In the early 1960s, GM’s Oldsmobile and Pontiac divisions responded to the burgeoning personal luxury market with re-trimmed B-body hardtops, the Oldsmobile Starfire and Pontiac Grand Prix. Both were restyled for 1963, taking rather different aesthetic approaches to the same mission, with very different degrees of aesthetic and commercial success. How did the 1963 Grand Prix and Starfire compare? Let’s take a detailed look.
During its lengthy heyday, General Motors spent a remarkable amount of time, energy, and money competing with itself. It could scarcely do otherwise — in this period, GM controlled more than 53 percent of the U.S. market, and it was only in certain segments that its domestic rivals posed any substantial commercial success. GM’s mid-price divisions went at it hammer and tongs, and even when their efforts were ostensibly aimed at some third party, they had a unique talent for stealing each other’s lunch money.

1961 Oldsmobile Starfire / Mecum Auctions
Originally available only as a convertible, the Oldsmobile Starfire had debuted in 1961 as a sporty personal luxury car, lobbed in the general direction of the trend-setting Ford Thunderbird. Unlike the T-Bird, which had its own unique body shell, the Starfire was essentially a well-trimmed Olds 88 convertible with bucket seats, a center console, and big swaths of brushed aluminum side trim. Sales were modest, but Olds kept at it, adding a Starfire coupe for 1962 — the model’s best year, with production totaling 41,988 units.
At that time, Pontiac got into the act with its Grand Prix. Offered only as a hardtop, it was essentially a well-trimmed Pontiac Catalina with the obligatory buckets and console, with a level of interior trim approximating that of Pontiac’s flagship Bonneville. This first Grand Prix did okay, selling 30,195 units for the model year.

1962 Pontiac Grand Prix / Mecum Auctions
For the redesigned 1963 Grand Prix, Pontiac design chief Jack Humbert pulled out all the stops and pulled off most of the exterior trim, leaving a cleanly chiseled shape highlighted by a stacked-quad headlight treatment and a crisp new “formal” roof, both highly influential.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix in Cameo Ivory with 8-lug aluminum wheels / Mecum Auctions
Stripping off extraneous exterior trim was a standard customizer trick, but while it wasn’t wholly without precedent in Detroit (the 1955 Chrysler C-300 had done the same thing), it wasn’t the usual order of things. For one, the auto industry had long relied on external brightwork to signify a model’s position in the hierarchy: The higher the price, the heavier the “gorp” (as contemporary stylists called the brightwork). Having a pricier model with less chrome and frippery could make the sales force very uneasy. For another, as comics artists and graphic designers will tell you, the fewer lines you draw, the more right each of those lines had better be. Here, Humbert’s exquisite draftsmanship really paid dividends: Even with its lack of trim, I would hesitate to call the the 1963 Grand Prix “subtle” or “understated” — as with most Pontiac designs of the early ’60s, the net effect is rather brash — but it is supremely confident from nose to tail, with no need for costume jewelry.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix / Mecum Auctions
By comparison, the 1963 Starfire is (with due apologies to author John Irving) another refugee from The World According to Gorp. Its signature brushed aluminum side spear adds a couple of levels of clutter to a design that already looks overly busy, with its peaked fenders (each topped with a line of stainless steel trim), demi-fins, and crucifix taillights.

1963 Oldsmobile Starfire Coupe in Garnet Mist / Bring a Trailer
There’s a degree of nervous fussiness to this design that reminds me of Chrysler products of this era, which is not helped by the fact that in profile, the Starfire’s roofline looks an awful lot more like a 1963 Dodge Dart GT than I would prefer in a car costing well over $4,000.

1963 Oldsmobile Starfire Coupe / Bring a Trailer

1963 Dodge Dart GT / Bring a Trailer
Although their sail panels are obviously different shapes, both the Starfire and the 1963 Grand Prix share a concave backlight. I suspect the tooling for what automakers call the roof upper was also common to both models. However, I don’t think the average observer would grasp that the Starfire and GP both share the same GM B-body shell — they don’t look at all similar, despite the common rear window design.

