Car and Driver really raised its profile (and notoriety) with its comparison of a Pontiac GTO against a Ferrari GTO. The Pontiac was insanely fast, thanks to lots of prepping by Royal Pontiac. That outfit might as well have been called Scuderia Pontiac, as it was well known that any and every speed secret the Pontiac engineers knew was passed on to Royal Pontiac.
That comparison created massive eye-rolling and an avalanche of mail, but it undoubtedly goosed C&D’s subscriptions and newsstand sales. And of course C&D was ready to do it again, this time with two larger cars; the Pontiac Catalina 2+2 and the Ferrari 330 GT/2+2. And yes, the mechanics from Royal Oak were there to make sure that race car driver Walt Hansgen was able to squeeze the maximum out of the Pontiac, as in a 0-60 time of 3.8 seconds and the 1/4 mile in 13.8 @106 mph. That’s as good or better than a significantly lighter hemi Coronet or Belvedere. But who cares? C&D was for entertainment, not facts.
Those wheels on the Pontiac look suspiciously wider than stock to me.
(If the Pontiac were a woman:) “The Pontiac would have an enormous bosom and the pretty-but-empty face of an airline stewardess. She’d be earnest but uninspired in both kitchen and boudoir, and your friends would think you were the luckiest guy in town”.
“The Pontiac’s best quarter-mile was 106 mph in 13.8o seconds—plenty spectacular for us, but the cause of some headshaking and excuse making from the Royal mechanics, who’d wanted us to use a 4:11 ratio and slick tires.”
Related CC reading:
Vintage Reviews: The Reality of Vintage Road Test Stats – Greatness Through Estimation by VinceC
Makes my eyes misty reading the prices of 1965! A Ferrari 330 2+2 for under $13K?!! I’d still take the Poncho any day of the week. Having personally remembered their performance as a little kid then, I’ll take full-size muscle any time.
$13,000 in 1965 = $121,000 in 2023, which would still be a bargain for a new Ferrari as the entry level Roma starts at more than twice that. Heck, you can spend way more than $121,000 on a new Cadillac Escalade, which makes me want to gag.
Cars are becoming priced like homes way, way above inflation now.
Even a compact car is price £20 k in the UK. Gone is the £7k Dacia it’s £11k now!. Thank you chip shortage and greedy car makers forcing buyers in to electric SUVs. Fiesta RIP. Your not so profitable now after 47 years…
Re: The GTO test. “ Thanks to prepping by Royal Pontiac” . And as Jim Wangers later admitted, a 421 not a 389.
Aaron Severson remarked in his article on the Pontiac GTO when Car & Driver tested the GTO it had received Royal Pontiac’s Bobcat kit a and was fitted with a 421-not the 389; on the road course it was sidelined on the road course when a rod bearing failed- both of which went unannounced by the magazine staff and Pontiac. It certainly would not have not surprised me if the 2 + 2 had received a similar treatment.
The point was to sell cars and magazines and it worked. Jim Wangers and John DeLorean certainly understood their market.
Plus the car must have been ” one of one” with all the performance options that a normal buyer would not tick the box for.
Add 3 secs to the real world 0-60 mph time for this car which would bring it in line with the other big block muscle cars. 3.9 secs!.
I admired the styling of the 1965 Pontiacs, especially the two door hardtops, when they were new. Still do. That Ferrari looks kind of stubby and dumpy.
Never having driven either on road or track, I can’t comment on the experience, but having known owners of both, I’d say the Pontiac would be willing and able to go, any time, any day, any place. The Ferrari? Maybe. But it also might catch on fire.
Agree, GP.
I wouldn’t necessarily assume that a 421 Pontiac would necessarily be that reliable in the advanced state of tune required to get anything approaching these numbers, particularly given the fanbelt-tossing antics observed, which could be awfully troublesome on the highway.
C&D specifically said in this article that they had originally wanted to use the GTO from the previous comparison as a “benchmark”, but that it was laid up with “a deformed piston due to excessive timing advance”. Which of course also goes towards explaining both of these Pontiacs. I can only arginine how much advance they had.
