Although the muscle car era had mostly wound down by the arrival of GM’s “Colonnade” A-body intermediates in 1973, there were still some people who coveted a new Pontiac GTO. Unfortunately, quite a few of those buyers couldn’t afford the payments, or the often-brutal insurance surcharges. For those buyers, Pontiac offered the LeMans Sport Coupe, which provided a hint of sportiness in a more affordable package. This first-year Colonnade Sport Coupe even has the very rare floor-shifted 3-speed manual transmission.
When the restyled “Colonnade” A-body intermediates arrived for 1973, Pontiac still offered a sporty GTO package for the LeMans coupe. This final midsize GTO was no longer what it once was, in style or performance, but the $368 option package did give you the 400-4V engine, heavy-duty 3-speed manual transmission, dual exhausts, fat tires on 15-inch wheels, uprated suspension with front and rear stabilizer bars, and a special hood with NACA-style hood scoops. A 4-speed manual was still optional.
The early 1973 options list also promised additional enticements like the ultra-hot SD-455 engine (which was delayed due to emissions certification problems and would only ever make it to production under Firebird hoods), and a functional Ram Air system (which would never make it to regular production at all).
Even if all this desirable performance hardware had actually been available, it was now unaffordable for a lot of the buyers who might have wanted it. One of my family’s favorite cliches when I was growing up was “champagne tastes on a beer budget.” For early ’70s Pontiac fans, you could have restated that as “SD-455 tastes on a 350 budget.” True, a modestly equipped GTO with the 400 or non-SD 455 engine wasn’t really THAT expensive for this era, but even if you could swing the monthly payments, insurance was another matter altogether, and you’d still be paying for that long after the car itself was paid off.
Pontiac offered many ways to order the various equipment — you could get the big engines, the handling package, or the sporty trim à la carte if you preferred. Unfortunately, if you wanted to go fast as well as look fast, your insurance company was unlikely to cut you a break just because your car didn’t have GTO identification. Some insurers also saw a 4-speed gearbox as a sign of actuarially worrisome Sporting Intent, and even a four-barrel carburetor might bring trouble unless you were buying a Bonneville.
However, if you were cautious about options, you could still “build” a LeMans Sport Coupe that looked tough and was at least somewhat fun to drive without breaking the bank or causing your insurance agent to laugh like the Joker.
“Sport Coupe” had previously been GM-speak for a two-door pillarless hardtop, but the Colonnade intermediates no longer offered those, so Pontiac applied the name to a separate model. A 1973 LeMans Sport Coupe cost $88 more than a standard LeMans coupe, which bought you rear quarter window louvers, special interior and exterior badges, some woodgrain trim on the glove box lid, and your choice of bucket seats or a notchback bench with a fold-down armrest.
I must emphasize that the car pictured here is not especially original. As far as I can determine, its current shade of orange (applied in 2018) was not a shade Pontiac offered when this car was new. The bumpers have been “tucked,” with their hydro-pneumatic energy-absorbing struts removed. The vinyl interior was reupholstered, there’s a faux carbon fiber trim panel around the instrument bezels that didn’t come from the factory, there are aftermarket gauges under the dash, and it has an aftermarket stereo system. However, except perhaps for the simulated carbon fiber, this is the kind of thing an enthusiast on a budget might have done with one of these cars in the early ’70s.
The orange car has a GTO ducted hood, although not the under-hood scoop and gaskets that would have made it functional. Pontiac originally announced that a functional Ram Air system would be a $56 option for the 1973 GTO, but the system didn’t pass muster with drive-by noise regulations, so it was dropped before introduction. Parts were very briefly available over the counter, but they’re extremely rare and hard to find.
Standard engine on the 1973 LeMans was the Chevrolet 250-cid six with 100 hp, but over 98 percent of LeMans buyers chose a V-8. This car has the cheapest of the available options, the L30 350-2V, which listed for $118 and normally boasted a modest 150 hp. Pontiac didn’t offer a 350-4V option on the LeMans this year, but you could add dual exhausts, which gave the 350 an extra 25 hp and 10 lb-ft of torque for just $30. This car has the duals, giving it a rorty exhaust note if not blistering acceleration.
