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Muscle Cars were about one thing:
Neck-snapping acceleration. They offered anyone with a drivers license and a credit rating instant access to a vehicle that the neighborhood gearhead often took years to customize – a real hot rod. Pickup drag racing was a national pastime, a muscle-flexing test of status. Custom car builders had long understood that the secret of speed was horsepower-to-weight ratio. When car weight was divided by horsepower, the lowest number would be fastest. So local speed demons were always stuffing bored-out V-8s from the '50s into stripped-down cars like the 1932 Ford "deuce" coupe. In the '60s manufacturers began to turn out huge 400-cubic-inch engines for luxury cars but did little to soup them up.
The GTO changed that scene. Straight off the dealer's lot in 65 came a light car stocked with a 389-cubic-inch engine cranking out 360 horsepower! Customers who looked under the hood
saw something unprecedented in a production American auto – three carburetors. The amount of fuel those triple two-barrel carbs could slosh into a Pontiac V-8 was staggering. Four miles per gallon was a bragging
point – the more gas in the engine, the greater the horsepower. What perfect timing: The first wave of baby boomers was zooming into the car market. Pontiac's success was immediately mimicked by the Olds 442 (the
numbers stood for 4-barrel carb, 4-on-the-floor, and dual exhausts), the Buick Gran Sport and the Chevy Malibu SS. Within a year, Chrysler and Ford joined the race too. The U.S. was on its way to the moon – and so
were we.
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