Yeah, eh?
What, y’mean overheat?
Yeah, um, why bother having lovely gauges for water and oil temperature, then, if their heading toward or past the danger zone is ‘no cause for concern’? C’mon. I have no delusion the roided-up Pontiac would be anywhere near so reliable as one in showroom-stock condition, but again, where’s any mention of a thermal tantrum, or any other kind?
Well, tossing its fanbelt in a setting that didn’t allow for stopping and exasperatedly putting it back on would probably trend in that direction, n’est c’est pas?
Granted, though that seems like the kind of failure that could happen to more or less any car. And I don’t know for sure, but I strongly guess if it had happened on the Ferf, it’d’ve been a whole lot harder—perhaps impossible—to replace by the side of the road.
Possibly, but as I noted below, other contemporary reviews of the Pontiac with the hot 421 (including ones far less, er, fanciful) also complained that the engine tended to toss its belts at around 5,500 rpm. Which sounds more like a design problem and less like a one-car oddity.
Fair ’nuff. I’m not about to claim the Pontiac was anywhere close to perfect, and it sounds like the belt drive designed for engine speeds attained on public roadways wasn’t adequate for much higher engine speeds. But I still don’t see that as equal to a Ferf heating up in ordinary traffic, with a bunch of it’s-not-a-problem bulk wrap from whoever made that assurance.
That’s because the “Pontiac” looked big,sweeping , “American”. The “Ferrari” looked “European”, aka ” a foreign job”.. “Dumpy”? Nah.
A fine example of Car & Driver’s “irreverence” that they were known for in the 1960’s thru early 1980’s.
Today’s “C&D” reads like an internet magazine produced by twentysomethings who probably don’t have a driver’s license, much less actually drive the cars they comment on.
Indeed. C&D earned a reputation as being the left of center, gonzo entrant in the Big 3 of the buff magazines during that halcyon time of automobiles. While the prose was certainly better and more entertaining (like the car version of Esquire), when one gets down to the facts, they were just as much of a shill for the car companies as Road & Track or Motor Trend and It’s nowhere more evident than in these ginned-up Pontiac-Ferrari comparisons with Wangers’ Royal Bobcat prepped cars.
Sadly, that’s more apparent today than ever.
One thing they always do in these sort of tests, is take the sports car out of it’s element or road racing and put it in a drag race. They liked to pick on Lotus for some reason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18bXXNbTP0M
If anyone is curious, the February 1965 Motor Trend includes a road test of a 2+2 equipped with the “base” four-barrel 421, close-ratio four-speed, and 3.42 axle. They got 0-60 in 8.1 seconds, the quarter mile in 16.4 @ 88 mph, and an observed top speed of 115 mph @ 5,300 rpm, presumably limited by the fact that the engine’s “habit of tossing its fanbelt and power steering belt when run over 5500 rpm.”
Two months later, Car Life tested a 2+2 with the Tri-Power 421 (376 hp) this car allegedly had, again with close-ratio four-speed and with the 4.11 axle mentioned in the C/D text. This resulted in 0-60 in 7.2 seconds, the quarter in 15.5 seconds @ 95 mph, and a top speed of 108 mph @ 5,500 rpm (again limited by the rev limits of the 421 engine).
Both cars had traction problems off the line — the Motor Trend car lacked Saf-T-Track, and while the Car Life car had the latter, they observed that starting at anything above 2,500 rpm would just smoke the tires uselessly. Their editor suggested that with drag slicks and the sort of tuning implied in the Car and Driver article, ETs in the low 14s were probably within reach.
The 11 mph difference in trap speed, on the other hand, goes beyond the merely implausible, given that these were 4,100-pound cars. (The one area of the C/D spec sheet that seems reasonable is the curb weight, which is within 50 lbs of the other two tests.) In the immortal word of Rochester Van Jones, “Oh, Boss, come now!”
(Er, strike the words “the fact that” — I have to remember that comments aren’t editable anymore and proof more carefully.)