1963 Oldsmobile Starfire Coupe / Bring a Trailer

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix / Mecum Auctions
Their exterior dimensions aren’t the same either: The 1963 Grand Prix is 211.9 inches long on a 120-inch wheelbase, 78.2 inches wide, and 54.1 inches high; in keeping with Pontiac’s contemporary “Wide Track” advertising theme, tread width is a sizable 62.5 inches in front, 64.0 inches in back. The Starfire is 2.6 inches longer overall, 214.5 inches on a 123-inch wheelbase, 77.9 inches wide, and 55 inches high, with track widths of 62.2 inches in front and 61.0 inches in back. Not huge differences, or enough to prevent the bodies from sharing significant chunks of their inner structure, but it helps these cars look different from one another.

I think a reasonable person would call this a tail fin, and it seems a bit dated for 1963 / Bring a Trailer
Strictly as a contest of design, I think the Grand Prix wins hands-down. This was a style-driven segment, and the GP’s outstanding tailoring is more appealing than the Starfire’s cluttered and sometimes dated detailing.
Let’s also see how they compare in other significant areas:
Contrast With Line-Mates
Unlike the Thunderbird or the 1963 Buick Riviera, the 1963 Grand Prix and Starfire are dressed-up B-bodies, so it’s reasonable to ask how they compared with the cheaper models in their respective lineups, which offered the same mechanical package and most or all of the same features.
The Grand Prix is fundamentally a plusher Catalina with a different roofline and different trim, so the family resemblance is hard to avoid. A 1963 Catalina hardtop is also a handsome car, and as a practical matter, its chrome side-spear would have some value in crowded parking lots. However, the Grand Prix has dressed for dinner, whereas the Catalina looks like it might be more comfortable parked outside a Bob’s Big Boy. The GP doesn’t obsolete the Catalina (good news for Pontiac, which sold a lot of the latter for 1963), but the Grand Prix does look like the better-dressed, more prosperous older brother.

1963 Pontiac Catalina Sports Coupe / Mecum Auctions

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix Sports Coupe / Mecum Auctions
Even more than in 1962, the 1963 Starfire doesn’t strike me as an improvement on the basic Dynamic 88, whose simpler side spear, less-cluttered grille, and sporty pseudo-convertible hardtop roof (shared with the Catalina Sports Coupe) seem more on-trend for 1963 than the pricier Starfire does. I am a documented sucker for the buckets-and-console interior treatment on the Starfire, but when it comes to the exterior, the Starfire seems like a step down from its cheaper brother — not a good thing in this league.

1963 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 Holiday Coupe / Showdown Auto

1963 Oldsmobile Starfire Coupe / Bring a Trailer
Price
At first blush, the Starfire and Grand Prix wouldn’t seem to be in the same price class: A Starfire Coupe started at $4,129, while the Grand Prix started at only $3,489 — a sizable difference in 1963 dollars. (The Grand Prix seems to have been positioned to compete with the Chrysler 300 two-door hardtop, which started at $3,430.)
However, the Starfire had much more standard equipment, including power steering, power brakes, Hydra-Matic, and a number of other features. Most Grand Prix buyers ordered those things anyway — only a dedicated drag racer or a fool would order a new full-size Pontiac with manual steering or three-speed manual transmission in 1963 — so the actual price difference for typically equipped cars was more like $200. Nonetheless, unless you ordered the Grand Prix with one of the H.O. engines or got really carried away with the dealer-installed accessory list, the Oldsmobile was likely to be more expensive, at least in suggested retail terms.
This didn’t extend to resale values: After three years, the Grand Prix would command an extra $100 in trade compared to the Starfire Coupe. Today, a nice GP is worth a good deal more than the Olds as a collector car, with the hotter powertrains commanding even higher prices.
Performance
Given Pontiac’s performance reputation, you might assume the Grand Prix would easily win this category, but it wasn’t quite that simple.
The Starfire was available with only one powertrain: a high-compression four-barrel version of the familiar 394 cu. in. Olds Rocket V-8, with 345 gross horsepower and 440 lb-ft of torque, linked to a three-speed Model 375 Hydra-Matic transmission with a 3.42 axle. (Oldsmobile marketing in this period was still trying disingenuously to claim this was a “four-stage” transmission, an assertion that continues to mislead uninformed fans; the Model 375 was NOT a four-speed automatic like its predecessor.)

