1981 Pontiac Firebird 4.3 LITER V-8 - You Had to Be There

I'd love to talk to the planning team that baked up this 1981 Pontiac Firebird - I believe it's a base model seeing there's no badging on it denoting it's an Esprit or Formula and because it has, best I can tell, little luxury accoutrement.

It also has Pontiac's off-the-shelf steering wheel of the era you would have found on everything from a Bonneville to a Grand Prix to a god damn front-wheel-drive Phoenix. This is a bone-stripper; at least it has a console, buckets and a floor shiter but then again these only came that way. 

It may not be the actual product planners themselves whom I like to have a discussion with but rather the wonks who came up with not so much the "4.3 LITER" engine in our '81 here but the idea behind it in the first place. 

I had heard these things were in 1980 and 1981 Firebird's but until I actually saw this one here in a Firebird I didn't think Pontiac did this. This, friends, is in fact one rare bird. Mind you, rare does not always mean "good". 

You don't see these engines everyday. Actually, you didn't see many of these back in the day either in anything. Pontiac's 4.3-liter V-8 engine, which displaced some 265 cubic-inches, was part of a gaggle of small bore and or stroke stroke "economy" V-8 engines that General Motors myriad divisions put out in the darkest days of the "Malaise Era" of automobile-dom.

Lest we forget, as part of each of GM's division's brand essence back in the day, each division was repsonsible for making their own engines. Models shared a considerable amount of other parts like transmissions, drive shafts, body shells, stampings, rear ends and what not but engines were unqiue commodities. 

A Chevrolet 350, for instance, as different from a Oldsmobile 350 as a Pontiac engine was different from a Ford engine. Seeing that GM Powertrain builds all engines for GM wares these days this practice seems as foreign as a typewriter or VCR but that's the way GM did things back then. 

None of these tiny engines from the Chevrolet 262 to their 267, yes, Chevrolet had two "micro engines" back then, the Olds 260 and our Pontiac 4.3\265 here made any real power. One-hundred twenty brake horsepower at most and maybe two-hundred ten foot-pounds of torque. Certainly not enough "go" to offset the weight of a V-8 and also approximately the same amount of poke Buick's smaller and lighter 3.8-liter V-6 made back then. Chevrolet built a similarly sized V-6 engine to the Buick for a spell back then as well that put out all but the same power. 

Cadillac didn't build a small V-8 until 1982 but that's a whole other story and a blog for a different day. 

Seeing that Buick's spilt-pin crankshaft had smoothened out most of the vibrations their 90 degree V-6 had, and that was available as the base engine on 1980 and 1981 Firebird's, driving a V-6 Firebird back to to back with a Firebird with the 4.3 V-8, you have to wonder why someone would opt for this engine in a Firebird rather than the V-6. Personally, if I had to have a V-8, I'd have taken the kick in the wallet the 301 V-8 would have been. And it probably wouldn't have been that much worse than the mileage this engine gave the owner. 

Then again, I have to adjust my perspective - back then, even if a V-8 offered less performance than an available V-6, "V-8" still really meant something. And if you don't "get that", well...you simply had to be there.