From what I’ve read (I love old road tests as you do, Aaron), C&D might as well have been making up acceleration figures in the mid 1960s. Their test of a ’65 Riviera GS showed a 0-100 figure of something in the 16-second range, along with a 0-60 time of 6.5 seconds, which is almost a second faster than the next closest competitor’s times. A test of a K-Code Mustang resulted in a 0-60 time of something like five seconds, along with a quarter-mile time of 14 seconds at 100 mph. That’s over a second a half and 10 mph faster than most magazine results. Then you throw these Pontiac tests in, and I’d be surprised if there were any statistically relevant test results in any C&D road test of the time; they’re suspicious at the very least. On the other hand, it makes for some fun reading, which was probably the point.
I don’t think that was universally true of C/D road tests of this period. Some are really quite reasonable and don’t seem at all outlandish; some tended to be quicker than other magazines, but still relatively consistent relative to each other, perhaps reflecting tricks of methodology like the 1-foot rollout (something that remained the case with C/D well into later decades).
On the other hand, if something was calculated as a circulation-boosting stunt, like this one or the original GTO test, the results were often preposterous — ranging from “handheld stopwatch timing of obvious ringers” to “no relationship to reality whatever.”
Their ’65 Riviera GS was listed at 7.2 seconds 0-60 and 0-100 in 16.1, which I agree sounds unrealistically quick. Their ’64 Riv, on the other hand, was listed at 8.3 seconds to 60 and 25.5 seconds to 100 mph, with the quarter in 16.6 @ 83 mph, which doesn’t require any particular suspension of disbelief.
The variation certainly makes C/D less reliable than its rivals of this era as a source of data — not always categorically ridiculous, but certainly something you’d want to compare to other period tests, which is precisely why I left the initial comment.
I agree with AUWM that there was a considerable range in C&D’s testing. Some reviews were quite perfunctory and the stats seemed reasonable, or quite close to others. Others clearly not. But the more of these vintage reviews I expose myself to, the less credibility C&D has with me, precisely because of the inconsistency.
R&T and Car Life (both from Bond) clearly put a lot of effort in consistent testing methodology, hence results that I have much more faith in.
My big complaint about Car Life road tests is that they did not consistently distinguish between actual observed top speeds and estimated or calculated ones. Whatever else one may say of vintage Motor Trend tests, they at least made a point of saying whether their speeds in gear were observed top speeds or were just maximum test speeds limited by the length of the track.
I don’t doubt that a fair number of the more powerful American cars of this vintage were capable of speeds of 120 mph or more — the triumph of brute force over aerodynamics, generally — but finding enough space to wind them out that far and, critically, to stop from such speeds was quite another matter, and even if a car was tested at a race track, there wasn’t necessarily a long enough straightaway for that.
(Autocar and Motor had the advantage in this regard that they could do instrumented testing at the MIRA track, today HORIBA MIRA: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/test-track-pioneering-car-development-behind-scenes-horiba-mira)
Just proves that C&D was just a carrier for the car companies and that R&T was a serious piece of journalism. I take it that this road test was done when advertisers were allowed artist impressions in their brochures before consumer laws and the threat of false advertising.
Did any buyer sue GM because their car didn’t match this 0-60mph time I wonder?. Cadillac Seville owners sued because the car had an Olds engine not a Caddy one, as if that mattered.
I agree this era of C/D was about entertainment not technical accuracy. It worked well for them though. Like others mentioned, I too love vitage rosd tests and have a fairly good collection. I wrote an article on the “accuracy” of vintage magazine tests and specifically highlighted this C/D article. I also discussed some of the others people mentioned in the comments above.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/vintage-reviews/vintage-reviews-the-reality-of-vintage-road-test-stats-greatness-through-estimation/
I was in a rush, and forgot about your article. I’ve added the link to the bottom of this post now.
I forgot that the 2+2 was a second faster to 60 than the GTO! Makes perfect sense!
