A Little Background

The year was 1963. Pontiac had just released its Pontiac Tempest GTO for the 1964 model year and was looking for a way to promote it. Car and Driver was a small automotive enthusiast magazine looking for a interesting article to increase their sales. They approached Pontiac with an idea: pit their new Pontiac Tempest GTO vs. a Ferrari GTO. Jim Wagners, head of Pontiac marketing, jumped at the chance and sent the magazine two “prepared” GTO’s. Meanwhile, the magazine couldn’t locate any Ferrari GTOs to test, so they just tested the Pontiac’s and compared them to fictional Ferrari GTOs. After extensive testing, Car and Driver declared that “Ferrari never built enough GTOs to earn the name anyway — just to be on the safe side though, Pontiac built a faster one.” The “official” test times were unbelievable: 0-60 in 4.6 seconds and the quarter mile in 13.1 seconds @ 115 mph. These results made the Pontiac Tempest GTO a sensation overnight and made Car and Driver the “every man’s” magazine.

The Truth

Although the article pointed out that the GTOs that were tested were only “mildly” prepped by Royal Pontiac, no other magazine or customer could match those test numbers with stock GTOs. Both Pontiac and Car and Driver insisted that the numbers were accurate. It wasn’t until 30 years later that the truth came out: the numbers were not as accurate as they should have been. First of all, Car and Driver, in its infancy, was testing with stop watches. There was plenty of room for human error, and looking back, you can see that human error certainly did exist in these testing procedures. But the main reason for the unbelieveable times was that both GTOs test were ringers. Jack “Doc” Watson of Hurst Performance fame, made this statement in a 1994 interview in MuscleCars magazine regarding the GTO that was actually featured in the pages of Car and Driver: “That car had a 421 in it, not a 389, and if anyone tells you different, they are full of hot air!” But it was Jim Wagners, five years later in his book “Glory Days,” that finally confessed that the test cars were indeed specially prepped by Royal Pontiac and included 421 engines. Jim Wagners noted that “yes, I did install a 421 H.O. Tri-Power engine in the red Royal Bobcat Car and Driver test car.”

The Original Article

Here is the original article in its entirety. You make the call as to how much Pontiac and Car and Driver stretched the truth.

Ferrari never built enough GTOs to earn the name anyway–just to be on the safe side though, Pontiac built a faster one.

Most knowledgeable enthusiasts reacted negatively when Pontiac announced that their new Tempest sports model was to be called the GTO. They felt, as we did, that Pontiac was swiping a name to which it had no right. Like Le Mans, Grand Prix, Monza, Spyder and 2+2, this was another of those hard-to-digest bits of puffery from the Detroit/Madison Avenue axis. Our first look at the car made us feel a little better, because it is handsome, and then we got a call from correspondent Roger Proulx, raving about the car’s acceleration and handling, so we arranged to test a Pontiac Tempest GTO.

This was the most exhaustive and thorough road test we have ever done. We used two nearly-identical cars, the differences being that one car had the shorter-ratio manual steering while the other had power; the manual steering car was also equipped with metallic brake linings. We drove our two cars unmercifully. One was driven from Detroit to New York City, used for ten days by every member of the staff, and then driven from New York to Daytona Beach, Florida, carrying the managing editor, his wife, and three active children. This car–the manual steering, metallic brake version-was driven over 3000 miles. The other car was driven about 500. We ran dozens of acceleration tests on the two cars, plus many, many laps of the Daytona International Raceway’s tri-oval and road circuit.

It was our original intention to borrow a Ferrari GTO and to run the two against each other at Bridgehampton’s road racing circuit and on the drag strip at Westhampton. We had engaged Walt Hansgen to drive the Pontiac and Bob Grossman to run his own Ferrari. Unfortunately Grossman’s Ferrari was tired from a season of racing, and was not considered fast enough to really be a match for our Tempest. We then canvassed all the GTO owners in this country and simply could not get one of those lucky gentlemen and the weather to cooperate simultaneously. As a result, we drove two Ferrari GTO’s, but we were never able actually to run the Tempest against either one of them.

