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CHAPTER

4

THE SUPERCAR IS BORN, PART 1

Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick

Here are several kits of the Buick-Olds-Pontiac (BOP) compacts that preceded the intermediate-sized replacements that wore the same names for the 1964 model year (all: Wave 1/**). AMT offered kits of the Tempest in sedan (1961 not shown) and hardtop and convertible forms (1962 and 1963). AMT also produced Buick Special wagon kits for 1961 and 1962, while JoHan offered the Olds F-85 in 1961 wagon and 1962 Cutlass hardtop/convertible forms (the JoHan kits shown are 1970s USA Oldies reissues).

If you define the core of the American muscle car phenomenon to be the 1960s intermediate-sized supercar, then the story of the muscle car is largely the story of the Pontiac GTO.

General Motors entered the new intermediate-sized class starting with the 1964 model year. General Motors was already two years behind, as the intermediate market segment really began in the 1962 model year with the introduction of Ford Motor Company’s Ford Fairlane and Mercury Meteor models. Some might suggest that the new-for-1962 downsized Dodge Dart and Plymouth Fury were also intermediates, but they were notably larger in several key dimensions than the Fairlane and Meteor, and they were marketed against the full-sized Galaxie and Impala, not as new intermediates.

Over the course of the early 1960s, the automotive market in the United States was evolving quickly, with emerging trends including highly styled two-doors, hardtops, and convertibles with bucket seats, consoles, and more powerful V-8s. Therefore, while the Ford Fairlane was an immediate success that required a market response from rival Chevrolet, what makes the GM entries of special interest is the way in which response was delivered. In the two years following the introductions of the Ford intermediates, General Motors was able to more effectively develop and “tune” its new intermediate-sized products to capitalize on these evolving trends. In doing so, General Motors enjoyed not only immediate market success for the 1964 model year, but also set the pattern for how intermediate-sized cars evolved during the following decades.

GM’s response took two approaches. First was an all-new nameplate for Chevrolet, the Chevelle, chosen in part to continue the use of Chevy product names starting with the letter “c.” The Chevelle was a notably more stylish car than the first Fairlanes, and the marketing very successfully capitalized on the top range Malibu and Malibu SS two-door hardtop and convertible models. For the B-O-P offerings, General Motors chose to drop its previous compact-sized Tempest, F-85, and Special models and reapply these now-established nameplates to the newly sized intermediate products. These three products also launched the format for the supercar segment starting with the Pontiac GTO, quickly followed by the 4-4-2 and Gran Sport models from the sister divisions.

GM’s 1964 entry into the intermediate-sized car market was one of the most important automotive events of the 1960s. Within five years, GM’s intermediates had become the style and performance leaders among GM’s family cars, with the same trend starting to evolve at Ford and Chrysler. By the mid-1970s the intermediate segment entries had evolved into some of the best-selling cars in the marketplace (led at that time by the Oldsmobile Cutlass). This trend continued into subsequent decades with the Ford Taurus and Fusion, the Honda Accord, and the Toyota Camry. Intermediate-sized cars are still the best-selling passenger cars in the American market today.

But now returning to the 1964 model year, I’ll bet everyone reading this book has his or her own GTO story to tell. Right now, I’m specifically talking about a “first time the GTO registered on your car guy or gal radar screen” story. This is mine.

I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Despite our location less than 60 miles west of Detroit, Ann Arbor back then was not a car town (it is even less so today). As an enthusiastic pre-teen car enthusiast, I was far more likely to see a Volvo or a Saab than a GTO during the mid-1960s, reflecting the heavy local influence of the University of Michigan and the intellectual approach to car ownership of the faculty of this respected institution of higher learning.

So, imagine then one sunny fall 1964 afternoon, as our otherwise unassuming Abbot Elementary School Chorus teacher drove down Center Street into the school parking lot in her brand new 1965 Iris Mist Metallic GTO convertible. Not just that, but it was a close-ratio 4-speed manual, and Mrs. K. was not beyond driving down the street in a low gear holding the tach around 3,000 rpm or so. Oh man! If the GTO hadn’t bumped into my consciousness before, it sure did that sunny afternoon in the fall of 1964! The memory still gets to me well more than 50 years later.

This was also just about the time I graduated from being an occasional model car builder to a frequent kit purchaser. Soon, I saw the new tiger-striped box with the AMT Trophy Series logo and the 1965 Goat on the end panel at the Hobby Store in Arborland, our nearby outdoor regional shopping center. I bet many of you remember that very box top yourself. That’s my cue to segue into the topic of this chapter: GM’s first intermediate supercars: the GTO, 442, and Gran Sport.

