"Cream-gold and buckskin" is not my favorite color combination but I can make an exception when it comes to a personal luxury car from the mid 1970's. Especially a Pontiac Grand Prix at the height of its leisure suit powers. This 1976 GP here is all but rental grade with no bucket seats or console shifter and just the Pontiac "350 2-barrel" stuffed under it's gigantic hood but with just sixty-six thousand some odd miles on her, not a spec of rust and priced reasonably at $6995 it's worthy of a tire kick or ten.
Personal luxury cars were the aspirational, luxury cross-over of the 1970's. High on style and rife with the pretense of sportiness if not a modicum of driving finesse, these were the types of cars that wannabee junior executives, the fashion conscious and anyone wanting to stick out from the crowd drove. Personally, I could care less about the statement they made; I just love 'em.
The Pontiac Grand Prix didn't start out as a "personal luxury car". First debuting in 1962, it was a "sporty"
full-size car intended to liven up a Pontiac lineup that was construed as being old and stodgy.
Using the same shortened GM "B-body" wheelbase the Ventura used, which it replaced, '62-'64 Grand Prix' were available available only as a two-door hard top, featured a squared off formal roof line, bucket seats, a console mounted transmission shifter and could be ordered with a brace of "389" Pontiac V-8's making between three hundred and three and three hundred forty eight horsepower. The crux of the image of the Grand Prix was performance which was usurped by the mid-size GTO come 1964.
Along with all the other GM full size makes and models, Grand Prix was totally redesigned for 1965. Still riding on a proprietary, shortened GM chassis, from 1965 to 1968 Grand Prix shared much of the same "coke bottle" styling other full size Pontiac's did save for a more squared off roof line. It was available exclusively as a two-door. Grand Prix was now marketed first and foremost as a luxury car and any leftover performance swagger was indirectly implied.
In an attempt to revitalize a nameplate that had become just another Pontiac model, for 1969, Grand Prix was "downsized" becoming a mid-size "sport-luxury" model built on the longer wheelbase, four-door and wagon version of GM's new for 1968 intermediate chassis. While somewhat smaller than prior models, the '69 Grand Prix was nearly four inches longer than other Pontiac intermediates like the LeMans, Tempest and GTO with its additional length all in front of the firewall with a "heroically" long hood.
Allegedly, GM designers used cues from grand touring cars from the 1930's as inspiration for the '69 GP's exaggerated, overt styling; Chevrolet doing the same with their 1970-1977 Monte Carlo. All these years later, much like the Lincoln Continental Mark III-VIII's "trunk hump", the inspiration for those styling vestiges is all but lost to the ages. Pictured above is a 1971 GP; love these old painted brochures that went the way of the tailfin in the early 1970's.
Our triple-cream '76 here is part of the Grand Prix "Colonnade" class of 1973; colonnade referring to the use of an additional column behind the doors rather than the hard top design of previous models.
1976 Grand Prix' were the last of the '73's to be revised before the great downsizing epoch whacked the fun out of GM midsize models, including all their personal luxury cars, come 1978. For '76, side by side rectangular headlights, replacing singular round ones, flanked a new "waterfall" grill. Whereas on the Chevrolet Monte Carlo some distinctiveness was, arguably, lost going to rectangular headlights, on the Grand Prix the new front end was, subjectively, a delightful updating of the 1973 GP's somewhat dated looking, "neo-classical" front end.
I know I'm not alone in my sentiments about these cars. While the 1969-1972 GP's are worth more than these '73-'77's these days, the downsized models that came after 1977, while honestly better transportation conveyances, are worth significantly less. No sooner had I decided to break from quarantine and venture out for a socially distant test drive I found that someone gobbled this up already. Triple cream, whitewalls and all.
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