An internationally known automotive journalist, John L. Stein has written about cars and motorcycles for over 20 years. He served as Editor of the award-winning Corvette Quarterly, was one of the charter editors of Automobile Magazine, and Road Test editor at Cycle magazine. He has written for Autoweek, Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Vintage Motorsport, Motorcycle Classics, Classic Bike, Cycle World, Motorcycle.com, Classic Racer, and Hagerty.
Learn more about John here.
Even among collectors, it is perhaps unusual to own the exact same car twice, with 40 long years separating the two experiences. I first bought this Pontiac GTO in 1981, after discovering it with a scattered clutch in a Sierra Nevada meadow. After torturing it for a summer, I sold it on, only to rediscover it four decades later and 1,500 miles away. Naturally, I reacquired it. In my 20s, a ragtop Goat with a 4-speed was cooler than hell. It never bothered me that the GTO lacked power steering and brakes and offered little sound insulation, no air conditioning, and […]
Even among collectors, it is perhaps unusual to own the exact same car twice, with 40 long years separating the two experiences. I first bought this Pontiac GTO in 1981, after discovering it with a scattered clutch in a Sierra Nevada meadow. After torturing it for a summer, I sold it on, only to rediscover it four decades later and 1,500 miles away. Naturally, I reacquired it.
In my 20s, a ragtop Goat with a 4-speed was cooler than hell. It never bothered me that the GTO lacked power steering and brakes and offered little sound insulation, no air conditioning, and relatively few safety, comfort or convenience features. The top went down, the revs went up, and it projected all the attitude. That was good enough.
After reacquiring the car in 2021, however, I discovered with a start that I’ve… evolved? So much time has gone by that I struggle to comprehend having been young in this car. It is familiar and yet unfamiliar, and moreover, usable but useless.
What happened?
Although the GTO was restored in between my ownership stints, it’s still fundamentally as before. While it hasn’t really changed, the world sure has, and so have my feelings about it. What once seemed a brutally fast car is now just mildly satisfying. It will still smoke the rear tires, but the modern radials hook up vastly better than the old bias-plys, so the car is no longer tail-waggingly frisky.
The big engine’s free-breathing dual exhausts, coupled with the uninsulated ragtop, are taxing. Was this car as loud back in the day? I didn’t used to think twice about driving 500 miles with the top up or down. But these days, I wear a hat, sunscreen and sunglasses, maybe even earplugs to keep the sound pressure from haunting my already hammered ears.
Fronting a Muncie gearbox and 3.55 axle, the 400-ci V8 turns nearly 3,300 rpm at 70 mph. I dislike the idea of those coffee-can-sized pistons flailing away at these high speeds for miles and miles, so I slow down. How embarrassing, then, is it to relegate oneself to the right lanes in a Masters of the Universe car like this? Plenty.
Yet that’s typically where I find myself. We seldom drove so fast back in the day, due to 55-mph speed limits and the prevalence of lightly trafficked two-lane roads. Surrounding traffic wasn’t that rapid, either. But today, it seems like everything from a Kia Soul to a Ford F-250 SuperCab to a Tesla Model S goes much, much faster. It makes me hesitate to take the GTO on the interstate.
A plan comes together
So what am I doing with this car, then? That’s a good question. Currently, I’m pondering how to evolve the old Goat from being good in my past life to great in my present and future lives — and I’m separating sentimentality from reality.
My biggest step will be doing something to drop the cruising revs below 3,000. This can be accomplished via an OE-spec 3:08 axle “upgrade,” by installing a Tremec 5- or 6-speed gearbox, or by hitching up a Gear Vendors planetary-gearset overdrive. That will make the biggest potential improvement in noise, vibration and harshness.
At this point, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that I’ll install a Vintage Air system, along with a supplemental electric fan for the aluminum radiator.
A previous owner rebuilt the engine to Pontiac’s period Ram Air specs, so it is cammy and brash and doesn’t want to be hampered by more-restrictive mufflers. Therefore, an infusion of Dynamat inside the floors and doors is in order to help quiet things down. Unfortunately, little can be done about the thin canvas top. This is, after all, a commodity American car that’s over 50 years old.
Collectively, these mostly bolt-on mods should meaningfully widen the GTO’s dynamic bandwidth, improve comfort and confidence, and enable extended trips in hot weather. But they won’t really address the gap between the actual experience of the car and my memory of its idealized past.