Pontiac GTO: The Supercar Legend

The story of the GTO’s development is well known and there is no need to repeat it here. What does bear repeating is that not only was the GTO largely a groundbreaking product, it was brilliantly marketed almost from the very beginning. The combination of these two developments gave the GTO a head start in the supercar market that was not fully challenged until Plymouth’s Road Runner delivered an equal dose of product uniqueness and marketing savvy five model years later. Not too surprisingly, the GTO also quickly established a leadership position in the hobby kit market that it held for years to come. The story begins in fall 1963.

AMT’s annual kits for 1964 included the Pontiac LeMans convertible (Wave 1/***), followed by the GTO hardtop (Wave 1/*****). These AMT kits are still considered the “gold standard” for 1964 Tempest/GTO body accuracy and proportions. The 3-in-1 racing version had a Rallye/Road Racing theme. That would soon change in GTO kits that followed!

1964–1965 GTO: First at Bat

The daylight hours were starting to shorten, and there was a brisk chill in the air when the AMT 1964 annual kits rolled off the line at the AMT plant located at 1225 East Maple Road in Troy, Michigan. Generally speaking, AMT would produce the pre-assembled promotional models first, as they were to be shipped primarily to car dealers to coincide with the annual new car announcements. The exterior body tools (and in many cases, the chassis and interior parts) were then repurposed as assembly kits with the addition of opening hoods and fairly simplistic engine compartments. Convertible kits were typically run first, followed by the hardtops.

All this is a way of conveying that the first 1964 Pontiac intermediate assembly kit was actually a LeMans convertible, not the GTO. The box top featured a cut-in illustration highlighting the “326 CU. IN. V-8 ENGINE.” When the hardtop kits came off the line several months later, the LeMans became a GTO, the engine was now a 389 with 4-barrel and tri-power options, the hood added those two faux scoops, and the body was updated with carefully engraved GTO nomenclature. America’s model car builders now had their first chance to build a scale version of Pontiac’s Gran Turismo Omologato. These were well-detailed annual kits for the time, with highly accurate exteriors and moderate levels of interior and engine detail. Just one sign of the attention to detail: the GTO kit offered the builders three different styles of 4-speed transmission shift levers.

Monogram’s 1/24th-scale 1964 GTO kit from the mid-1980s (Wave 2/*) has excellent detail and remains the most accessible 1964 Goat kit available to builders today. Polar Light’s 1964 GTO kit (Wave 3/*) is somewhat simplified; the convertible is the only GTO kit of this body style to be produced in 1/25th scale.

These AMT 1964 GTO kits were relatively scarce to begin with, and by the 1980s they were pricey and rare collectibles. During this period, Monogram had begun to revisit the muscle car era for possible kits, and the 1964 GTO quickly rose to the top of the list. When its 1/24th-scale kit appeared in 1985, it was rendered in two-door sedan/coupe form (what today is called a post car, referring to the visible B-pillar between the driver’s side window and the rear quarter-window). Instructions showed the builder how to remove the door and window frames to create a second two-door hardtop version of the kit. Set up with the iconic 389 tri-power, this was a very sharp replica kit that has been reissued several more times in the following years.

In the early 2000s, a new model company, Polar Lights (a play on the old Aurora kit name), commissioned the development of a new series of 1/25th-scale model cars. It featured snap-together assembly, along with pre-painted bodies. Among the releases was a 1964 GTO, rendered in both hardtop and convertible form. The kits were generally well done, but they never caught on strongly with the adult modeling community, perhaps due to the lower parts count and less precise engraving versus other newly tooled kits of the millennium. The hardtop was reissued in 2014, this time with an unpainted body.

While not as rare as some kits shown in this book, these two are among the most desired. AMT’s 1965 GTO annual kit (Wave 1/***) and Trophy Series reissue (Wave 1/***) are both 100-percent factory stock kits. These are sought out versus later 1980s and later reissues of the kit, which contained a series of mistakes in body trim and nomenclature engraving.

By the fall of 1964, it was very evident that the GTO was becoming a huge hit in the marketplace. New vertical quad headlamps and a refined rear-end appearance made it immediately recognizable as the new 1965 version, while underhood refinements improved the performance. This was also the year that GTO marketing and merchandising fully kicked in, making the Tiger the most desirable car of all for performance-minded young adults.