Oldsmobile Starfire 394 cu. in. (6,460 cc) V-8, 345 gross horsepower / Bring a Trailer
Base engine in the Grand Prix was the four-barrel 389, which in standard form made 303 hp and 430 lb-ft of torque while requiring premium fuel. A regular-fuel economy engine withe 235 hp was a no-cost option with Hydra-Matic. There were also several more powerful optional engines, including the rare Super Duty 421 racing engines, which were ill-suited to street use. For civilians, the top choice was the Tri-Power 421 H.O., with 370 hp and 460 lb-ft of torque. Pontiac also offered 21 different axle ratios, half of them obviously aimed at racers. With most of these engines, the Grand Prix came standard with a heavy-duty three-speed manual transmission, which for $231.34 you could replace with either a four-speed manual gearbox or the three-speed Hydra-Matic. The latter was the same Model 375 Roto Hydra-Matic used in the Oldsmobile Starfire, which went into 92.9 percent of all 1963 GPs. (The older four-speed Model 315 Super Hydra-Matic still used on the Star Chief and Bonneville wasn’t available on the Grand Prix.)

Pontiac 389 cu. in. (6,372 cc) Tri-Power V-8, 313 gross horsepower / Mecum Auctions
With the milder available engines and axle ratios, the Grand Prix was definitely slower than the Starfire in a straight line. The white GP featured in this post has the Tri-Power 389; this version of that well-known engine didn’t have the hotter camshaft it used in the later GTO, so it was rated at only 313 gross horsepower, just 10 hp more than the standard Grand Prix engine. With Hydra-Matic and a 3.23 axle, Car Life found that it was a full second slower to 60 mph than the Starfire; Motor Trend‘s standard four-barrel/Hydra-Matic Grand Prix was 0.4 seconds slower still. The 421 H.O. engines were a different story, especially with a four-speed manual (which the Starfire didn’t offer at all), but their greater performance would quickly erase the price difference between the Grand Prix and the Olds: Ordering a 421 H.O. cost an extra $290.84 with a four-barrel carburetor (353 hp) or $403.71 with Tri-Power (370 hp).
Here are some comparative acceleration times. The Starfire and 313 hp Grand Prix figures are from Car Life (February 1963 and May 1963), the 303 hp base and 421 H.O. Grand Prix from Motor Trend (May 1963 and June 1963):
Acceleration (2 aboard) |
Starfire, Hydra-Matic |
Grand Prix, 303 hp/Hydra-Matic |
Grand Prix, 313 hp/Hydra-Matic |
Grand Prix, 370 hp/4-speed |
---|---|---|---|---|
0–30 mph | 3.6 sec. | 3.3 sec. | 3.5 sec. | 3.0 sec. |
0–60 mph | 8.5 sec. | 9.9 sec. | 9.5 sec. | 6.6 sec. |
0–100 mph | 22.4 sec. | N/A | 31.5 sec. | N/A |
Standing ¼ mile | 17.2 sec. at 89 mph | 18.1 sec. at 80 mph | 17.3 sec. at 81 mph | 15.1 sec. at 94 mph |
In testing the 370 hp 421 H.O. (which had the close-ratio four-speed and Safe-T-Track with a 3.42 axle), Roger Huntington calculated that the engine’s actual net output at the clutch was about 320 hp at 4,600 to 4,800 rpm and 415 lb-ft of torque at 3,400 rpm — and this from a completely stock engine that wasn’t quite broken in and suffered some problems with lifter pump-up.
The Starfire was clearly no slouch here, but if you wanted go as well as show, Pontiac had more to offer.
Brakes and Chassis
In standard form, neither the Pontiac nor the Oldsmobile was very good at slowing down. Both had 11-inch drum brakes whose swept area (310 sq. in. for the Olds, 311 sq. in. for the Pontiac, per the AMA specs) was meager for the weight of these cars, which were well over 4,200 lb at the curb.

Pontiac 8-lug aluminum wheels with integral drums were optional on the Grand Prix / Mecum Auctions
Pontiac offered a partial fix in the form of its familiar 8-lug aluminum wheels with integral drums, a highly worthwhile $122.13 option on the Grand Prix. Stopping distances weren’t exceptional with these brakes, and like all drums, they were prone to pulling to one side if heated unevenly, but fade resistance was greatly improved, so if you wanted to be able to stop from 70 mph or more, they were a must. Oldsmobile didn’t offer any such relief, and the Starfire’s standard power brakes were also excessively sensitive, demanding a light touch to avoid premature lockup.

