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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.
By 1976 the muscle car era was supposedly finished, yet Pontiac was still selling a Trans Am with 455 cubic inches under a shaker scoop and a four-speed behind it. The catch is how briefly that combination existed and how few people could actually order it. This is the story of Detroit’s last big-inch holdout and why 200 horsepower meant more than the number suggests.
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.
By 1976 the horsepower war was over and Detroit had lost. Pontiac marked its fiftieth anniversary with a black and gold Trans Am that looked far faster than it was, and then its engineers did something nobody else in the industry managed that decade: they made the numbers go back up. Read on to find out which two sets of cylinder heads they used to do it.
General Motors banned its divisions from racing in 1963, which should have ended Pontiac’s performance program on the spot. Instead, a handful of engineers found a loophole in the rulebook and shipped a 389-cubic-inch coupe as an option package on a mid-size Tempest. Management capped it at 5,000 units because they were certain nobody wanted another muscle car. Read on to find out how badly they misjudged it.
Pontiac says the 1964 GTO invented the muscle car. Chevrolet launched the Chevelle SS package the same model year. Chrysler loyalists point to the letter cars of the 1950s, and Oldsmobile fans go back to the 1949 Rocket 88. The argument has never been settled and probably never will be. Here is what each side actually claims, and why the Chevelle ended up mattering more than the debate itself.
Pontiac built just 697 Firebird Trans Ams for 1969, including only eight convertibles, and the nameplate nearly disappeared before it had a chance to catch on. Two Ram Air engines were offered, but the Ram Air IV went into only 55 cars, all of them coupes. Here is what separated those cars from the rest, and why a legendary third engine never actually reached a customer.
Jay Leno owns hundreds of cars, but few tell a story as understated as his 1966 Dodge Coronet, a boxy family coupe hiding one of the most feared engines Detroit ever sold to the public. That small “426 Hemi” fender badge marks the first model year Chrysler offered the Hemi as a genuine street engine rather than a race-only exotic, sold in just three B-body nameplates. Read on to find out why a car this plain-looking still commands serious respect from collectors like Leno.
GM pulled a Super Bowl IV commercial for this car’s Vacuum Operated Exhaust option after it aired exactly once, and cancelled the option itself just weeks later. This 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge review digs into that history, the Ram Air engines that defined the package, and the Orbit Orange paint that became the Judge’s visual signature. Watch to find out how rare the surviving VOE-equipped cars really are.
George Hansen fell for this car’s grille in a 1958 advertisement, a full year before the 1959 Pontiac Bonneville even existed to buy. Decades later he found this Mandalay Red convertible with its factory Tri-Power 389 and finally closed the loop. Lou Costabile caught the full story on “My Car Story” — including a dashboard viewers keep calling straight out of the Jetsons. See what a promise kept for sixty years looks like.
Back-to-back fuel crises in 1973 and 1979 forced Pontiac to rethink the Trans-Am from the ground up, and the result was a 1982 redesign built almost entirely around wind tunnel data — roughly 500 pounds lighter, capable of 34 mpg with the four-cylinder engine, and styled with hidden headlights and a frameless rear window. Read on to see how that fuel-crisis compromise eventually turned into the fastest production car in North America.
In 1976, a heavily built 1967 Plymouth Barracuda Formula S with a 383 big block got its doors blown off on Gratiot Avenue — by a full-size Pontiac most street racers wouldn’t have recognized. The culprit was a rare 1966 Pontiac 2+2 running a 421 tri-power engine rated at 376 horsepower, a model Pontiac once marketed as the GTO’s big brother. Read on to see how one of the rarest Pontiacs of the 1960s humbled a genuinely fast Mopar.