AMT reacted accordingly with a 1965 GTO annual kit that mirrored the appeal of the real car. The kit started with a body that allowed the builder to construct either a factory hardtop or convertible. The custom version added a fastback hardtop that pretty accurately foreshadowed the buttress-like C-pillar of the upcoming 1966 GTO. The racing version was now drag racing themed.

All was not well, however, as AMT’s new cross-town rival, MPC, soon secured the contract for upcoming 1966 GTO promotionals. This gave MPC the ability to affordably develop the car assembly kits that followed. AMT reacted quickly by re-boxing its 1965 GTO as part of its premium Trophy Series and keeping it in the lineup for several years to follow. This was the aforementioned kit with the iconic Tiger Stripe box art that seemed to jump out at you from every local hobby and discount store you visited back then. The slightly larger box now carried a suggested price of $1.70 (versus the original $1.50 price for the annual kit). Interestingly, in today’s collectible market the Trophy Series reissue also sells for more than the original annual kit.

These two issues of the 1965 GTO (along with two other late 1960s reissues with different box art themes) are the only kits with the original AMT body engraving. The body tooling was fundamentally altered in 1972 as part of an AMT series of Modified Stockers; these were dirt track–style cars with huge wheel cutouts and other non-stock kit changes. For most kits of this series, this was a death-knell for future stock version reissues. In the case of the GTO, in the mid-1980s AMT-Ertl attempted to restore the tool to factory-correct 1965 GTO status. The result drew brickbats from serious modelers for poor and out-of-scale body details and engraving. Later changes attempted to correct the errors, but the result still lacks fidelity versus the original kits produced in the mid- to late 1960s. No model company has attempted a modern-day popular-scale kit of the 1965 GTO. It is a distinct market opportunity for a motivated and opportunistic scale kit producer.

1966–1967 GTO: The Tiger Rules

GTO hit full stride in the American automotive marketplace in the 1966 model year. It was no longer an optional package for the LeMans; it was now a separate series within the Pontiac lineup. Accordingly, it featured greater appearance and content differentiation versus the LeMans series, and the new Coke-bottle body shape made Chrysler’s equally new Coronet and Satellite immediately look a generation out of date. The Tiger merchandising approach reached its peak, and, nearly 97,000 buyers later, the final result was the best sales year ever for the GTO.

MPC took full advantage of its new GTO promo and kit franchise, as next to the Mustang this was probably the hottest annual kit franchise in the 1966 marketplace. Combined with a merchandising effort that credited Budd Anderson (the highly popular, former AMT spokesperson) as the kit consultant, the kit included parts for stock, custom, a B/Stock drag racer, and a second drag racing version. Offered as a $1.49 convertible or a $2.00 hardtop, box art for both versions promoted the “wild match car” setup featuring dramatically set-back engine and driver along with an extended air scoop for the 480-hp supercharged V-8, and new version-specific interior door/bulkhead panels and steering gear. The hardtop kit even added a Bonus “Extra Slot Racing [conversion] Pack.”

MPC’s 1966 GTOs were typical annual kits in that after the model year run, the “tool” that molded the models was modified and updated for the 1967 GTO changes. Thus, the 1966 GTO kits quickly became very hard to find and extremely pricey if/when located. Belatedly to the rescue, more than three decades later, the team at Revell engineered an all-new kit of the 1966 GTO hardtop that debuted in 1998. Featuring the last-ever tri-power 389 and precise underbody, and interior detail, it is in my judgment the best of all GTO kits available in the popular 1/24th and 1/25th scales.

MPC’s 1966 GTO hardtop and convertible annual kits (both: Wave 1/***), were brilliantly merchandised as kits and also showed a strong connection between the kitmaker in Mount Clemens and the Pontiac braintrust located 25 miles west-northwest in another Detroit suburb. Note the use of the GeeTO Tiger marketing theme, while the kits also promoted “detailed instructions on building an actual full-scale GTO B/Stocker.”

Revell’s 1966 GTO kit (Wave 3/*) was engineered and released in 1998, and it is a fine example of what I call Wave 3 of model car kit development. It has seen multiple kit versions including those shown here. (The drag racing themed kits are factory stock except for the Hurst five-spoke mags.)

As 1967 dawned, the GTO faced several new challenges: 389 and Pontiac’s legendary tri-power options were gone, and the Tiger merchandising theme was history, both credited to decisions from the GM executive suite in downtown Detroit. Not only that, but the GTO’s competitors were growing savvy about the development and marketing of their own supercars. Mild body changes (primarily added chrome on the lower body sides) and a new 400-ci version of Pontiac’s V-8 were the main changes for 1967. Equally important, a new marketing campaign was developed: The Great One.