July Muscle
March 8th, 2007
1967 Goat – the final year
What do you get when you take a sleeper front wheel drive Tempest designed for Dick van Dike and throw in Pontiac V8 engine from a full-sized family wagon like the Catalina? Well, the greatest car ever made: The GTO.
The GTO is widely considered the first real muscle car, with a name inspired by the Ferrari 250 GTO. The visionaries at Pontiac who first dreamt up the idea for the GTO had to find a loop hold and sneak it under the boss’s nose- initial production was limited to 5,000 cars and was only an option on the base model Tempest.
What separates the best from the rest?
Style: The style for the 1967 GTO remained true to its first generation GTO roots with a few noticeable changes to the keen eye: the front grille was changed to a chrome wire mesh & The fender was relocated to the widened rocker chrome trim. They toyed with the taillights also. But the real change was where the real men look: under the hood…
New engines were offered after Chevrolet nixed the Tri-Power engine: Notably the big dog: 400ci with the 4 barrel carb. With this bad boy there were two options, the regular with the 335hp and the HO with 360. With power like this you got a quarter-mile performance of 14.51 seconds @ 98.79 miles per hour.
GTO sales remained high at 81,722, but that wasn’t enough for Chevrolet. After 1967 they dropped the first generation GTO entirely and replaced it with the Judge, but that my friend is a whole-nother story.