Although it would have been great fun and quite interesting to run the Ferrari racing car against Pontiac’s similarly-named touring car, our tests showed that there really was no effective basis for comparison–the Pontiac will beat the Ferrari in a drag race, and the Ferrari will go around any American road circuit faster than the stock Tempest GTO. We are positive, however, that a Tempest like ours, with the addition of NASCAR road racing suspension, will take the measure of any Ferrari other than prototype racing cars or the recently announced 250-LM. We should also point out that our test car, with stock suspension, metallic brakes and as-tested 348 bhp engine will lap any U.S. road course faster than any Ferrari street machine, including the 400 superamerica. Not bad for an actual delivered price of 3400 dollars, wot?

It was a shade over ten years ago that events in Detroit took a turn for the better and started the trend that ultimately resulted in the Tempest GTO. At that time, GM announced the Corvette. It was a funny car, hooted and jeered at by enthusiasts and by-passed by the great unwashed in favor of its more understandable competitor, the two-seater Thunderbird.

From those humble beginnings (with the late-fifties prompting of a robust and growing imported car market), came a host of better, more interesting cars from Detroit. The success of the Corvette and the sports-type Corvair Monza led the other GM divisions to build similar cars, particularly in the B-O-P compact lines. Buick and Oldsmobile leaned toward the concept of “Little Thunderbirds,” cars with bucket seats and floor-mounted shift levers, but little else of a sporting nature. Pontiac, God love ‘em, went the hairy-chested route and came up with our test car, the best American car we have ever driven, and probably one of the five or six best cars in the world for the enthusiast driver.

Obviously, personal preferences must come into play here. There are many of our readers who think that a Sprite is the absolute epitome of grand touring, while others feel that no car should have a displacement greater than 1500cc. Add to these the purist who wouldn’t drive an American car if his life depended on it, and you have a pretty fair-sized body of opposition. We respect their differing opinions and will defend to the death their right to express them, but we will stand or fall on our enthusiasm for the Tempest GTO.

In 1963 we were a bit stunned by a Mercury Marauder that had 427 cubic inches, 425 horsepower, good handling, and performance that to us, was absolutely breathtaking. The Tempest GTO is better. First of all, its smaller outside dimensions make it a lot more fun to drive; and, second, it goes faster.

Our test car was equipped with the 389- cubic-inch, 349 horsepower, V-8 engine with hydraulic valve lifters and a compression ratio of 10.4 to one. It had the new GM “Muncie” four-speed transmission and Pontiac’s Saf-T-Trak limited-slip differential. The rear axle ratio was 3.90 to one, and the brakes had metallic linings. The car had standard Tempest GTO suspension (slightly stiffer valving in the shocks) and manual steering with an overall ratio of 20 to 1, substantially faster than the standard manual steering ratio of 26 to 1, but slower than the power steering’s 17 to 1. We preferred the power steering-not because the manual set-up was too stiff, but because it still wasn’t quite fast enough.

A word of caution here: Pontiac is forced by the realities of commerce to build cars for little old ladies and GM executives as well as enthusiasts. It is quite possible to go to your dealer’s for a demonstration drive and find yourself in a GTO of infinite dullness-an automatic-transmission-, power-operated-seat-, tinted-window-car with little to distinguish it from a Chevelle, a Buick Special, an Olds F85, or any other semi-visible American car. The GTO that delights the executive from the Fourteenth floor of the Detroit’s General Motors Building is not going to be the rabid enthusiast’s dish of tea. To buy a car like our test car you should either get a hold of a catalogue and memorize the options you want, or seek out a live-wire dealership like Royal Pontiac in Royal Oak, Michigan, the firm that loaned us our GTO.

Read about ford muscle cars and chevrolet muscle cars.
Save money on car loans – auto loan calculator can really help.