TESTED
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.
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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 preference 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.
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