when I purchased my first muscle car. It was a 1968 Pontiac GTO convertible with a 400 cid, 4-speed Hurst and not much else. It had been repainted in ’69 Carousel Red — the same color you see on most ’69 Judge models. The day I took hold of the title, that poor car was headed for the slaughterhouse. Poor thing.
This is a '69 convertible Judge, but you get the idea. Right?
It was in 1974, and we’d just come off a major gas shortage for the first time since WWII. Some of us young people claimed that oil tankers were sitting off the coast of the US, just waiting for the price of gasoline to go up another ten-cents, so they could earn millions more on their deliveries. True or not — we all had to curb our driving for several months and purchase smaller quanities of gas on odd or even days….depending on your IQ.
When I bought this Goat, the seller owned a body shop in Salem, MA. He didn’t do much collision work, but rather spent his days fixing wrecked muscle cars, painting them-up and selling them for profit. I remember he had several mid-60s Vettes in his yard; I wasn’t interested, I wanted a GTO. It may have had a bent frame, but I didn’t care, nor did I ask — as long as it was a GTO.
But this guy recognized the value of a GTO with better gas mileage, so he bastardized the car with a two-barrel carb and a set of highway gears that were absolutely maddening at best. He advertised it as a gas-saving muscle car and I took it — hook, line and sinker. All for 800 bucks, by the way.
The first thing I did was purchase a set of rear air shocks. I ran the long plastic lines to the rear bumper where I placed the valve stem, making it easier to raise or lower the rake of the GTO. (But who would ever lower a muscle car in 1974???)
Soon, I was cruising town in a jacked-up ’68 GTO — with a set of polyglas, 75-series whitewalls and PMD hubcaps.
Yikes. Did I really do that?
Within a few weeks, I had saved enough to buy a used set of deep-dish Cragar SS chromed wheels and a set of G60-14 tires with raised white letters – just for the rear, of course. (Ouch again. While this was better than the whitewalls, I still had the steel wheels with PMD hubcaps on the front!)
I forget how long I drove the car that way, but I remember that those front wheels and caps finally gave-way to a set of Rally IIs and two 70-series raised white tires. (Thank God.)
Driving in a jacked-up GTO was not exactly an experiment in Euro-style touring. The front seats were so angled that you’d have to brace your feet against the firewall at hard stops. (Who ever heard of seat belts back then? We used to hide them under our seats!) I cringe when I think of the weight transfer to the front suspension now. No wonder it handled like a tobogan.
All of this did nothing to enhance the performance of this poor, poor GTO. Until I found a set of 4:11 gears. Suddenly, and despite the 2bbl. carb, I had one of the faster muscle cars in town. But those gears weren’t for a kid who enjoyed cruising with his girlfriend on a Saturday night, they were for trucks or weekend warriors at New England Dragway. But I didn’t care….my car was fast and looked fast too.
The police seemed to notice this as well.
If not for the fact that my teenage flame was a police captain’s daughter, I would have lost my license within the first year.
During my first few weeks with the new set-up, I beat some cars that had always beaten me in the past. Word got around – I became respected by my peers. That may have been a total of a dozen kids or so. But the problems outweighed my perceived success. I was getting about 8 MPG, my air hoses kept melting on my exhaust pipes and as such would lower the rear fenders onto my fat rear tires, causing massive amounts of tire smoke and grooves in the tread. Then one day, the two Cragar rims decided to walk home on Rt. 128 — wrong lug nuts. The lug bolts had all sheared off.
But there was so much more to do to the car to make it “right.”
One guy in town had installed a wiper fluid pump in his trunk. At the flip of a switch, he’d pump Clorox onto his tires at a stoplight and smoke his Z28 outa there like nobody’s business. Gee, I needed that too.
Then there was the coveted 4-barrell Holley and Edelbrock intake manifold. I just needed to burn even more gas!
Then I wanted to cut out my blocked scoops, purchase Ram Air intake parts and give the car that 5HP of additional boost from the cooler air.
Luckily, I never accomplished any of the above. I seems the gas expense was guzzling most of my weekly paycheck.
But the funny thing is, it was all fun. I’m glad nobody ever got hurt, because our cars were often pretty unsafe, but it sure was a ton of fun. I’ll never forget cruising in that car…my girl by my side and The Beach Boys or Aerosmith cranking out of 5″ K-Mart speakers.
Later that same year, I went to a Pontiac dealer and ordered a 1975 Trans Am. In those days, Trans Ams were special order only and not stacked on the dealer lots. Mine was ordered on Halloween night 1974 and arrived a few days before the end of 1974.
The Trans Am didn’t have the raw power of my old ’68 GTO, but man did that car hug the road! I had more fun in that T/A than any other car I’ve ever owned.
Euro-style handling is a lot more fun when you’re a cruisin’ idiot like me.
See you next week!
This week’s Mac’s Wax of the Week is my Wicked Cherry Wet Wax, available at Macs-wax.com. It smells like cherry…it’s pink…and it’s wet. Nice, huh? But seriously, my Cherry Wet Wax has pure carnauba wax and some polymers we call WetGloss. The stuff is incredible and inexpensive too!
At the time, the head mechanic in charge of those incredible Bobcat GTOs was Milt Schornack, a guy who still builds these legends up in Macomb, MI. It doesn’t matter that he’s in his 70s; Schornack is a racer and racers never die…they just retire to an old barn and wait to be resto’d.
Only our faces were redder than those GTOs that night…
