Photo: YouTube/The story behind the car
Tom Gallaher’s YouTube initiative, The Story Behind the Car, offers up some truly remarkable cars, each with a fabulous history, but few, if any, could compete with this GTO. The owner purchased it in high school, but it wasn’t his first car. That honor goes to a 1967 Le Mans, which he inherited a year earlier.
Yet how many car enthusiasts can put their right hand on the air filter cover of their beloved car and swear that it was the first one they bought all those years ago? Not many, I'm sure, but John Grissom is one of them. And not only does he still own the car, he also treats it with the respect and care it deserves. In return, he gets to drive it every weekend and every time there's a car show.
The St. Louis Car Museum held its sixth annual car show a few days ago, and John was there to show off his Tiger GOAT. No, it’s not a monstrous crossbreed, but two of the nicknames the Pontiac GTO has received: one from Pontiac Motor Division and one from its fans. The name most associated with the 1960s muscle car movement, the GTO, is long gone, and so is Pontiac, sadly.
Photo: YouTube/The story behind the car
However, the remaining examples will continue to fly the flag until there is no one left on planet Piston to pay their respects. Given his options, John Grissom's example is not only a sight to behold, but a rare one. Right off the bat, the Plum Mist livery, a new color introduced for the 1967 model year, is one of forty-seven.
Of the 81,772 GTOs assembled for the model's second year as a separate model, the vast majority (67,176) were hardtops, just like this one. Nearly half of Pontiac's muscle cars that year had an automatic transmission (nearly 42,600). However, only 13,827 came with the 360-hp High-Output V8.
Pontiac's 400 cubic inches (6.6 liters) of power came from a four-barrel carburetor and 10.75:1 compression. It was the absolute top of Pontiac's midsize line and second best overall, after the famous 376-horsepower, 428-cubic-inch (7.0 liter) Grand Prix. Pontiac translated cubic inches to liters as “6.5 liters,” probably because of the 4.12-by-3.75-inch cylinder dimensions.
Photo: YouTube/The story behind the car
The big engine measures exactly 399.95 cubic inches or 6,553.98 cubic centimeters in absolute numbers. John's V8, on the other hand, received a thirty-cubic bore, so it now measures 405.8 cubes (6,649.8446 CC, to be precise). The owner also installed a hotter cam, so the 360 hp and 438 lb-ft (365 PS, 594 Nm) that the factory claimed are no longer valid.
The story of the car is touching: John spent many hours with his father working on the car before he died. His grandmother (his father's mother) helped him through his grief and loss, overcoming her own grief after losing not only a son but also a brother in six months. However, the woman found the resources to ensure that her grandson took care of the car and made him a deal: she would help him with the money, but he would have to have the car restored.
John tells the story better than anyone, so play the video and listen to him recall all the ups and downs of rebuilding the frame. He got a quote from a restorer for the car, but at $35 an hour and about a thousand hours of work, it was way out of John's budget at the time. Nonetheless, he went ahead and finished the job.
Photo: YouTube/The story behind the car
He still occasionally takes the car to its natural setting, namely the speedway, where he clocked a 14.34-second quarter-mile sprint (with his son in the car as a passenger), trapping 95 mph (153 km/h). Because it’s an automatic, with a dual-paddle shifter for both full manual control and seamless automatic shifting, and it also has air conditioning, the rear gear is 3.55.
I noticed that this car is rare, but the color isn't the only scary feature: cruise control is not something commonly found on 1967 Pontiac GTOs, and the wire wheel discs are also nice and rarely seen. The first ones are original to the car, by the way; that's how John bought it from the original buyer. The interior has been redone; the entire restoration project took 15 months (it was a one-man operation, working 30 hours each week).
The odometer currently reads 28,654 miles (46,114 km). However, you have to add the 100,000 miles (161,000 kilometers) that the odometer does not show after it flipped. However, it is a super nice GTO with a fantastic history and is worth every dollar, cent and nickel that John has spent so far.