The aluminum wheel/drum combination looked good on the GP as well as reducing brake fade / Mecum Auctions
Like most big American cars of the time, both the Starfire and the Grand Prix were tuned for a cushy ride at the expense of any semblance of handling composure. However, it may surprise you to learn that the standard Grand Prix suspension was actually softer than the Starfire’s, particularly in roll control — Car Life called the standard Grand Prix “a real handful if pressed.” This wasn’t to say the Starfire handled especially well: In addition to stiffer front springs, Oldsmobile had specified a stiffer 1.09-inch front anti-roll bar, which ensured pronounced understeer. Car Life complained that “the deceptiveness of the silent ride and easy speed can betray the driver when he discovers that a corner is sharper than he had anticipated.”

The 1963 Starfire didn’t offer any handling or brake upgrades as factory options / Bring a Trailer
The closest thing the Starfire options list offered to a heavy-duty suspension was stiffer rear springs, intended for trailer towing and probably not very helpful otherwise. Pontiac was more accommodating in this regard, offering both medium-duty and heavy-duty spring/shock absorber packages, for the bargain price of $3.82 and $6.24, respectively, when purchased on a new car. Car Life thought the high-rate package was probably too stiff for most people, but felt the medium-rate set-up provided a big improvement in handling and body control with little sacrifice in ride.
Bottom line: The Pontiac could have better road manners and brakes, but only if you selected certain extra-cost options. In standard form, both of these cars were soft, clumsy, and had very marginal stopping ability.
Interior
Even adjusting for standard equipment, the Starfire was a more expensive car than the Grand Prix, which was evident in its interior trim. The Grand Prix cabin was hardly plain, especially in this example’s white Morrokide, but it lacked the Starfire’s fancy-looking swaths of brushed metal.

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix with white Morrokide upholstery and brown carpeting / Bring a Trailer

1963 Oldsmobile Starfire Coupe with red leather/Moroceen trim and red carpeting / Bring a Trailer
The Starfire also had leather upholstery, although how much of it is actually “Barcelona-grain leather” and how much is Moroceen (vinyl) is an interesting question. Pontiac offered only Morrokide vinyl, although the brochure sniffed, “Expanded Morrokide, you know, is softer and more pliable than leather.”

Grand Prix with white Morrokide upholstery and brown carpeting / Bring a Trailer

Starfire with red leather and Moroceen upholstery and red carpeting / Bring a Trailer

Grand Prix with white Morrokide upholstery and brown carpeting / Bring a Trailer

Starfire with red leather and Moroceen upholstery and red carpeting / Bring a Trailer
One minor point, as you can see from the photo above, was that the longer Starfire console and taller center seat pattern effectively make the Starfire a four-passenger car. (I guess you could stuff a fifth person in there for short trips, but no one would be very happy about it.) The Grand Prix is a bit less restrictive here.
Both cars’ dashboard treatments are very shiny, but fall short of ideal in a number of respects:

Grand Prix with white Morrokide upholstery, brown carpeting, a woodgrain steering wheel, and a dashboard tachometer / Bring a Trailer

Starfire with red leather and Moroceen upholstery, plus an aftermarket under-dash air conditioner / Bring a Trailer
The horizontal speedometer seems out of place in both cars, a cost-driven choice that betrays these models’ kinship with their cheaper siblings. Also, I’m not sure I understand Pontiac’s logic in providing an ammeter, a fuel gauge, and a clock, but not a coolant temperature gauge. I can’t help thinking how much more appealing the Grand Prix interior would be with something like the Rally Instrument Cluster later offered on the GTO, with a round speedometer, an in-dash tachometer, and secondary gauges (although that setup had gauges for everything but battery).

Grand Prix with brown dashboard, secondary gauges, and pushbutton AM radio / Bring a Trailer
A center console was standard on the 1963 Grand Prix, and entitled you to one awkwardly placed console-mounted gauge. With manual transmission, this was a tachometer; with Hydra-Matic, you instead got a manifold pressure gauge, seemingly positioned for the amusement of a small child sitting in the rear center position.