The good news is that the basic American sedan platform can be “massaged” to provide much better performance than detractors might suspect. Royal Pontiac was very good at massaging! I’ll bet that the engine was blueprinted and balanced, ported, equipped with thinner head gaskets to raise compression, had a blocked heat riser, distributor curve adjusted, and maybe they even found an old “export” camshaft sitting on a shelf!
Drag racing is best done with a solid rear axle, limited slip differential, and stiff springs, which the Pontiac had. IRS cars have always had a disadvantage, but how many true GT cars were routinely taken to the drag strip? It was interesting that the article stated that this particular track wasn’t too hard on the brakes, what kind of road course was this? Tuners had known how to set up NASCAR “stockers” for a long time.
The 2+2 was almost the end of the line for full size American performance sedans whether they had two or four doors. This type of car goes back to the Buick Century (late 30’s) through the Chrysler 300 letter cars. I remember an ad for the ’59 Chevy where the car enthusiast “owner” describes how he set up his Impala with all the high performance goodies, and that satisfied his itch for a true sports car. The performance of the 2+2 was impressive, but just a few notches above that of a ’69 Impala with a 427 equipped with an auto box.
While the Ferrari was compromised as a family use car, it was designed for sustained high speed driving, while the Pontiac was not. It threw the fan belt, at this time the high performance engines could not be paired with a/c. The note that the GTO burned a valve and another lost a rod bearing, indicates that unless it was carefully rebuilt, most standard American V8s could not sustain a lot of repeated, high rpm operation.
Personally, I like big flashy cars like the Pontiac, a 421 four barrel, with auto would be a nice car, and the suspension and tires could be upgraded to make it a real road car. It was about a foot shorter than the biggest GM cars, but the GTO, or another intermediate would be a better choice for a car enthusiast, family man. The recently introduced Pony cars were an even better choice.
Modern American cars are so much more evolved today, and offer high levels of performance.
Car and Driver loved doing these “apples to oranges” tests but they sure liked to slip in those ringers!
$4000 car vs. $14,000 car in 1965: The US Census Bureau shows the median income of all families in 1965 was $6,900. The Pontiac would have been a real stretch, the Ferrari the equivalent of a suburban starter single family home.
This ad had been run on CC before, but it illustrates that there was a lot of choice in equipment right from the factory.
If Ferrari’s handling of press cars in the ’60s was anything like what it is today, it’s almost as heavily massaged and far from a random customer’s car as the Pontiac is.
It wasn’t. They didn’t even have “press cars” in the modern sense. These testers almost invariably came form either a distributor, a dealer, and quite often, from a private owner.
And in each of these cases, they would not have been “massaged”. For that matter, that would have been very difficult to do, as the Ferrari engines were very highly tuned already.
Notice that , in the one pic, the “Ferrari” resmbles the “Brazilian VW” mentioned , earlier in the week. ((appearance wise))
Left the “?” out of my observation, apologies all.
Plus the car must have been ” one of one” with all the performance options that a normal buyer would not tick the box for.
Add 3 secs to the real world 0-60 mph time for this car which would bring it in line with the other big block muscle cars. 3.9 secs!.
My wayward older cousin somehow got his hands on a lightly used ’65 Pontiac 2+2 sometime in the mid 60s. He showed up at our house with a friend after Thanksgiving dinner and took my brother and me on what remains as the wildest, scariest, and yet exhilarating ride of my life.
I was 14 or so at the time; my cousin took us to what was then a largely rural area near the Pittsburgh International Airport. I remember one oncoming driver pulling completely off the road when he saw us approaching! Needless to say, my brother and I remained mum to our elders about the antics we experienced once we were deposited back at home.
As an avid reader of both C+D and R&T from the mid 70’s into this century it was interesting, C+D almost always had better acceleration numbers, but eventually it came out, they would just beat the ****, er snot out of the car. Standing start meant sliding your foot off the clutch, not “releasing” it. And they seemed to take pride in better numbers. (and of course they didn’t have to fix what they broke)
Now I for one, while not always gentle on my cars, have never just slid my foot off the clutch for takeoff.
Lastly, it would seem from this test back in the 60’s they might have been less objective than in later years.