This big old boat of a Pontiac Grand Prix has been stuck in my drafts folder for weeks now. The challenge for me is finding something—anything—to say about it. Aside from the fact that I still find it interesting that from 1962 to 1968, a "Pontiac Grand Prix" was a full-size car.
Big Pontiacs from this time period aren't my cup of antifreeze. So, in the interest of recognizing that I can't always blog about cars I like, I feel obliged to put fingers to keyboard.
Growing up in the 1970s and coming of age in the '80s, for most of its time above terra firma, a Grand Prix was a midsize car. Although from 1969 to 1977, what General Motors called a midsize car would today be considered epically enormous.
It's for sale down in Valley Grove, West Virginia, a good two-hour drive southeast of the Triple Wide. The seller claims it's a great restoration project. The asking price is $8,000.
It will need the brakes and fuel system "gone through," which tells me it's not running. Even if it were, it probably wouldn't be able to stop. Sheesh. For eight large, you'd think they'd have taken care of that.
These O.G. Grand Prixs were part of General Motors' three-pronged salvo at Ford's phenomenally successful four-passenger Thunderbird. Oldsmobile got there first with its Starfire in 1961, followed by Buick's Wildcat and Pontiac's Grand Prix in 1962.
The GM trio featured luxurious interiors and, in general, more powerful engines than the cars they were based on. The Wildcat, for example, was initially based on Buick's Invicta, while the Starfire was based on the full-size Oldsmobile 88. The Grand Prix itself was essentially a more sporting, upscale version of the full-size Catalina coupe.
Buick upped the ante in 1963 with its game-changing Riviera, a corporate-designed car with a unique body that looked like nothing else in Buick's lineup at the time.
When GM redesigned its full-size B- and C-bodies for 1965, the Grand Prix got a reimagined body as well. Swoopier and seemingly larger than before, the interiors remained quite sumptuous for a Pontiac.
These cars could also be ordered with Pontiac's famous 8-lug wheels, which incorporated aluminum brake drums with integral hubs. The idea was to take advantage of aluminum's superior heat-dissipation properties to reduce brake fade. The system was clever, unusual and, these days, a little intimidating to anyone who has never worked on one.
And wouldn't you know it? Our Marketplace find here has those 8-lug rims. They're hard to find today, and the specialized brake components aren't exactly something you want to discover are missing when you're halfway through a restoration.
So, when the seller says the brakes need "going through," I hope whoever buys this knows what they could be getting themselves into.
For the asking price, the buyer does get what appears to be a pretty clean body. She's missing her fender skirts, which I don't miss at all.
The interior is almost worth the price of admission. And she's a four-speed car, too.
The 1965–67 Grand Prix' also featured handsome, hideaway headlights, operated by a fussy vacuum-actuated system. Finding replacement components—and someone who knows how to work on them—could make this another area where it pays to be handy.
Back in the day, General Motors had a habit of recycling nameplates onto entirely different types of cars, and the Grand Prix was just one of them.
Pontiac also used its famed Ventura nameplate on an X-body compact that shared its basic architecture with the Chevrolet Nova. And in 1974, Pontiac committed what some might consider automotive blasphemy by putting the GTO name on a Ventura-based compact.
Then, in the '80s, Pontiac did it again: The Bonneville, once one of the division's biggest and most prestigious cars, became a midsize car.
Nameplates, apparently, were forever. What they were attached to was another matter entirely.
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