Pontiac GTO: A Muscle Car from the Start
By 1968, the Pontiac GTO Had Become an Icon
Like the Ferrari GTO, the new Pontiac’s name stood for Gran Turismo Omologato, a classification for street performance cars eligible for certain types of racing. Pontiac later referred to GTO as The Great One, but in 1964, the name mattered less than the 389 Tri-Power V-8 whose triple carburetors helped it to produce 348 horsepower.
Muscle Cars Score a Victory
Challenges soon appeared from Ford and Chrysler – not to mention Pontiac’s fellow General Motors’ divisions – all using the big-engine, small-body concept pioneered by American Motors’ 1957 Rebel. As a muscle car, Rebel lasted just that one year, but by 1967, AM was back in the game alongside all but the luxury marques.
The range of choices was therefore broad and it virtually killed the full-size performance car. Chrysler’s 300 letter series that had helped launch that genre in 1955 ended with the 300-L of 1966. The Galaxie 500 7-Litre, Ford’s 1966 entry, became an option package for 1967 and then vanished.
Pontiac, too, knew full-size performance cars. It had begun in 1956 with options for its 317-cubic-inch V-8; two four-barrel carburetors and other performance components gave it 285 horsepower compared to 227 in normal tune.Its final descendant, the 1967 Catalina 2+2, included a 360-horsepower version of Pontiac’s 428-cubic-inch V-8. Fast with but little market, the 2+2 sold fewer than 1800 examples that year.
While nearly everything in those now-discontinued full-size models remained available and a customer could thus order their equivalents, muscle cars had made their point.
All-New 1968 GTO
By any measure, the 1966 GTO had been attractive. Its signature features were vertical quad headlamps and flying-buttress rear roof pillars and as the first new body since the badge had appeared, it needed only minor styling changes for 1967. The 1968 GTO was another matter.
The new GTO was styled much more cleanly than the previous car, almost as if it had been cast in a mold. Gone were the striking roof pillars, replaced by a sweeping flush rear window. Up front, hidden horizontally arranged headlights were located in a wraparound bumper of body-color Endura, a flexible material able to absorb minor impacts without damage. The split grill was already a Pontiac tradition and so was retained.
Under the Hood
A 400-cubic-inch V-8 rated at up to 360 horsepower provided the performance, although the Tri-Power set up long associated with Pontiac was succeeded by a Quadrajet four-barrel carburetor. “Others have caught on,” Pontiac advertised in 1968, “but they haven’t caught up.” Whether they ever did is difficult to answer, but they had just a few more years in which to try.
Changes in Priorities
The muscle car era would soon begin to fade under increasing regulation, rising insurance premiums and similar pressures. For Pontiac, the end came when it built its 1974 GTO on the Ventura platform. It looked much like the Chevrolet Nova whose body it shared and regardless of performance, nearly all of its character and uniqueness were gone.
So is the 1968 Pontiac GTO the best muscle car ever? No model could make that claim, but Pontiac had something when it spoke of The Great One and a 1968 GTO today is unlikely to disappoint.
The 1968 Pontiac GTO was a completely new design.
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