The orange car’s floor-shifted M13 3-speed manual transmission was quite unusual. Stick shift was increasingly rare on intermediates — almost 97 percent of 1973 Pontiac A-body production had Turbo Hydra-Matic — and you had to pay extra for floor shift even with the 3-speed. Although it was much cheaper than a 4-speed stick, the M13 option’s $82 price tag was enough to dissuade penny-pinchers, and you definitely wouldn’t get that money back at trade-in or resale time. So, I think the M13 was probably mainly sold to buyers who wanted to do a little sporty driving, but couldn’t afford the 4-speed and/or feared their insurance company would penalize them for it.
For people who couldn’t afford the insurance on a GTO, Pontiac offered a GT option for the LeMans that included the floor shift, dual exhausts, and RWL tires on Rally II wheels, plus some other cosmetic items. The orange car pictured here has much of that equipment, but it lacks the GT identification, stripes, and wheel arch moldings (and the wheels have trim rings, which weren’t included with the GT group), so I think the other features were either ordered separately or added after the fact. It also has power brakes ($46) and power steering ($113).
With those options and an AM radio, this LeMans Sport Coupe would have listed for just about $3,500, a modest price for a new car in 1973. Even with limited options, this was still a 3,900 lb car, so it wasn’t going to win a lot of street races, and its 15 mpg economy would seem overly thirsty once the oil embargo hit. The early Colonnade LeMans was also prone to rust and rattle. However, equipped like this, the LeMans Sport Coupe had a sporty look and a sporty sound, and if it wasn’t quite a GTO, it was at least a lot easier on the wallet.
Related Reading
Curbside Find: 1973 Pontiac LeMans Coupe – A Strong Start to a Weak Finish (by Dave Skinner)
Cohort Classic: 1973 Pontiac GTO – Insurer’s Special (by Gerardo Solis)
Curbside Classic: 1973 Pontiac LeMans Sport Coupe With Floor Shifter – A Victim Of Fashion (by Rich Baron)
CC Tech: 1973-77 GM Colonnade Chassis Design – Corner Carving through the Brougham Era (by VinceC)
The “tucked” bumpers improve the looks of this car immensely, and the mixture of added options make it very attractive, along with the 3 speed floor shift. I like it!! 🙂
That remind me of this “Phantom” 1975 GTO Judge then someone created. I saw some pics at a website archived on the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090725074140/https://ultimategto.com/cgi-bin/showcar.cgi?type=lot&pic=/pasture/75judge2
It inspired me to play with Google Whisk AI to see that one elsewhere like in Patagonia plateau of Southern Argentina. ^^;
https://www.deviantart.com/stephdumas/art/Phantom-1975-Pontiac-GTO-by-Google-Whisk-AI-1288545383
I understood the poor man’s way back in March 1979. I was looking to buy my first new car and wanted a Firebird. The lowest price ones on the lot were $8000 V8 automatic Esprits. The salesman who had come out of the showroom could see my disappointment. He said, “lets order you one!” Base price was $5079.95. Base engine V6, check. I asked about the 4-speed, but required a V8. Nope. The standard RPO code MM3 3-speed manual will be my no cost transmission. (Only 0.8 percent of the over 211K Firebirds built in 1979 had 3-speed manuals) I did specify spoiler, body colored Rally II wheels, RWL tires, sport mirrors and Nocturne Blue. My girlfriend was with me and she said if I wanted to keep dating her, (we had been dating about 2 months) I would order A/C. (Live in Louisiana) Asking about the price for A/C, it was going to add $529! Ouch! Ok, check the A/C. Also ordered a RPO code UM1 AM and Stereo 8-track tape player. Just over $6500 for a new 1979 Firebird. It was sharp looking, but was slow. Added a rear sway bar from a wrecked Z-28 and replaced the front sway bar with a 1.25 inch Trans-Am bar. That’s all I did to her. Drove it until our first son was born in 1983 when it was traded for a sedan.
Wow, I would never have imagined that a 3 speed floor shift was an option on these. In fact, I am not sure I have ever seen a manually shifted colonnade car of any kind in real life.
I do vividly remember how un-impressive the 2 bbl 350 was in my mother’s 74 Luxury LeMans sedan. Try as I might (and I tried it at least 2 or 3 times as a stupid teen) I could never find enough road to get that car to 100 mph. That engine with a 3 speed would have been interesting to experience. Or maybe not.
The floor shift being optional means that, technically, a three-on-the-tree was standard. I wonder how many of those were built (and are still around).
