Pontiac GTO started muscle car concept

Marv Francoeur of Regina vividly recalls the first time he saw a red, 1965 Pontiac GTO — more than 50 years ago.

He was a Grade 9 student at Scott Collegiate in Regina.

“There was a fellow in Grade 11, and his grandmother used to buy him all his cars. He was always driving to school in his 1963 Chevrolet Impala SS convertible. Then one day he came to school driving a new 1965 Pontiac GTO hardtop — red, with a white interior. It sure beat the heck out of my ’57 Plymouth four-door sedan. I said: ‘Someday I’m going to own one of those’ and decided then, that someday I would have one — and now I do,” says Francoeur.

The Pontiac GTO stands out in automotive history because it started the muscle car concept. The idea was simple — put a big engine in an intermediate-sized car in order to get great performance. The GTO was introduced midway through the 1964 model year as an option package on the mid-sized Pontiac Tempest. Never before had such a larger motor — 389 cubic inches (6.4 litres) — been put in a midsize American car.

Francoeur’s GTO has the 389-cubic-inch V8, as well as the optional three two-barrel carburetors (resulting in 348 hp) and a four-speed manual transmission.

The concept was John DeLorean’s, who was head of Pontiac at the time. In his autobiography, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, DeLorean says, “The most memorable product coup while I was at Pontiac was the birth of the muscle car craze ... The Engineering Policy Group technically should have been consulted about putting these bigger engines into the intermediate car, but we were afraid they would turn us down or take so long to give their approval that we wouldn’t get the car into production on time ... The GTO gave birth to the muscle car craze of the mid-1960s.”

Early projections of sales of 5,000 GTO option packages were way off; in all 32,450 were sold. Its success was largely due to the enthusiastic response of the motoring press.

For the 1965 model year, Pontiac sold 75,352 GTOs. The GTO’s best year was 1966, when 96,946 were sold.

Within three years, competitors were offering their own mid-sized muscle cars, including the Buick Skylark GS, Chevrolet Malibu SS 396, Dodge Coronet R/T, Ford Fairlane GT, Mercury Cyclone GT, Oldsmobile 4-4-2 and Plymouth GTX.