[Auto] A compulsive con man and his first lie: thus was born the sports car that anticipated the Mustang and Camaro

[G h o s t l y.]

 

Sports, especially soccer, coined a metaphor that defines the most radicalized successism, with that of "the second is the first of the losers", a look as unsympathetic as it is debatable. In other fields there are some examples that challenge the verisimilitude of the sentence, as in the automotive industry. Ford Motor Company was not the first to implement the assembly line for the manufacture of cars, but took an idea that Oldsmobile had already put into practice with the Curved Dash, perfected it and massed it with the Model T, no less, of which more than 15 million were sold. Four decades later, the Mustang appeared in 1964 as a materialization of the American dream, a car with poise and sporting features that (like the T) was made available to a salaried middle class and, with almost 60 years of existence, has already been 10 million units put on the street. But, in effect, it was not America's first muscle car, but the second ...
 

The first was born from the minds of a group of General Motors entrepreneurs who met on Saturdays to unleash ideas from their revolutionary minds. These meetings were called What if, or What if in the Spanish translation. They were young people as daring as they were creative, who, in this case, focused one of their ideas for Pontiac. The plan was to answer a question at a time when the market began to demand less grandiose and stately models to satisfy the demand of a generation, the Baby Boomers, who had aspirations of vertigo and freedom on top of a car: “What will happen? if we put a powerful engine in a compact car? "



 

The response was channeled to two protagonists: the Pontiac Tempest and the 389-cubic-inch, or 6.5-liter, V8 impeller, who gave the mentor of that idea the tool he needed to boost both Pontiac and his own career: This is how the GTO was born, the acronym for Gran Turismo Omologato, which was already recognized in large Italian sport models. The growth of the brand was exponential and directly proportional to the John DeLorean, the hidden brain behind the new model, which must have been developed in secret because it was against the rules of GM in those days.
 

DeLorean did not go unnoticed in the automotive industry of the 20th century, and the secret conception of the Pontiac GTO was just the first link in a dizzying career, because as fast as it rose was also the way it descended: that promising young GM star in In the 1960s he died in a public hospital in New York, the city where he lived with his fourth partner in a small one-room apartment.



 

Born in Detroit in 1925, the son of a Ford operator and a General Electric employee, DeLorean had his education interrupted by World War II (he served in the Army), but eventually earned a master's degree in automotive engineering and, later, a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Michigan. He then officially began his automotive career in 1952, by joining the research and development team at Packard Motor Car Company. In no time, he became a rising figure in the industry.
 

In the mid-1950s, Pontiac hired Semon Knudsen as general manager to rejuvenate its range. To achieve this, he teamed up with Pete Estes, the same one who years later was to take credit for dubbing the Camaro "the animal that eats Mustangs." They brought in brilliant young engineers including DeLorean. With them, the Pontiac styling became slimmer and more powerful, with cars lower and wider. At the time, GM was the largest company in the world, but Pontiac, even with the changes, found it difficult to connect with America's youth, a large consumer force driving America's emerging automotive culture.
 

The brand took its new designs to the track, where it fought with other Detroit automakers. The transformation was going from strength to strength until GM bosses instituted an internal competition ban in January 1963, ending the successful game plan that Pontiac had used to rank third in U.S. sales behind Ford and Chevrolet.
 

The solution came from those What if meetings. It was during one of those sessions that the elite engineering team put a 1964 Tempest LeMans coupe prototype on an elevator - it took less than half an hour to fit the 389 engine. Since the external dimensions of the Pontiac blocks were the same size, switching to the larger displacement impeller was relatively simple. The first to handle it was DeLorean, who in turn invited second-rank executives from Pontiac and GM to live the experience, so that they could begin to convince their superiors about the convenience of introducing a vehicle of these characteristics to the market. A true strategist, a snake charmer ...

It was said to be so fun to drive that DeLorean used to have a hard time getting the car back after borrowing it. At this point, the biggest hurdle he faced in putting the car into production was GM's internal policy regarding large engines in small cars - in the case of the GTO, a corporate mandate that called for 10 pounds of vehicle weight per inch. cubic capacity of the engine. In other words, the vehicle had to be 1764 kilos (3,890 pounds) for the power-to-weight ratio to be approved by the parent company, which went against the original plans.