Grand Prix console with Hydra-Matic shifter and manifold pressure gauge / Mecum Auctions
Even with Hydra-Matic, you could still order a tachometer (for $53.80), in this case rather crudely lashed to the left side of the instrument panel. In this position, it’s somewhat easier to see, but still feels like an afterthought.

Grand Prix with dashboard tachometer / Bring a Trailer
The instrumentation situation is even worse in the Starfire, which has only the horizontal speedometer, a fuel gauge, some warning lights, and a clock.

Starfire dashboard with warning lights and AM radio / Bring a Trailer
You did get a tachometer on the Starfire, although its position at the forward end of the console meant you would be lucky to see it was there, much less read what it said. (This car’s aftermarket air conditioner installation presumably doesn’t help.) On the other hand, the three-speed Hydra-Matic didn’t encourage much manual control anyway, so perhaps Oldsmobile wasn’t entirely wrong to treat the tachometer as a cosmetic item.

Starfire had standard Hydra-Matic, console, and tachometer, but the under-dash air conditioner is an aftermarket add-on / Bring a Trailer
Conclusions
The 1963 Grand Prix and 1963 Starfire had similar origins, a similar marketing pitch, and broadly similar prices, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the Grand Prix was the more successful in execution: It still looks great, and with a careful selection of optional equipment, you could order one that was indeed capable of, as Pontiac put it, “grand touring in the best North American manner.” Factoring in the lower price and higher resale values, it’s not surprising that the Grand Prix outsold the Starfire by about 3 to 1 (72,959 units to 25,890). In fact, for 1963, the Grand Prix even outsold the Ford Thunderbird, which was then in the last year of a three-year styling cycle. (That ranking would be reversed for 1964.)

1963 Pontiac Grand Prix / Mecum Auctions
By comparison, the 1963 Starfire lacked much of a USP beyond its bucket seats and center console. As a collector car, its cluttered styling and fancy interior are quirky and fun, but in a year of exceptional automotive designs, it was not impressive, an uneasy melding of ’60s angularity and ’50s overdecoration. If you could live without buckets, a regular Super 88 Holiday Coupe was more tasteful, and little different to drive.

1963 Oldsmobile Starfire / Bring a Trailer
Both these cars have their shortcomings — Roto Hydra-Matic is a big one, with the lack of suitable instrument panels another — but when it comes to the basic question, “Which would you rather have, then or now?” the grand prize goes to the Grand Prix.

