Were we to buy a GTO (and there’s a good chance at least one of us will), our selection might go something like this. A GTO is basically a $2480 Tempest Le Mans with a $296 extra-equipment package that includes a floor shift, 389 engine, dual exhaust, stiffer shocks, “exterior identification” and a choice of super-premium tires or whitewalls. The 4-speed, all-synchro transmission is $188 extra, and we’d gladly pay $115 to get the hottest (348 bhp) engine. The shorter axle ratios are only available with metallic brakes, HD radiator and limited-slip differential ($75.00 for the lot). Quick steering (20:1) is part of the handling option, though HD shocks and springs alone are only $3.82. The “wood”-rim steering wheel is $39, and from there on in, it’s trimming window with fuzz (like $36 for custom wheel covers). With every conceivable option on a GTO it would be difficult to spend more than $3800. That’s a bargain.
We find the GTO quite handsome, except for those phony vents that GM Styling’s Bill Mitchell insists upon hanging on everything. Unlike the Sting Ray, the GTO has only the ones on the hood, so we can say it could be much, much worse. Our test car was a rich dark blue with black U.S. Royal Red Line tires and very conservative wheel covers. There was nothing to give away the presence of the ferocious beast concealed inside, and yet the car would draw admiring glances wherever it went. Whether it was the car’s restrained looks or the threatening grumble from the four (count em, four) shiny tail pipe extensions, we never learned.
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Once inside, everything seems to be just about where you would have put it in a car of your own design. The optional steering wheel is wood-looking plastic that had us completely conned. To our embarrassment, some smart aleck who’d read the catalog pointed out our mistake and made us feel like General Motors had really taken us. Wood or not, it’s handsome as hell and an excellent piece of fakery. The instruments are all well-placed and legible, except for the tachometer, which is terrible—it’s too far to the right to be glanced at during a hard run, and, worse, it’s the wand type that sweeps horizontally across a four-inch quandrant and is practically impossible to read anyway. The speedometer is just slightly left of center in the panel and it has a typical 270 degree clock-type face. Our choice would be to swap the tach and speedometer locations, substituting a Sun SST (270°) tach for the factory’s $53.80 optional tach.
The transmission lever is nicely placed immediately next to the driver’s thigh. It has the now famous Hurst linkage which is amazingly short and unerringly accurate. The sports car driver’s first tendency is always to try to make the gate wider than it is, and the shift pattern more complicated. After a little time in the car, however, the brutal simplicity of that great tree-trunk of a lever begins to reassure you and you start throwing shifts with the same slam-bang abandon as the drag racing types. Our photographer drove the car and commented that he was used to driving imported cars and he had a hard time getting used to the extreme closeness of the GTO’s gate. Kismet.
The so-called bucket seats in the GTO are the same as those in the Corvair Monza or any of the B-O-P compacts. That is to say they are not buckets at all, but actually individual front seats with a modicum of lateral support. We’d like the car better if the seats wrapped around farther and were more firmly constructed, but that’s the breaks. In one way, the softness is a good deal, because anybody who’s a middleweight or bigger will compress the seat cushion all the way anyway, and then it becomes quite satisfactory. Fore and aft adjustment on the front seats is excellent provided you have the manual adjustment—the power assisted system limits travel enough to preclude any kind of straight-arm driving technique for would-be heroes. Rear seat room is cramped for three—it is, strictly speaking, a four seater.
Driving this car is an experience no enthusiast should miss. Unfortunately, few Pontiac dealers will have GTO demonstrators with the proper equipment on them, but if you can get your hands on one like we tested, it’s almost worth stealing it for a few minutes of Omigod-we’re-going-too-fast kind of automotive bliss. One expects the acceleration to be spectacular in first and second, but none of us were ready for the awful slamming-back-in-the-seat we got when we tromped on it at 80 in fourth.
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