1964 Pontiac Tempest GTO - Blurred Lines

I like to tell my staff to find a long established parade, jump in front of it and claim it as our own. Sure, at first folks bristle at the notion but if we do it repeatedly, over time, that parade becomes our own. Especially if we improve upon what it was. Such was the case of Pontiac and their 1964 Tempest GTO. 

The notion of a big engine in a small car was certainly nothing new come the fall of 1963 when Pontiac introducted the Tempest GTO. Frankly, neither was the muscle car. 

Years prior moonshiners had either modified existing engines or stuffed larger, more powerful ones into their "Rum-Runners" so they could out-run the police. 

They even raced their cars when they weren't "working". After Prohibition ended, "hot-rodders" continued to modify their cars and by the the late 1940's and into the '50's, the market for "go-fast" parts had become a cottage industry.  

Somewhere along the line, Detroit got wind of the speed-craze even if the major manufacturers were, officially at least, vehemently opposed to supporting racing. 

Now, we can debate all day as to what the first "muscle-car" from an automobile manufacturer actually was. 

 

Whether it was the 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88, 1955 Chrysler C-300, 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk or even the 1957 Rambler Rebel, what we do know for certain is it was General Motors' Pontiac division that first used the phrase "musicle-car" when they introduced their intermediate size Tempest "GTO" for model year 1964; regardless of whether or not it was the first. After all, what's in a name?

 

Revisionist history being nothing new, the combination of the GTO's fiendish good looks, performance moxy and the "muscle" of General Motors marketing department blurred the lines such that the 1964 Pontiac GTO is generally regarded as the one that started the oh-so-short muscle-car craze. 

Talk about jumping in front of a parade and making it your own. 

1965 Pontiac GTO - For Better or Worse

I can't believe I've been doing this blog for as long as I have and I've never blogged about an early (1964-1967) Pontiac GTO. Well, today I right that wrong and kick the historically incorrect wheels and tires on this '65. 

GTO's might as well be unicorns. Even at car shows "real" GTO's, or Tempest\Lemans' that haven't been "cloned" into a GTO, are few and far between. When you get a "numbers matching" example like this in your midst you're seeing something unique and special. The VIN rings true so this here is, for better or worse, the real deal.  

Although this '65 wears "Monterey Red" and not its factory tan and the clunky Saginaw three-speed has been swapped for an era-correct Muncie M-21 four-speed, it's as close to an "original and un-restored" GTO of this era that I've seen in a while. Both the paint color and M-21 where GTO options in 1965 so they're at least "historically" correct. 

I don't take issue with the historically incorrect after-market HEI ignition although many purists do; I'm all about anything that improves a vehicle's drivability. I thought at first the Pontiac "Ralley II's" odd, they were not available on GTO's until 1967, but I think these work quite nicely. Such things don't always - for example, any Chevy Nova wearing Chevrolet Rally rims. Don't. Do. It. 

Contemporary reviews of early "Goats" are quite mixed. You have to read between the lines to get the gist of what the reviewers, whose scribe might be across the page from an ad for the vehicle they're eviscerating, are getting at. They applauded the straight line performance and clean styling but tactfully slammed the overall lack of refinement. Dead-heavy and slow steering, unboosted single pot drum brakes, squishy suspension and a long throw-shifter makgin for a humdinger of a Sunday drive. 

Spotters note, while the '64's were rather boxy and quite similar looking to the '63 "rope-drive" Tempest, "planned obsolescence" rearing it's venemous hand, GM updated all their "A-body" intermediates for '65. On the GTO the dual hood scoops on the '64 were replaced by a single scoop in the middle of the hood, headlights are stacked and the tail lights are raked outward.  That rakish-ness stretching the overall length out to a portly 206.5 inches; we'd consider this a full-size car today. The '65's also subtley fortelling of the coke-bottle styling yet to come. 

All said and done, I'm drawn to these cars even if I'm as terrified by their purity of purpose if not crudeness as I am enthralled by it. Can you imagine driving something like this every day? 

