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Call of Duty - Pontiac Trans Am

It’s as if a Tyrannosaurus Rex had ducked in a cave when the meteor struck, stayed put until the weather improved and then popped out to carry on as normal. While everyone else took the tightening smog regulations and the oil crisis as a cue to can all their serious muscle cars, Pontiac carried on with only a slight drop in compression ratio to disappoint the serious street racer. The 1973 Trans Am could still be bought with an X-code engine, the 455cu.in. V8 that made 310bhp and wheel-warping amounts of torque, and even by ’74 it had dropped only as far as 290bhp.

Sure, these numbers are a long way off the various rare semi-race engines that different manufacturers allowed onto the street in the late Sixties, but hardly anyone actually bought those and still fewer used them as everyday cars. Then there are the rumours of the true power output being some 50-70bhp higher than the factory listing for the Super Duty. Yes, lots of muscle cars enjoy this kind of dubious kick to their reputation, but there’s some logic in this case.

The X-code engine wasn’t just a Y-code with a different carb, it had a different block with strengthening webs, aluminium pistons, forged rods with huge 7/16 inch rod bolts, a high-lift camshaft and carefully redesigned intake, plus a set of rather special cylinder heads with larger ports, swirl-polished valves and higher-grade valvetrain equipment. Saying you’d need all that to keep an engine intact if it was only turning out 310bhp invites a few raised eyebrows.

Whatever the truth, the ’73 Trans Ams didn’t sell in wild amounts – just 4802 for the model year. However, every one of those came with a 455cu.in. V8, either the standard 250bhp Y-code, or the Super Duty X-code, which puts the rivals in the shade somewhat. The Trans Am’s closest competitor was its fellow F-body offering from Chevrolet, the Camaro Z28. But the fire-breathing SS Camaros were dead by ’73 and the Z28 version only came with a small block, albeit one claiming 245bhp. But the edge, and the image, wasn’t really there any more.

Then there was the Mustang, of course; the car that the Firebird and Camaro had been created to fight off. If you really wanted to, you could buy an ‘aircraft carrier’ 1973 Mustang with a four-barrel, 266bhp version of the 351cu.in. V8, but not many did – the image was rapidly evolving into the Personal Luxury sector rather than a cool, affordable pony car, or a butch muscle machine. Every other engine was down under 160bhp.

F-body brethren

The only other opposition you could really identify came from within GM, and that was the Corvette. The Trans Am and its hotter F-body brethren were always capable of putting a foot in each camp – sports car and muscle car – and it’s probably this clever sizing and design that ensured its survival. Either that, or someone was channelling the spirit of John DeLorean, the ex-Pontiac boss and originator of the GTO, who left to set up on his own in ’73. It didn’t take a genius to see that if everyone else had stopped making proper muscle cars, then that left a significant gap in the market.

Sadly, the sales of the ’73 and ’74 Trans Ams didn’t really bear out that theory. That figure, or 4802, wasn’t much against the 41,000-odd lower powered Firebirds or the 90,000 Camaros that GM shifted. It seemed people really were ready to move on from hairy-chested engines and painful gas mileage. Indeed, the Trans Am package offered a less thirsty 400cu.in., 225bhp unit as the base engine in ’74, and sales leapt again to 10,000.

But while the Y-code and Super Duty options remained, it seemed the writing was on the wall, and by 1975 even Pontiac gave up the struggle and everyone settled down to some grim years of gutless, strangled big blocks hauling over-decorated land yachts around, while four-cylinder subcompacts gave America a taste of what the rest of us had been enduring.

Ho hum. Shall we accentuate the positive? Thankfully, these bullnose Trans Ams now have a big following. Plenty of us appreciate Pontiac’s refusal to leave the muscle car party on time and go home to bed. The temptation is of course to get the spanners out and release some of the latent power tied up in those huge 455cu.in. engines. After all, that’s 7456cc, so starting with only 250bhp in Y-code form should give you reason to expect much more with some high-compression pistons and a decent cam.

Andy Georgallis of Wimbledon fell prey to this temptation when he removed the engine of his ’73 Y-code Trans Am to detail the engine bay. But before we get onto the greasy bit, here’s some background: ‘I had a genuine 1974 Trans Am Super Duty way back in the early Eighties,’ he says. ‘I’d fancied another one for ages but you don’t see many of them. Then, about five years ago, a mate of mine said there was one in Wimbledon auctions, and sure enough I saw it sitting in the car park. I got talking to the owner, who was a driver for the auction company, and we did a deal.

‘It was black back then, with a big Pontiac decal on the side and gold turbo ‘Vette wheels, and I wasn’t wild about its looks. It didn’t even run properly, but a trip to Gary’s Shack Motors in Wimbledon for a service cured that.’

The itch

Andy used the car for a while, but began to get the itch to ‘make something of it’. It was a numbers-matching Y-code car, so he removed the original engine, which he still has, and rather than just tidy the paint and put it back he formed another plan.
‘I got a new engine built up from a 455 block by Peter Knight. We used a Butler Performance kit to basically build the engine to Super Duty spec, only the power output from the parts they offer these days is a good deal higher – I think something around 500bhp is what they reckon,’ says Andy.

There wasn’t much point going to town on the engine if Andy didn’t like the rest of the car as well, so it went to Wilf Stacey in Canvey Island for a bare metal respray. As many of you will know, this can expose all manner of things you wish you’d never seen, and by the time the car was ready for paint, Wilf had replaced the panel behind the rear window, both rear arches, the rear valance and the door skins, which he made himself after the replacements they were offered weren’t a good enough fit.

‘The colour we chose was Buccaneer Red,’ says Andy. ‘It’s the original colour for this car according to the 575 code on the chassis plate. It was hand-blocked all over and the finish really is super straight.’ There was work to be done underneath too, where Hotchkiss suspension kits lowered the front by two inches and the rear by one and a half, stiffening the car up in the process. ‘It goes round roundabouts like an Audi Quattro now,’ says Andy. That we’d like to see!

The grip is obtained from a pair of 7x15in BF Goodrich tyres on the front, with 8x15s on the back. To get the power from that mighty mill to the road, Andy gave the Turbo 350 automatic ‘box to Robin at Auto Pontiac, who rebuilt it with upgraded clutches, bands and a TransGo shift kit. The rear axle was built up from brand new parts by Webster Racing. When it was time to get the whole lot back together, the body received all new rubber seals and weather-stripping, while the interior enjoyed a set of new carpets. ‘The seats are original,’ says Andy. ‘They’re still good, but I’ve got a set of covers for when they do wear out.’

Thumbs up

That may take some time, as the car has seen less than 1500 miles of use since all this work was done in 2007. But that works out as roughly one prize every 200 miles, as Andy’s taken the car to five shows and won seven times, including three at Billing alone. A highly-tuned big block V8 is not the engine of choice for regular use round south-west London, and Andy does have the excuse of two other American vehicles to keep the T/A’s use low: he’s the owner of the silver and blue ’55 Chevy featured recently in Classic American and his regular drive is a Harley-Davidson model Ford F150. He must be good mates with the people in his local petrol station.

‘Not just the local petrol station,’ he says. ‘Whenever I stop at any petrol station in this people come over and chat or give me the thumbs up. You make new friends everywhere.’ Can you blame them? The next time you’re watching the Men’s Final at Wimbledon and Nadal is put off his serve by what sounds like a dinosaur roar, you know it’s just Andy gunning the T/A up Church Road.

Words: Nighel Boothman    Photography: John Wallace