TGIF! I got nothing to add. My brain is fried from a very stressful week of work. Haven’t been able to sleep and trying to fix that with freezer vodka appears to have backfired.

Word Count Filler Time

Let’s learn about the birth of muscle cars, the Pontiac GTO. RIP to Pontiac.

Back in the good old days of 1956 GM promoted a guy named Bunkie, real name Semon (lol), to GM (different kind of GM) of Pontiac. He had 5 years to increase sales at Pontiac or the brand would die. Bunkie assessed the Pontiac lineup and realized it wasn’t for young people, proclaiming “You can sell a young man’s car to an old man, but you’ll never sell an old man’s car to a young man.” Smart dude.

So he first hired Pete, real name E.M. (wtf), as head engineer and John Delorean (yes, that guy) as his assistant. Then began building high-performance models of their existing cars with big block V8s and bucket seats. Bunkie hit on a winning formula and by 1960 Pontiac was the best selling mid-priced car in the nation and he was duly appointed GM of Chevrolet, Pete went to GM of Pontiac, and Delorean chief engineer.

Around this time, GM pulled Pontiac and all of its divisions out of NASCAR racing even though they were quite successful there. Pete didn’t take kindly to this and worked with Delorean to bring race cars to the street. So he took those giant V8s and put them in their smaller cars like the Tempest/LeMans with other performance modifications. Company rules did not allow for this, so they had to hide their work. So instead of introducing a new model, they made the modifications available as an option called GTO. After dealers put in 5,000 orders for the Lemans with the GTO package, GM realized what was happening. And, of course, they decided not to stand in the way of profits. And so the first model year (1964) 32,000 units were sold, then 75,000 the next year, before giving the car its own model name of GTO the next year and selling another 97,000 cars.

This sparked a muscle car boom from all GM divisions and every US manufacturer. Alas, it was short lived as the muscle car died in the early 70s. This was due to a confluence of events. Insurance companies realized these were race cars and bumped rates that exceeded the car payments. Then the oil embargo happened and 10 mile per gallon cars were no longer affordable. In 1975, Pontiac retired the GTO model.

The less said about the “revival” of the Pontiac GTO in 2004, the better. It was best left dead. The originals are still worth more for a reason.

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Sexy Time

Well, it was great run until the last, but they can’t all be winners. Enjoy the weekend, folks! Alright, now let’s get to the comments!