Purebred Warrior

Tony Oliveira’s ’69 GTO is Stirring up the Pontiac Faithful

- Rod Short

Making what once was old into something new is what hot rodding is all about. Yet sometimes the dream of what you want can go a bit astray. That’s what happened when a young Tony Oliveira bought a big-block ’68 Chevelle. Tony had always admired the lines of these GM A-bodies and got just what he wanted, but inside the engine bay sat a 455 Pontiac rather than a 454 Chevy. “Well, at least it was a GM engine,” he says. “I didn’t have the money to take it out and put a Chevy engine in it, so I became known as the guy with a Chevy with a Pontiac motor. I was made fun of, but at that time I didn’t have the money to switch the motor out, so I stuck with what I had then.” It was a combination that served him well because at that age Tony did a lot of street racing with the car around Southern Maryland and Washington D.C. After they came up against the car, nobody had anything to say then. Even though things were going well, deep down inside, having a Pontiac engine in a Chevy never did feet quite right. He wouldn’t let that happen again.

Marriage and then kids eventually came into Tony’s life and then finally one day it was time for the Chevelle to go. The engine went to one buyer while the car went to another. “The guy who bought the car didn’t want the engine because he had a 396 to put in it,” Tony says. “That led me to another guy who’d always said that he’d buy the motor, so it found a new home with him.” That passion for muscle cars, racing, and speed was temporarily put on the shelf and forgotten.