 

1982 Porsche 944 - Loud and Clear

 

I found this rather worn but still apparently used as a daily driver Porsche 944 the other day in the parking lot of the giant Walmart near our triple-wide on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio. And it took me back. Way back. 

The whole notion of a car with an engine mounted behind the driver is, no pun intended, instinctively foreign to me. When I was a kid I believed in the grain-fed, all-American notion that a car should have its V-8 engine and its transmission mounted in front of the driver and passengers with torque transfered by a shaft to the axle mounted out back. Therefore, no matter how much I'd read about the packaging and handling of anything different, Porsche's were odd-ducks driven by wealthy people who just wanted to show off they could afford expensive things regardless of how good (or not) something was. I did, ironically enough, find Volkswagen Beetles charming but that was probably due to familiarity; there were plenty of Beetles where I grew up and I don't recall any Porsche's.  

But then the Porsche 944 came along and as oddly shaped as I found it, and despite it powered by a god-damn four-cylinder engine, when I realized it was a front-engine, rear-driver, it got my attention. Keep in mind that I was completely unaware at the time that the Porsche 928 even existed. 

Porsche built these things from 1982 through 1991 and they were meant to replace the much unloved 924 model they'd been shilling since 1976. The 924 was actually built by Audi and was the first "Porsche" to be powered by a "water-cooled" engine that was mounted in front of the driver. Torque was transferred to a rear mounted "trans-axle" via a drive-shaft or "torque-tube". The 924 replaced the 914 as an "entry-level" Porsche. Ha. As if there really ever was such a thing, right? The 914, incidentally, was a rear-engine, air-cooled car just like the 911. 

The 944 was built off the same platform as the 924 but it had a larger (still four-cylinder) engine, improved suspension, improved interior "ergonomics" and subtle styling changes to distinquish it from the 924. And the pundits loved it. In a 1984 comparison test amongst import sporting cars, they ranked the best handling car in America besting the Porsche 928 in the same test. So, Porsche built a car that could out-handle their 928, cost thousands less and, according to Car and Driver, could be driven "every-day"? 

Looks like whomever owns this one here got that message loud and clear. 

1982 Chevrolet Monte Carlo - The End is Near

These were never quite the apple of my eye although I wouldn't kick an '84-'87 (non-Aero coupe) Monte Carlo SS out of my garage. Still, you don't see these every day even at car shows so let's take a minute or to kick it's fourteen-inch wheels , dry-rotted tires and dorky AF wheel covers. 

Us "spotters" have a hard time with these because Chevrolet did little year-over-year to distinguish one model year from another. I tried to check the VIN but it's sun blasted away but based on what I know about these cars and no CHMSL this is for certain a 1981-1985.

 

I could call the number painted on the windshield to find out for sure but what's the point of that? If I was a betting girl I'd say it's an '82. 

From the looks of it you would never know there's just 79,000 miles on it's thirty-nine year old ticker; this is one tired looking automobile. I should have taken pictures of the front tires; they show signs of a front end seriously out of  alignment. The seats appear ok but the dash, carpet and headliner are shot to pieces and the exterior speaks for itself. 

I didn't see any rust on the body so it does have that going for it but I didn't peak underneath. "Pennsylvania cars" tend to be much cleaner than Ohio cars so they go for a bit of a premium over here but holy smokes, $6,000? That asking price has more to do with the current over-inflated used car market than about the car itself. 

Seriously, do people actually drop this kind of money on "non-classic" old cars in this kind of condition? NADA guidelines peg '82 Monte Carlo's low retail at $2,100, $4,375 for average retail and $6,975 for "high retail." Have they not updated their values in these odd, sort-of post-pandemic days? 

For $6,000 I'd want this car to have at least a mirror like finish and run better than the day it first left the factory.  If beaters like this have asking prices this high the end is truly near. This is a $1,500 car in my humblest of opinions.

Maybe it's a sleeper and there's a 383 or an LS1 lurking under it's patina-rich bonnet. Highly doubtful but for six-grand there should be something more interesting than, at best, the optional "Chevy 305". 

