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A Great Idea...G reat T o O wn!
One day in the early '60s, Pontiac's chief engineer, John Z. DeLorean, took a long hard look at the company's poor-selling answer to the com- pact, an economical piece of transportation
called the Tempest. It was smallish, stodgy and barely powered by a cranky four-cylinder engine. Thinking like a teenager, DeLorean had mechanics drop the meanest V-8 he could find into the light Tempest body. Then
he drove off, looking for competition at the nearest traffic light. Soon friends and colleagues were asking to borrow the keys: "I could never get it back, they had so much fun with it."
Pontiac's sales manager predicted, "You won't sell two or three thousand," and so DeLorean was only able to persuade the company to gear up for 5,000 of the cars, named for
Ferrari's Gran Turismo Omologato. Within a year, more than 60,000 GTOs had peeled out of the showroom, and an all-American phenomenon was born.
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