You might think that the new Firebird Sprint, with its high-revving OHC six, four speed manual and upgraded suspension would be right up R&T’s alley; not so. They did acknowledge its many positives, including presumed reliability and durability of its mechanicals; that was a misplaced assumption, as the OHC six turned out to be a rather fragile engine. It certainly had style and comfort. But it was let down by a few typical American car bugaboos.
The Sprint’s 230 inch OHC six, whose block and internals were essentially the same as the Chevy 230 six, had even more power for 1967, up from 207 to 215, thanks to slightly revised valve timing. Nevertheless, it wasn’t quite as quick as the heavier ’66 LeMans Sprint R&T tested a year earlier.
Obviously, the optional 4-speed was the transmission of choice to team with the six. But its shifter had serious shortcomings, from its location too far forward and from high effort, as well as the obnoxious noise made form the clacking sliding-plate shift lever seal. Lacking a proper remote shifter mechanism, it was decidedly inferior to a good sports car/sports sedan from Europe, and now even Japan.
Although Pontiac added “control arms” (more like traction bars) to the Firebird’s rather floppy monoplate single-leaf rear suspension, they did not properly ameliorate that suspension’s intrinsic shortcomings. Typically for American sporty cars, it had fairly high cornering limits on smooth pavement, but it deteriorated rather quickly when the going got rough.
High speed braking was terrible, with a loss of control when hitting the brakes hard at 80 mph. The good old days.
R&T’s summation: they’d buy a 326 V8/automatic version, and just enjoy a more relaxed end effortless driving experience. Which is exactly what the overwhelming majority of Firebird buyers did, thus sealing the fate of the OHC six.
In the next year Firebird, rear axle windup was reduced by relocating one shock absorber lower mount…so that one was forward of the axle and the other was rearward. It worked better but ultimately the real fix was abandonment of the monoplate steel spring that was a cheap GM design for the low powered 1962 Chevy II. The contoured plastic leaf spring was still in the future.
Such an attractive car, yet so flawed as well. During this era, it seemed that there were many very attractive automobiles sitting on flawed chassis, brakes, engines, suspension and wheels. AMC gave buyers many attractive cars that were sitting on obsolete technology.
So America knew how to design a beautiful car, but seemed to love corner cutting regarding performance. In a way, how much different are these cars to the finned chromed Goggie-space age inspired jet fighters from a decade earlier? I am not a muscle-car fan, so I’ll leave it to the many who are, to espouse the strengths of that era’s muscle machines. Yet, one is forced to wonder how much better cars like this Firebird was “better” than a 1957 Fury – a car a entire decade older.
Yet – this first generation Firebird is so adorable. I easily understand how it ended up in so many driveways. I bet the ladies loved them.
Having owned a 1958 Fury, I can tell you that I would have clipped that Bird’s feathers with my Fury. I bought that car as a 20 year old and had it in the family until the mid 1970s, it was a fine car and served us well. Sadly, my folks sold it when they moved to a retirement community where they could only have one vehicle, mother’s 1965 Barracuda.
Firebird was analogous to Mercury’s Cougar A step up from the entry level badge. However. bean counters at GM allowed far fewer changes to Pontiac than did Ford with Mercury. Not all the sheet metal forward of the a pillar was different. those are off the shelf Camaro fenders Pontiac had to adapt their Pontiac loop bumper face to, it is quite obvious in the close up pic of the right front corner. The bumper looks exactly what it is, adaptation/afterthought to existing sheet metal. Such was the Firebird’s fate throughout its run. At least they remained pony cars. unlike the Cougar, which struck out and became something else entirely.
The Firebird’s trajectory may well have gone down the same path as the Cougar if not for it and the Camaro being the last man standing in the segment, the second gens weren’t strong sellers despite their good looks. This image was posted several years back and if you look closely the top two rows of images of pre production Collonades hint that the Firebird may well have gone intermediate for what appears to be what became the Grand Am package, note the Firebird badging on the front fender and nose
The second-generation F-bodies initially didn’t sell very well, and were almost discontinued after 1972. Sales of the F-bodies during the 1972 model year were hampered by a strike at the plant that produced them.
Sales of both the Camaro and Firebird began to increase in 1974. By 1977, the Firebird and Grand Prix were keeping Pontiac relevant.
Interesting, Hemmings has an article today on Jay Leno’s 1968 Firebird. It’s an OHC six cylinder convertible, and the mods include aftermarket brakes & front suspension, Tremec transmission and multi leaf rear springs.
I read the same article. I also followed this car in Jay Leno’s Garage. He had specially designed rocker arms machined to replace the cheap original ones. Jay seems to think this would solve an inherent weakness in the OHC 6 engine. Jay explains it better in his video. I think those rocker arms are now available to anyone with a Pontiac OHC 6 engine.