The winner and still champion / Mecum Auctions
Related Reading
CCOTY Nomination: 1963 Pontiac Grand Prix (by Kevin Martin)
Curbside Classic – 1963 Pontiac Grand Prix: Another Time, Another Place (by Aaron65)
Curbside Outtake: 1963 Pontiac Grand Prix – Soldiering On (by Ed Stembridge)
Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1962 Pontiac Grand Prix 421 Super Duty – “The Fastest Accelerating Stock Production-Line Car We’ve Ever Tested” (by Paul N)
Vintage Car Life Review: 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix Model SJ – “Tiger In Tuxedo” (by me)
1962 Oldsmobile Starfire Coupe Vs. 1962 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 Holiday Coupe – Thunderbird-Fighter Or Just A Fancier Olds? (by me)
CC Outtake: 1963 Oldsmobile Starfire – The Pageant Loser, But Good Enough For Denise Huxtable (by Laurence Jones)
It’s telling that Pontiac didn’t feel the need to put their name in letters across the front. Olds hadn’t yet found its face.
Fortunately, in America, we can STILL have our own opinions. Not sure how much longer 😕. This is a fair and comprehensive post. But IMO, having a Too much is NEVER enough philosophy, The Starfire outshines ( no pun intended) the Grand Prix. I first saw a 61 Starfire convertible on a vacation with my parents and have loved them ever since. Àt car shows I often see a 61 or 62 Starfire, but Don’t recall seeing a Grand Prix.
FYI, the “woodgrain” steering wheel in the GP pictured in this article isn’t factory. That’s a relatively recent aftermarket wheel.
I love these comparisons! Please consider at least also including a table for data comparisons — it becomes tedious to ferret out, say the wheelbases or the overall lengths from the prose.
FWIW, the GP had a 120″ wb and the Starfire 123″. They both shared the same basic B-body, but Olds and Buicks had a longer front end, where that extra 3″ of wb was. The longer front end of the Starfire is fairly noticeable in profile view.
Great article, interesting topic! Magazine-worthy quality. Put my vote down for the GP, though I do have a soft spot for the Starfire due to it being a model I built as a kid in the 80s, when Johan models were still available off the shelf. In fact, several years ago I found an unpainted body at a swap meet and redid my old model with much better paint this time.
I agree that the Starfire (and all full size 63-64 Olds) definitely have tailfins. Not that I mind that at all, it just seems a little passé for the time. The GP is a car more of its time and undoubtedly had trend-setting, cool styling. The Starfire had more fifties-style flash.
Roto hydramatic the torque converter would shift into two ranges, first and second, giving the transmission 4 speeds. Same principle as a Dynaflow, no one would say the Dynaflow is a single speed transmission.
I prefer the Poncho Grand Prix although I remember a 1964 Olds coupe a friend’s brother had in the 1980’s, I thought it too looked pretty sharp .
When the Grand Prix was new I was drooling over a blue one parked on front of our house on Center Street, my middle class mother was very derisive of it .
I’d love to see GM go back to that supposedly bad divisional infighting .
-Nate
It was really hard to top Pontiac at its own game in the early to mid 1960s. While the Olds has points in its favor, the fresh styling of the Gran Prix showed the way to the future, whereas the Starfire wasn’t quite ready to leave behind the excesses of the late 1950s.
What struck me immediately is the boxy profile of both cars in the first two pictures above. These pictures underscore the fact that both cars share the same body shell despite all the sheet metal and detail differences. At the same time, curved side glass introduced in the 1965 model year made for a far sleeker profile in all the GM lines (although they eventually pushed that look too far in the 1971-76 B and C bodies).
Thanks for this comparison. It’s very helpful to see two different takes on the same concept as the Detroit Three attempted to move toward a sportier definition of luxury in the early Sixties. The Chrysler 300 mentioned above and perhaps the Ford Galaxie XL were two other possibilities a buyer interested in a car of this type may have considered, though the Chrysler still suffered from some weird styling cues in 1963 and the Ford brand may not have communicated the buyers’ aspirations to higher social status as well as the two GM offerings.
I’m not really feeling the Olds’ similarity to the Dodge Dart, but there would seem to be one strong connection, and that’s the concave rear window of the GM products being the inspiration for the even more curved rear window of the 1967 Dart hardtop.
I always thought it was more along the lines of an ersatz, cheaper copy of the 1966-67 GM ‘tunnelback’ rear window but that would seem more directly related to the 1968-70 Dodge Charger.
The Dart hardtop, instead, got a version of the rear window from the 1963 Grand Prix and Chrysler kept it for ten years, all the way up to the final 1976 Mopar A-body hardtop.
The comparison is very stark, with the Starfire losing the styling aspect by a country mile. It’s a bit surprising that Bill Mitchell allowed Olds to keep the Harley Earl school of slathering on more brightwork going this long.
I would be interested to know just how this unique-roof variant of the B body came about. Who instigated it: Olds or Pontiac? My guess is that it was a sop to Olds for Buick getting the lovely Riviera, and Pontiac got in on the action.
The GP was a big deal in 1963. Obviously it was no Riviera, but it was more affordable and it was the crowning touch to the superbly restyled ’63 Pontiac line. I would put 1963 as the best year ever for full-size Pontiacs, and the market responded enthusiastically. Sales increased strongly in’63 and ’64, the peak year for full size Pontiac sales ever (except 1955) with 528k units. A stellar performance.
Obviously you favor the Pontiac , follow the Gm order Chevrolet Pontiac oldsmobile buick Cadillac for the most part marketing was correct really not comparing to each other but as a price point and also why all these divisions were made Chevrolet being the cheapest and certain people bought these and so on anyway oldsmobile was always a nicer car than a Chevrolet or Pontiac and even buick at times as buick was portrayed as a old man’s car but then Cadillac was the ultimate that gm had and kept it that way forever along side oldsmobile being the innovative division until Gm lost its way pretty much , The Stafire was a better looking and all around better car , your comparing two different types of cars , the startfire is a personal luxury coupe and the grand prix is a sports coupe period