This could quickly become a money-pit and it's too damn expensive to buy as just an "old-car". Redoing the interior, good luck finding what you need, and a decent paint job will run you $4,000. 

Throw in whatever power train work it needs or you'd want to do and you're pushing ten-grand on top of the very high asking price. This thing worth the dark side of $20,000? 

High retail on a 1986 Monte Carlo SS is $9,750; that tells me everything about this car I need to know. 

General Motors got way fewer high-fives for their 1978 circa downsized intermediates than they got for their 1977 full-size models. More like up-sized compacts than intermediates, the worst-of-the-worst of them, in my humble-est of opinions, was the 7/8 scale, 1973-1977 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. 

Chevrolet did a pretty good job of cleaning it up for 1981 but whether it was that GM's class-of-'78 "personal luxury cars" were off-putting or not, by the early '80's, "influencers" and taste-makers began to make transportation-fashion statements elsewhere. 

The bloom was off the rose on personal luxury cars; or in this case the hood ornament. Chevrolet built these cars through 1987. 

Still, took the better part of thirty-years to finally deep-six these things if we bookmark the end of the personal-luxury-car era as the day Chevrolet pulled the plug on the Monte Carlo after model-year 2007. 

1979 Pontiac Grand Prix - Broke My Heart

There aren't any Pontiac Grand Prix models between 1969 and 1977 that I wouldn't want in my "Jay Leno Fantasy Garage". Sure, I prefer the lines of the pre-Colonnade 1969-1972 GP's but I have plenty-of-love for the over-sized 1973-1977's. I'm ambivalent about the first Grand Prix', those "full-sized sports cars" of  1962-1968. Not that I don't like them but the Grand Prix' of 1969-1977 are what I remember seeing in abundance when I was a kid and I loved them. Then the fall of 1977 came and my heart was broken by Pontiac's new-for-'78 Grand Prix. Our subject here is a 1979 but it's all but indistinguishable from a '78. 

I row against the flow since GM's "smaller" 1977 "B and C (and D)" bodies have a multitude of fans; I'm generally ambivalent towards them although given a choice between, for instance, taking a 1976 Pontiac Catalina on a road-trip and a 1977, the '77's the much better choice. However, in the grand scheme of things, give me the barge-like '76'er simply because I think it's a better looking car. So, if I wasn't doing jumping-jacks over the downsizing GM did to their big cars in '77, imagine my horror when GM shrunk their intermediates. The Pontiac Grand Prix might not be be bad as as the Chevrolet Monte Carlo but it's right there with it in terms of inducing a "what the hell is that?" gut reaction.  

 

The only thing vaguely similar between the 1978 Grand Prix and the model it replaced is it's front end and even that pales in comparison to what it supposedly emulates. 

It's not the downsizing, per se, that I find so off-putting and it's not that I like "big-cars" for the sake of liking them either. Doesn't matter to me if the car is a block long or has three-wheels; I like what I like it. Size-wize, while the Grand Prix was shorter overall by more than eleven inches, had an eight-inch shorter wheelbase and was eight-hundred pounds lighter, at two-hundred and one inches stem-to-stern, they were dimension-ally in line with General Motors seminal 1955 B-bodies. In fact, the 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix is approximately five-inches longer than a '55 Chevrolet and all of two-inches less long than a '55 Pontiac. 

Now, the '55 B-bodes did ride on a one-hundred and twenty-one inch long wheelbase and that went a long way towards helping designers create the "illusion" that their wares were larger than they actually were. That long wheelbase also helped give the '55's their remarkably airy interiors and tidy front and rear overhangs. The interiors of these "up-sized" compacts were not "cozy", they were cramped. 

It's the stubby-ness of these cars, due in large part to the short wheel base and absurdly long overhangs,  along with their questionable aesthetics that are the deal killers for me. Again, it's not that they're smaller that makes them off-putting; they're just simply ugly. 

