One for the kids

General Motors was aiming squarely at the youth market with the launch of the Pontiac GTO 60 years ago, and its runaway success popularised the muscle-car movement

- COLIN GOODWIN

Decades before he famously underwent much cosmetic surgery, dated famous actresses, started a sportscar company and twisted Margaret Thatcher's arm for the UK government to bankroll a factory in Northern Ireland - and long before he was arrested for allegedly setting up a cocaine deal - John Zachary De Lorean was chief engineer of the Pontiac division at General Motors.

De Lorean, as well as being a talented engineer, understood car culture and, in particular, youth culture. He'd seen the rise of hot-rodding and the birth of drag racing, and he realised that if a car was built to appeal to a youth audience and priced so those youngsters could buy it, he would be on to a winner.

In 1962, Pontiac had built for super-stock drag racing a small-volume run of Super Duty Catalinas that featured exotic aluminium front wings, bonnets and bumpers, plus body frames drilled for lightness. They were expensive and not suited to street driving. De Lorean had a better plan: take an intermediate-size car, in this case a Pontiac Tempest Le Mans, and drop in a large engine from the full-size models.

Specifically, the division's 389cu in V8. It was an easy job because, unlike Chrysler, Ford and other GM-division V8 engines, Pontiac's unit had the same external block dimensions whether its capacity was 326cu in or 421cu in, so it slotted into the Tempest's engine bay with virtually no modifications.

The result was the Pontiac GTO. According to De Lorean in an interview in 1994, the name wasn't intended to ape the Ferrari 250GTO that had been launched in 1962; it was simply intended to give the car a strong whiff of sportiness and a European flavour.

One slight hitch was that GM had an internal ban on engines above 330cu in being fitted to intermediate-sized models, but De Lorean and his team got around this problem by presenting the new, larger engine as an option on the Tempest.