The All-American Muscle Car_ The Birth, Death and Resurrection of Detroit’s Greatest Performance Cars

devotion to good citizenship, but rather because the economy cars, could afford to ignore this vast, afflu- company had nothing to gain from the publicity that ent, and hungry market. racing attracted. The classic muscle car era, which began when Either way, GM was not receptive to the inno- the first Pontiac buyer checked the GTO box on the vations that DeLorean and his own band of merry Pontiac Tempest option order list and ended when pranksters were about to unleash on the automotive the last Super Duty 455 Firebird rolled off Pontiac’s scene, so they had to bring the results of their off- assembly line in 1974, was something that should hours engineering exercises—the Pontiac GTO—to have never been. In hindsight, who can legitimately market through the back door, offering the GTO as an argue that giving teenage boys lightweight cars option package on the Pontiac Tempest. stuffed full of big-block V-8 power, crude handling What the cadavers occupying the top floors of abilities for harnessing that power, and virtually no GM’s corporate headquarters failed to grasp, the braking power to bring the festivities to a halt once motoring public bought in droves. The GTO was a everything went south, which it did more often than huge success, as were its successors like the Ford not, was a good idea? Mustang, the Dodge Charger, and the Chevrolet Even though building these cars for kids was Camaro. The GTO anticipated a new breed of per- unwise, like giving heroin to Keith Richards or a formance car aimed at a new breed of buyer: the race car to James Dean or Marilyn Monroe to a horny Baby Boom generation, tens of millions of young president, the resulting cars were pretty damned buyers entering the auto market each year. And no cool. The cars might have been overpowered, poor- car company, not even mild-mannered American handling death traps, but unless a person has driven Motors Corporation, builders of the humble Rambler one of these outrageous machines, he or she has