There were 5,897 1973 Pontiac A-bodies with 3-speed manual transmission, about 2.4 percent of production. I don’t have any breakdown of column-shift versus floor-shift, but since the latter cost extra, I’m guessing the column-shift variety was more common.
That’s a whole lot more 3-speed Pontiac A-bodies than I would have ever guessed. Then, again, I would imagine the vast majority were sedans, too.
I wonder who was buying them so equipped. Municipal fleets? Probably with the six-cylinder engine, too.
I do vividly remember how un-impressive the 2 bbl 350 was in my mother’s 74 Luxury LeMans sedan.
This is where the optional dual exhausts came in: they raised output by an additional 25 net hp; that would have made a very palpable difference.
Another very graphic example of the very substantial benefits of dual exhaust. For only $30, net (actual) horsepower increased from 150 to 175. This has to just about be the cheapest factory performance upgrade ever. Dual exhausts provided a much more dramatic impact on net hp because gross hp was measured with an open exhaust, making the difference essentially meaningless.
Here’s more details on that:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/engines/1966-220-hp-283-chevrolet-v8-a-one-year-oddity-that-proves-the-power-of-dual-exhausts/
Holy carp! $82 to move the shifter from the column to the floor?? That’s $575 in today’s dollars!! And I’d bet the floor shifter cost GM *less* in parts than all of the pivots and linkages and the special steering column that made 3-on-the-tree function.
No wonder the 3-speed on the floor was so rare.
If I recall correctly, to move the 3 speed shifter to the floor of my ’72 Nova was $16.
It’s not primarily the cost of the parts; it’s the inconvenience and slowdown on the production line for such a rare item. Time is money.
For the next generation of A-body, GM eliminated the column-shifted manual entirely. That made the floor shifter free 🙂
Even then that seems like an arbitrary number, what was the take rate for 3 on the column Collonades? Both had to be well in the distance of automatic equipped cars (column or console shift) in production, and the installation process of a column shifter is more complex than the floor shifter.
I think the M13 floor-shift option may actually have been a different, heavy-duty 3-speed transmission, rather than the Saginaw three-on-the-tree with a different linkage.
It would make sense since the M13 floor 3-speed was also what came standard with the Goat’s 400.
The 1973 Lemans Sport Coupe seems like one the last gasps of the budget, intermediate musclecar that began with such fervor in the 1968 Road Runner, not unlike the previous Tempest GT-37 or Chevelle Heavy Chevy.
The closer equivalent to the Heavy Chevy or GT-37 was really the GT option, which combined the features of the orange car (dual exhausts, 3-speed floor shift, Rally II wheels) in a single package. That was distinct from the Sport Coupe, which was basically just the window louvers and the seat, and came standard with the same 250 six and three-on-the-tree as a basic LeMans. (You could order the GT option on a LeMans Sport Coupe, but they weren’t tied together.)
This particular car is not a GT, although it has most of the pieces, which you could also order separately. I don’t know if the original buyer figured it was a way to save a few bucks or just didn’t want the GT identification stuff. Maybe both, and I’m not sure if the Rally II wheels were originally ordered with the car or if they were added later, since a lot of people do that.
A neat car but this early colonnade style was very off putting to me .
-Nate
I love cars like this, the more basic models with a few key factory options to create something personal, if it were mine I would delete the wheel trim rings
Interestingly, the GT package — which this car resembles, but isn’t — DID have the Rally II wheels without trim rings, although it also had stripes and some more chrome moldings.
I can’t believe insurance companies had a surcharge for a four-speed manual. Many people who wanted 4- or 5-speed manuals in the mid-’70s bought them primarily for better highway fuel economy and quieter freeway cruising due to lower revs.
Nowadays, automatic transmissions (whether conventional, dual-clutch, CVT, or other) usually have faster acceleration than the same car with a manual. But my insurance company isn’t reducing my price because my car doesn’t have an automatic, and has only 6 gears rather than the 8 the auto trans would have had.
Yes, in the mid-late ’70s, after the energy crisis and no more hi-po engines, that was undoubtedly the case. But thus car, and others before it, came out before the energy crisis.
Many things have changed since 1974. But maybe you could petition your insurance company and explain that your car is slower?
If the car had a V-8, four speed manual was a red flag to insurance companies. Another was anything less than a 10:1 curb weight to gross hp ratio.