Rare One Owner Red Can Am on 2040-cars
Bradenton, Florida, United States
Get yourself, or your sweetheart a great Valentine's Day present, it's even the right color! When I purchased the car, I was working at a Pontiac dealer in Ypsilanti Michigan and was told it was sent in with the last batch of Sport Coupes that went off to Motortown for conversion to the Can Am. Supposedly our Sales Manager was a golfing buddy of the VP of Pontiac at the time and he is the one that slipped the red one in at the last minute. I can't verify that, but that's what the manager of the dealership told me when I bought it and hey, it's a good story. I purchased this in August 1977 as my first new car and drove it for twelve years as my only vehicle. I had it restored in 2000 although the numbers don't match anymore, the heads got lost but I acquired a set of factory correct units and the motor is in stock configuration. The last 10 months the car has been sitting outside and there was a leak that allowed water to do the damage you see in the photos of the interior. The engine and drive train, in fact the entire car, only has 15,000 miles on it since it was restored, the tires have less than 500 miles on them and are a year old. If it were not for the rusted out floor, you could drive this car anywhere, although the gas bill would be a bit high. The car is equipped with the Pontiac T/A 6.6 (400 C.I.D.(Option W72)) engine with 4 bbl carb rated at 200hp at 4,000 rpm, and 325-lbs.ft. of torque at 2,200 rpm with a TurboHydramatic 400 transmission running a G80 code positrac rear end. Some Can Ams were built with the 6.6 Litre (403 C.I.D. Oldsmobile) engine with 4 bbl carb., but this one sports the Pontiac motor. The interior is the standard LeMans bench seat, Can Ams were supposed to have bucket seats with a console and floor mounted shifter and full gauge package from the Gran Prix, this car did not get that. The only options of note are A/C which works very good and an AM/FM Stereo radio with 8 Trac tape player which does not work, but the car was and still is an eye catcher and in its day, a heavy hitter in the stoplight wars. That may sound like a bit of a stretch by today's standards but in the mid to late seventies, many cars barely boasted 150hp. The Pontiac 400 has A LOT of torque at low RPM and it can still give a good account of itself from 0 to 60. I installed headers and a custom exhaust along with the old Trans Am style side splitter tailpipes. The shaker hood is functional and at wide open throttle not only does the car feel like it's pushing you into the back seat, it sounds like a P-47 Thunderbolt on wheels. This is not a garage queen, as I said above, I drove this car for over twelve years both city and highway, it has traversed the country and never let me down. After restoration I drove it only on short trips to local car shows and up to a year ago, almost every day to work, I would have continued had not the floor started to give out. She runs fine on pump gas and all I've used in it for the last ten years is Chevron with Techron additive fuel to keep the system clean. The oil has been changed religiously every 3,000 miles using Mobil 1 fully synthetic motor oil, and the transmission has Amsoil fully synthetic fluid in it. The cooling system has been drained and refilled every two and a half to three years and belts and hoses changed at the same time. As stated above, the tires are just about a year old with about 500 miles on them and filled with nitrogen. The car drives straight, no pulling left or right and cruises fast or slow, your choice, although at 70+ it gets a little noisy with the 3.23 rear and that three speed automatic, but power is instantaneous if your foot gets itchy as more than one tail light gazer can attest. It's tough to let this car go, but circumstances are forcing my hand, this is a good solid eye catching machine that makes everyone take notice when you pull in wherever you go, be it the grocery store, the beach, a hamburger joint or a national car show. Hello Kitty plate not included.
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This junkyard '91 Grand Am is as hooptie as it gets
Wed, Jun 29 2016I spend a lot of time in junkyards. A lot of time. With all this experience, I have learned to recognize a perfect hooptie when I see one, a car whose final owner got every last bit of use out of it when its value was hovering right about at scrap value. This 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that I spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service wrecking yard a few days ago, from the final model year for the third-generation Grand Am, checks all the hooptie boxes just right. First of all, it's a low-option coupe with the wretched and unloved GM Iron Duke engine, a rattly, gnashy, thrashy 2.5-liter four-cylinder kludged together using off-the-shelf parts from the Pontiac 301-cubic-inch V8 during the darkest years of the Malaise Era and used in cars whose buyers just didn't care. Most of the paint has been burned off by 25 years of harsh California sun, but the car spent sufficient time in a damp, shady spot for lichens to build up here and there. There are skeletons-with-sombreros stencils sprayed here and there, plus a big moonshine-guzzling skeleton mural painted on the hood. Goodbye, property values! Still, someone felt some affection for this car, giving it the name "Good Ol' Snakey" and painting that name on the decklid. We can assume that the Iron Duke was a bit loose by this time, probably leaving a serpentine trail of blue smoke behind the car at all times. So, the combination of cheapness, ugliness, menace, and who-gives-a-damn functionality make this Grand Am an excellent example of a pure hooptie. Within a couple of months, it will be crushed, shredded, shipped out of the Port of Oakland, and reborn in China as refrigerators and Geely Emgrands. Somewhere in Northern California, though, a few of Ol' Smokey's friends will remember this car fondly.
