In 1964, Pontiac created a new kind of American performance car by putting a big-block V8 into the Tempest and launching the muscle car era.
1964 was a good year for car enthusiasts in America. Ford Motor Company released the Ford Mustang, which eventually became a symbol of the United States and set the standard for the emerging pony car class. General Motors took things a step further. By putting a "big-block" V8 into the 1964 Pontiac Tempest, the company created a new class of cars that can be described with one word: muscle car.
If it weren't for one stubborn man named John Zachary DeLorean (there is an article about him on the channel), we would know GTO only as a Ferrari model, not a Pontiac.
DeLorean was already Pontiac's chief engineer when the Tempest family of cars was launched in 1961. The project was not particularly successful, even though the car was not small—with a length of just over 15.7 feet, it gave people inside plenty of room, but that wasn't enough for Americans. As a result, the Tempest's role was simply to fill out Pontiac's lineup, where everything was built around the wide-track, full-size "liners" Catalina and Bonneville, which were the brand's bestsellers at the time.
However, the Pontiac Catalina and Pontiac Bonneville were of little interest to young people with money, and DeLorean did not want Pontiac to be just a brand for older people. There was no need to think for long, since young people have always been attracted to cars that burn the most rubber, so the solution came naturally. One spring day in 1963, during a brainstorming session about a new prototype for the 1964 Tempest coupe, one of the engineers (Bill Collins) said, "You know, John, with the same engine mounts (Pontiac had one engine family), it would take us about 20 minutes to put a 389 in this thing." Just one week later, a car with a 6.4-liter engine producing 325 hp was sitting in DeLorean's garage.
John quickly came up with an equally pretentious name—GTO. Ferrari was already using those three letters, but DeLorean learned that the GTO name did not belong to the Italians in the United States, so they had no legal right to make a claim. To this day, it is still not entirely clear what the letters stood for: at Ferrari, they meant "Gran Turismo Omologato" ("Homologated Grand Touring"), while Pontiac enthusiasts claim DeLorean meant "Pontiac Grand Tempest Option."
Installing the engine and coming up with the name was easy, but what complicated everything was General Motors' ridiculous policy in the 1960s that limited the weight of all cars. Under this logic, DeLorean could have equipped the GTO with an engine no larger than 5.7 liters. However, there was a loophole, since the requirement applied only to production cars and did not extend to option packages. So the Pontiac team came up with the idea of selling the GTO as an optional "power and appearance" package (which also included the 389 V8) for the Pontiac Tempest Le Mans.
Before presenting the project to GM management, DeLorean had already arranged for the dealer network to pre-order 5,000 cars, since he doubted he would get approval for such an adventure otherwise. After all, even the biggest bureaucrats would not stop production of cars that had already been sold.
However, they were still convinced that the GTO story would end with those 5,000 cars because they believed dealers would never be able to sell that many in a year. But they were wrong. In 1964 alone, they sold 32,450 cars, practically without any official advertising, since the advertising was devoted to other Pontiac models.
The model eventually received some rather unexpected and not entirely honest advertising that turned out to be very successful. Journalists conducted a hypothetical road test—"what if two GTOs meet"—and the American came out on top against the Italian that cost five times as much, because according to the magazine, the Pontiac accelerated faster from a standstill to 62 mph. To be fair, the car tested by the journalists had been modified, and it is unclear how they measured its speed. However, nobody cared about the details, and the myth that the Pontiac was faster than a Ferrari spread like a virus, with baby boomers subsequently storming dealerships.
In 1965, the GTO, like the updated Tempest, received vertically positioned headlights, and in 1966, the GTO became a full-fledged standalone Pontiac model and broke records by selling nearly 100,000 cars that year.
The design changed every year—at one point, hidden headlights even appeared—but as the 1970s approached, the muscle car phenomenon began to fade. The oil embargo and rising insurance costs for young drivers significantly reduced the number of buyers, so in 1972 the GTO once again became simply an optional package for the Le Mans, and after the last 7,058 cars were produced in 1974, the story came to an end. Nevertheless, the GTO's legacy is significant. During those glorious 10 years, more than half a million GTOs hit the streets.