Pontiac fans--or anyone interested in 60s drag racing and muscle cars--should check out this thread at PerformanceYears.com. Keith Seymore's father raced for the Royal Pontiac dealership in Michigan back in the 60s, and there are some great stories and details about drag racing in that era. After Keith's father quit racing in the early 70s, the '65 GTO pictured below sat for two decades before Keith turned it into a magazine-worthy car just a few years back. Cool stuff! I especially liked the story about the quality of the factory paint job on his father's '64 GTO.
Back in the mid-70s Steve's dad shipped his '67 GTO over to Cyprus (an island near Greece). Then, while driving back home from a wedding with three friends, his father lost control of the car on a treacherous mountain road and pitched over a steep cliff. One of his father's friends was killed, and of course, the car was destroyed. Flash forward thirty-five years. Steve, who had heard the story from his father, who had seen the faded photos of the GTO in scrapbooks, who had searched for the car on several trips out to Cyprus, was finally able to locate the wrecked GTO after a fire burned away all the surrounding brush on the hillside. He even got a photo of himself standing on the wrecked car, just like the photo of his dad thirty five years ago. You can see all the pics and read the full story on Mike's '67 GTO ride page.
Mike wrote: "This story actually gives me the chills." No kidding! Thanks for sharing it on CarDomain!
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Our Bullrun Ticket to Drive winner earlier this year was a Z-car based GTO replica. Well, here's another one, only this one has LS1 power. Kind of brutal to see a rust-free 280Z get hacked like that, but I have a feeling the finished product will be worth it.
The current (and 60th anniversary issue) issue of Hot Rod features their list of what they consider to be "the most influential hot rods of all time." They only included cars built since 1948, which is when Hot Rod magazine was born. So which car scored the number one spot? The General Lee. Mopar B-bodies did quite well--Richard Petty's '64 Hemi Belvedere scored the number four spot. Number two on the list was the American Graffiti coupe. And the '64 Pontiac GTO press car was number three. I'm also a huge fan of number nine, the Batmobile. See the full list in the January issue of Hot Rod.
Check out this ride-along John and I did at SEMA in this awesome '05 GTO built by Wheel to Wheel Powertrain. The 620-horsepower Goat runs a Rotech-supercharged LS2, bored out to 389. And our awesome driver, Gautam, didn't knock over a single cone, despite (what felt like) multiple donuts. I wish our audio equipment had done justice to the sound of this mean ride!
As some predicted, Dan's 442 killed Ryan's GTO in last week's Face Off, getting almost 75% of the vote. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that modded beats stock on CarDomain. We'll have another American muscle match-up next week, so stay tuned.
This week's Face Off will be the first in a series of serious muscle match-ups. To start things off, we've rustled up a couple of less-conventional specimens from the year 1970: an Olds 442 W-30 versus a Pontiac GTO Judge. Take a look at each of these fearsome rides and then cast your vote to decide which one gets a new set of tires from Discount Tire!