If these cars had anything going for them it's their favorable power-to-weight ratios. Our '79 here stuffed with Pontiac's 301 cubic-inch V-8 and a four-barrel carburetor. It's "turbo 200" (transmission) and lazy rear axle won't help you win any drag races but at least compared to a '77 Grand Prix with the same engine, you'll have an easier time with highway on ramps and passing eighteen-wheelers when need be. Bonus, you'll get fourteen-miles per gallon compared to nine to ten. 

In a vacuum, I wonder what people think of this car. Ambivalence meeting necessity the essence of marketing, that might be the reason why the poster of the ad for this car on Facebook Marketplace is asking $10,500 for it. Wow. To the uninitiated, this might just be a "cool old car" but to me it's just an old car albeit one in pretty nice shape. There's only, allegedly, 33,000 on its ticker. But $10,500? 

That sky-high asking price just another prime example of just how nuts the used car market has gotten. And that's for all used cars apparently as the chip-shortage that's supposedly driving the shortage of new cars and driving up the price of used is affecting old and dare I say "non-classic" stuff like this. 

 

1977 Dodge Royal Monaco - Royal Treatment

Chrysler's full-size models were all-new for 1974 and their timing could not have been worse. Not only were they were "christened" weeks before the start of the OPEC Oil Embargo in October of 1973, their styling was derided for being derivative of two-to-three year General Motors designs. Our subject here is one of the last from that bumper crop of enormous '74's, a 1977 Dodge Royal Monaco. 

Makes you wonder how these cars would have fared if circumstances were different. Call me an old softie but I've always liked their lines, especially the 1974-1976 non-Royal Monaco's with fixed headlights and not this over-wrought, fussy front end. I liked them a whole lot more than the 1969-1973 fuselage models that did not sell well in those pre-gas crunch days too. 

Fun fact, the "Blues Mobile" from the 1980 movie, "The Blues Brothers" was a 1974 Dodge Monaco. Note, it was a "Monaco" and not a "Royal Monaco". 

What was the difference between a Monaco and a Royal one? Good question. A "Monaco", named for the region on the French Riviera on the Mediterranean, was denoted the top-of-the-line Dodge going back to 1965 when Chrysler "up-sized" after their abortive 1962 downsizing. Prior to adding the "Royal" pre-fix starting in 1975, there was a Brougham model that added the ritzy styling touches and doo-dads that were typical of 1970's luxury cars. Textured fabrics, opera lights, "landau" tops, wood-appliques, etc.

Then came the cake-toppers, the "Royal Monaco" and "Royal Monaco Brougham" for 1975 and 1976 complete with this (god-awful) hidden headlight, cheese-grater grill thing our '77 has. I think this front end treatment on these cars works as well as tennis-shoes with a tuxedo but that's just me; the front end the tuxedo, the rest of the car the tennis shoes. Or vice-versa. Take your pick. 

For 1977 Dodge rearranged their proverbial deck chairs. They moved "Monaco" to the old Coronet that was built on Chrysler's defacto intermediate "B-body" of 1962 downsizing fame (or infamy). Meanwhile, all the old full-size, "C-body" Monaco's became "Royal Monaco's: complete with the aforementioned cheese-grater front end. 

From what I can see from the interior photos of our '77 "Royal" here, doesn't look like the original buyer got much of a "royal treatment". Aside from the interior being much nicer than the shine-free, patina rich exterior, there's nary a power-window or seat adjuster, no power-door locks or tilting-steering column either. Oh, I can make out some plastic wood on the dash. Break out the Grey Poupon. 

At least our subject here has, get ready for a mic-drop, red-carpet. 

For 1978, Dodge got out of the full-size car market; after twelve-model years there was no Dodge sold built on Chrysler's 1965 circa "C-body". That left the "B-body" Monaco (nee: Coronet) all by itself as Dodge's largest model. Dodge ditching that and the Monaco nameplate altogether in 1979 when they sold a new car marketed as the "St. Regis" built on Chrysler's warmed over "B-body" they called the "R-body". 

Perhaps "R-body" was to denote Royalty. 

Dodge named a version of the Eagle Premier "Monaco" from 1990-1992.