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At the 25th Annual Indian Uprising, an all-Pontiac-only show in St. Charles, Illinois, owner Richard Larabee’s Tyrol Blue 1967 Catalina 2+2 stood out enough to take home an award. Lou Costabile records the factory 428 cold-starting on camera, while the comments fill with viewers recalling their own history with the model going back to 1967 showroom brochures. Watch to hear the big block come alive and see why this specific combination of options makes the car so desirable.
This 1932 Ford roadster proves the old hot-rodder rule that the engine badge never mattered as much as what is actually bolted to it, under the hood sits a bored-out Pontiac 400 breathing through a tri-power setup pulled from a completely different Pontiac decades later. Add in a mix-and-match interior built around 1940 Ford components, and this roadster tells the story of a builder who cared more about the finished product than staying loyal to one brand. Here is what makes this kind of cross-brand hot rod build a genuine hobby tradition, not a shortcut.
At a glance, it looks like a converted Chevelle wagon from the mid-’60s. Look closer and you’re staring at something Pontiac never built in any year, any trim, any factory brochure: a genuine two-door version of its mid-size wagon. Here’s why a body style General Motors never tooled up is now a real, driveable “one of none.”
General Motors controlled more than half the U.S. new-car market in the mid-1960s, and buried inside that dominance was a full-size Chevrolet hiding a genuinely serious big-block. The 1966 Impala SS could be ordered with a 427 making up to 425 horsepower, but only a small fraction of that year’s SS models left the factory that way. Here’s why the big-block Impala deserves more respect than its reputation as a grocery-getter suggests.
A 1967 television commercial for the Pontiac GTO sold horsepower the way modern car ads almost never do – through swagger, identity, and a voice actor’s delivery that viewers are still praising decades later. One commenter even traces BMW’s Ultimate Driving Machine slogan back to what Pontiac was already doing here first. Watch to hear the pitch that built a legend.
The 1973 Pontiac Trans Am Super Duty 455 arrived at the worst possible moment for a big-block muscle car — insurance rates were climbing, emissions rules were tightening, and most of Detroit had already walked away. V8TV’s look at this SD-455 explains why Pontiac built it anyway, and why Car and Driver once called it one of the last true fast cars of its era. Watch to see what’s hiding under that shaker hood.
This 1978 Pontiac Trans Am checks nearly every box serious collectors look for: the handling-focused WS6 package, the rare four-speed manual, and the big-block-adjacent 400 four-barrel, all still together after more than four decades. Viewers are already piecing together its origin story from small details, including a telling clue about why its interior plastics never baked in the sun. Filmed on a real road test with Rob at Street Machines, not a static show floor. Watch to see how it actually drives.
Before Roxy Starr ever got behind the wheel of a muscle car, her mother Ilona was already deep into Pontiac ownership with a 1969 Firebird convertible and GTO. This 1970 Oldsmobile 4-4-2 W-30 tells a different chapter, the year GM finally let Olds drop a 455-cubic-inch V8 into the 4-4-2, backed by a weight-saving fiberglass hood and aluminum trim. It’s widely considered the best all-around 4-4-2 Oldsmobile ever built.
From the mid-50s to the 70s, American street racers were the kings of cool, cruising boulevards and racing deserted runways. Muscle cars with sleek lines, custom paint jobs, and engines that left police cruisers in the dust were the emperors of the road—and their drivers raced for glory and the fastest girls. But crashes, the law, or love eventually sidelined most racers. Still, some of these legends have been passed down, with grandchildren now revving those engines at local dragstrips.
Pontiac’s 326 was actually a 336 and the 350 that replaced it in 1968 was really a 354.74, which nobody at the division ever adequately explained. The G3 LeMans carried that engine through some of the best years of the A-body, picked up big valve Ram Air heads for 1969, and by 1970 could be ordered with GTO-sized engines in a cheaper package. Read on for the LeMans years worth knowing, including the budget hardtop Chevrolet undercut within weeks.
A countdown of the six largest production engines General Motors ever built draws exactly the kind of comment section you would expect from a genuinely technical audience, including one commenter’s joke that working on a 496-cubic-inch big-block requires a mandatory cigarette dangling from the mouth at all times. Beneath the humor sits real engineering history, including a detailed explainer on how GM’s divisions once each built their own competing V8 platforms. Watch the full countdown to see which engines made the cut.
The fourth-generation Pontiac GTO was not designed in Detroit. It was built in Australia, imported nearly complete, and given a GTO badge because a General Motors board member read a magazine article and then drove one on a business trip. It had Corvette power, a legitimate 13.8-second quarter, and an exhaust note reverse-engineered from archived recordings. American buyers still walked past it. Read on for why, and why that makes it a bargain now.
When Rich Sperling bought this 1959 Pontiac Catalina in 1991, the Wisconsin seller practically talked him out of it, insisting nobody around wanted a Pontiac over a Chevy. More than three decades later, Sperling still owns the Silver Mist Sport Sedan, complete with its original four-on-the-tree manual transmission. Watch to hear the full story behind a car nearly nobody wanted.