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GTO: Pontiac's Great One
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Product Description
In 1963 Pontiac's Chief Engineer John DeLorean and his two favorite staff engineers, Bill Collins and Russ Gee, came up with an inspired way to keep Pontiac cars in the performance limelight: bolt a big engine into Pontiac's upcoming Tempest intermediate body. Thus was the GTO born. Through cunning, resourcefulness, and outright trickery the minds of Pontiac managed to get this rocket into dealerships and out onto America's highways, and to introduce that most iconic of American automobiles, the muscle car, to the nation’s most discriminating drivers.
This is the story of the GTO, of the people who made it a reality and a sales sensation, of those who owned and loved the cars. And it is, above all, a story of the cars themselves, from the initial option package offered for the 1964 model year through the high-performance late-model standouts. With color photographs, drawings, and detailed stats, this book is not so much the story of a historic car as an illustrated biography of American muscle.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #35167 in Books
- Published on: 2009-05-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is a great book, one that you can't put down and so well written that you find yourself skipping the photos and captions and having to go back and read it over again. And that's what you will do with this anthology on the "Goat." You'll pick it back up just to remember, to reminisce the good-ole days when the GTO was king of the streets, and G.M. was the king of automakers around the world. Reading Pontiac's Great One, GTO is like reading a letter from a long-lost friend. It should be arriving in bookstores about now and we suggest you get a copy, find a shady seat under a tree, and take a few days off."
From the Inside Flap
The birth of the muscle car revolution can be summed up in three simple letters: G-T-O.
The release of Pontiac's GTO rocked the performance car world in 1964. Sure, hot rodders had been dropping large engines in intermediate cars for decades, but never before had an automaker installed such a powerful engine into such a lightweight platform. Even though advertising support was practically nonexistent, the GTO quickly became Pontiac's hottest seller, and the cars literally flew off the lots.
In GTO, Pontiac's Great One, author Darwin Holmstrom explores the environment that allowed the creation of the prototypical muscle car. He tells the inside story of what happened at Pontiac to change the division's offerings from stodgy old coots' pedestrian transports to zoomy, hip factory hot rods. In the process, the division was whisked from the edge of oblivion and propelled to the rank of the nation's number three automaker.
It wasn't all easy though. As the muscle car wars escalated, Pontiac soon found it challenging to keep pace with other manufacturers' offerings due to GM's draconian policies limiting displacement and forbidding factory involvement in racing. By 1974, wheezing under government-mandated pollution control equipment and staggering insurance increases, the writing was on the wall for GTO.
GTO, Pontiac's Great One includes an illustrated, fold-out timeline and photographer David Newhardt's lavish images, which leave no detail uncaptured.
From the Back Cover
What do you do when you've created an overwhelmingly successful new genre of automobile? If you're General Motors and Pontiac, you bungle it of course!
Riding high on the success of their new GTO, the overlords at GM did everything in their power to sabotage their hot-selling new muscle car. And the car succeeded, in the showroom and on the racetrack, in spite of their best efforts to kill it. Starting with a zero-exposure marketing effort and then pulling the rug from beneath the racing effort just as it was gaining traction with enthusiasts, the GTO quickly established itself as The Great One, the car by which all other muscle cars were judged.
Never one to sugarcoat, in GTO, Pontiac's Great One, author Darwin Holmstrom tells the backstory that led to the creation of Pontiac's most successful nameplate. He delves into the division's inner turmoil and struggle to stay with the competition while being hamstrung by the corporation's timid policies. GTO's long, slow fade into mediocrity (and worse) is chronicled, along with its brief, ill-fated return as a rebadged car with Australian roots.
David Newhardt's brilliant photography highlights the purposeful design and beautiful styling in sharp, dramatic settings. GTO, Pontiac's Great One tells the story of the birth, life, and death of America's greatest muscle car, and pulls no punches along the way.
Customer Reviews
Take Me Back to the 1960s
Those of us like me who came of age in the 1960s hold a special passion for muscle cars. The GTO stood out from the rest in that it was not only a performance car, but bordered on also being a luxury car. Every time we would hear the song, "Little GTO," our desire for a GTO would increase. First, we witnessed the demise of muscle cars in general with the 1973 oil embargo. Now, we are witnessing the demise of the entire Pontiac line with GM's struggles. My copy of Holmstrom and Newhardt's book, "Pontiac's Great One, GTO," turned the clock back to the 1960s. First, Newhardt's vivid photography grabbed me. However, it was the narrative of Holmstrom that held my interest. In fact, I learned more about GTOs reading this book than I ever imagined. His writing brought back the 1960s and helped me understand the elements of society that generated the muscle car movement. I learned of its conception and development as well as the people who drove GTOs, raced GTOs, and just lusted after GTOs.
The thing that first attracted me to this book was the fact I own a BMW motorcycle book authored by Darwin Holmstrom. However, this book certainly stands on its own. The quality of writing in both books set them apart from others. If you get an opportunity to own a copy, you will not be disappointed.
Jim McLean
Tuscaloosa, AL
Great Sendoff to a Great Car
I picked this book up on the same day GM announced it was killing off it's Pontiac division. It's a big book, but since I was in a Pontiac kind of mood, I read it in one weekend (I didn't get anything else done). I think this book just came out last week, which means that it had to have been written sometime last year, but clearly the author had a good sense of what was coming because the information seems as up-to-date as the latest newspaper. It's a great history of not only the GTO, but of Pontiac division from the time Bunkie Knudsen took over in the mid-fifties. Best of all, it is filled with beautiful photography of virtually every permutation of GTO ever built.
A great book!
This is by far the best book on the GTO that I have ever seen. The photography is incredible,and, worth the price of the book by itself. It's sad that I received mine on the day they announced the death of Pontiac as a brand, but, this is a fitting tribute to the car that started the muscle car era. I'm ordering another one to keep "in the wrapper".