Junkyard Gem: 1986 Pontiac Fiero GT
Wed, Nov 2 2022If you like affordable, mid-engined two-seaters, the 1980s were your decade. Fiat (and, a bit later, Bertone) offered the X1/9, Toyota sold MR2s, and even General Motors got into the act by creating the Fiero. Available from the 1984 through 1988 model years, the Pontiac Fiero showed plenty of promise but ended up being mostly disappointing, in some ways echoing the career of the Chevy Corvair of a couple of decades earlier. Today's Junkyard Gem is a once-spiffy 1986 Fiero GT, found in a self-service yard near Denver, Colorado. After a long and painful development period stretching all the way back to John DeLorean's XP-833 Banshee (which ended up being a major influence behind the original Opel GT), the Fiero finally debuted in 1983 as a 1984 model. The top-of-the-model-range GT appeared the following year. The Fiero was built as a notchback coupe and as a fastback, with all the GTs being the latter type. I couldn't get the engine lid open, but this car would have left the assembly line (in Pontiac, Michigan) with a 2.8-liter V6 rated at 140 horsepower. This car has a five-speed manual transmission, making it a credible rival for Toyota's MR2. The 1986 MR2 was less powerful than the Fiero GT (112 horsepower versus 140), but also scaled in significantly lighter (2,459 pounds against the Pontiac's 2,780 pounds). The MR2 also cost less, priced at $11,298 while the Fiero GT cost $12,875 (that's about $30,540 and $34,805, respectively, in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars). Meanwhile, the $6,998 Honda Civic CRX two-seater lured away many potential Fiero buyers despite being a front-engined/front-wheel-drive car, and the $7,186 Ford EXP/Mercury LN7 also put a dent in Fiero sales. I can't find a price for the 1986 Bertone X1/9, but it cost a hard-to-believe $13,990 in 1984. GM still was using five-digit odometers in many vehicles by the middle 1980s, but this Fiero has a six-digit unit and thus we can see that it nearly achieved 150,000 miles during its driving career. The 1984-1987 Fiero suffered from a parts-bin suspension design, with the front suspension borrowed from the Chevrolet Chevette and the entire rear transaxle/suspension assembly lifted from the front end of the Chevrolet Citation. For the 1988 model year, GM finally spent the money to design an improved Fiero-specific suspension … and then promptly put a halt to production.
Drive plays Smokey, Bandit with turbo Trans Am
Sun, Jun 28 2015The modern trend for powertrains can be summed up with the simple maxim: cut displacement and add forced induction. Whether you are looking at the just-introduced 2016 Chevrolet Cruze or a BMW M3, this adage holds true. However, Pontiac's attempt at the idea goes all the way back in 1980 with the Firebird Trans Am and its turbocharged 4.9-liter V8. Drive's Mike Musto takes out a 1981 example to explain what makes this largely forgotten muscle car so special, and it certainly isn't performance. While a 4.9-liter V8 might sound like a lot in the modern world, keep in mind that only few years before the second-generation Trans Am was available with up to a staggering 7.5-liters of displacement. Turbocharging of road cars in the early '80s was quite archaic by today's standards, and the Firebird only managed around 200 horsepower with this mill. Without much go, the turbo Trans Am made up for a lack of power with lots of show. As Musto points out, the famous flaming chicken adorns practically every surface you can see on the coupe, and boost lights on the hood illuminate when the turbo is spinning. Musto still finds a lot to like about the turbo Trans Am. He even calls it "Burt Reynolds as an automobile." Find out why the coupe is so special in this entertaining clip.