If you’re like me, you love muscle cars. You love the sound they make, the way they look and what they represent. The Pontiac GTO is one of the first cars that was marketed as a muscle car and it still lives in the minds of car lovers everywhere.
The GTO was actually born out of one man’s fight against the establishment. John Z. Delorean, a chief engineer at the Pontiac company, wanted to create a “mild-mannered mid-sized sedan” with a big V8 engine. That sounds simple enough to me.
Delorean began making his creation in 1963 with some other engineers. They used the previous year’s model – the Tempest – for their basic shell. Since it had a four-cylinder engine with a V8 mount, they figured it shouldn’t be a problem to install a larger engine into this vehicle. After some experimentation, the engineers completed a prototype that was ready for the finishing touches.
Delorean, of course, had the honor of naming the car. He named it the Gran Turismo Omologato. In English, that translates into Grand Touring Homologated, or simply GTO for short.
At the time an exotic car company was using the same initials for one of its models, too. But since you can’t copyright initials, Pontiac still used the GTO moniker for its new muscle car. It started out as a car with 325 horsepower, dual exhausts, three-speed manual transmission, heavy-duty suspension and other features you’d expect from a fast muscle car.
Today, you can get a new or used GTO at your local Pontiac dealer. Drive a piece of history down the highway and appreciate what the muscle car represents in American culture before the hybrid revolution takes over!