GM was racing to respond to the Mustang via the Camaro and Firebird.
As per standard GM practice, corrections were made far after complaints from customers and dealers. By the time of implementation, the cars in question was discontinued (X-body) or so criticized (Vega), the model was scarred for life.
If in doubt, GM has gone from 49% of the US market in 1967 to 17% today.
GM used their long-standing formula: sell the sizzle, don’t bother with steak. Overpromise but underdeliver. Use flashy advertising and fancy styling to cover up mediocrity. Any innovations MUST be strangled in the cradle.
This Hemmings article was in my feed today as well https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2021/11/23/jay-leno-pontiac-firebird-spring-1968-gets-the-jay-lenos-garage-treatment
I thought that these had such potential as a rational sporty car. Unfortunately, the lack of final development of the OHC 6 and rear suspension and the availability of cheap V8 power doomed the model. A durable version of this engine might have been a winner during the first gas crisis.
My take as well, it strikes me as rather unfortunate GM likely scrapped the tooling to revive and improve on this engine in the 70s and 80s. They obviously had interest in reviving old “radical” ideas like the Buick V6(reacquiring the tooling from AMC) and turbocharging systems initially similar to those used on the Jetfire, the OHC 6 with similar improvements both the V6 and turbo systems would undergo could have made it a great modern standard corporate engine in downsized A/G and even B bodies.
The idea was resurrected in 2002, in the GM Atlas family of engines, including the Vortex 4200 straight-six engine, which was used in the Chevy Trailblazer and GMC Envoy from 2002 through 2009. Like its ancestor, it was cancelled after a relatively short seven (7) year run. The new version featured a DOHC design, with an aluminum block and heads, along with electronic fuel injection, electronic ignition and variable valve timing. It stands as an example of what the DeLorean six-cylinder engine could have been if GM had stuck with it. If they had persevered, they would have had a winning design years earlier than 2002, IMHO.
I would have thought the six would have been good for a few more MPG.
True, but remember, gasoline was about $0.30 per gallon in those days, fuel economy wasn’t on anybody’s radar back then. It’s a shame that GM cancelled the OHC six cylinder before the engineers had the time to work all of the bugs out of it, because just four (4) short years later, in 1973, thanks to OPEC, the price of gasoline went from $0.30 per gallon to $1.50 per gallon, and GM would have sold their own grandmothers for a few extra mpg! Mpg that the Sprint six would have happily provided. Over time, that engine could have been upgraded, with cross-flow aluminum cylinder heads, electronic ignition and fuel injection to boost performance while simultaneously improving fuel economy. Alas, it all went for naught.
$.30 in 1967 is $2.52 today, so it isn’t like they were giving it away back then. Not too far from pre-current COVID spike US prices. I do remember $.19 a gallon (= $1.60) during one of the periodic gas “price wars” in Arizona right about then, so sometimes they were giving it away.
Yeah, a lot of people were thinking about economy then, as witness the number of VW Beetles on the road. The US subcompacts were in development, and on the market, long before the OPEC embargo.
Also, prices didn’t go up to $1.50 a gallon after the embargo, they were more like 53 cents, which was enough, however, to cause all kinds of angst.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-915-march-7-2016-average-historical-annual-gasoline-pump-price-1929-2015
The horror of those times has distorted my memory. I stand corrected. I combined Fuel Crisis I (1973-74) with Fuel Crisis II (1978-80) in my head. It was Crisis #2 that first drove prices over $1.00 per gallon. I do remember the long gas lines, odd-even fill-up days, with color-coded flags at gas stations to indicate the operational status of the station: green=open; red=closed and yellow=open to emergency vehicles only. The big thing was that when fuel went over $1.00 per gallon, it caused all kinds of pain. The pump totalizers only went as high as $0.999 per gallon, so until new pumps could be installed, they had to set the totalizer to half price. You then took the price displayed on the pump and doubled it to calculate the actual sale amount. Sometimes fights broke out while people waited in line for gas. Ugly.
My brother bought a used 1969 Firebird Sprint Convertible for $1100 in the fall of 1980. We spent the winter of 1980-81 removing the entire drivetrain from the car, then he sent the engine out for machining and the transmission out for an overhaul. While that was being done we replaced the rear end with a used one sourced from a wrecked Chevy Camaro, and replaced the rear leaf springs and U-Joints with new parts. Baby brother decided to study in Europe for the summer of 1981, where he watched Charles and Di get married in London. I thought it would be a nice coming home gift to reassemble his car for him, so I drafted a friend to help me, and we started it for the first time the day he came home from Europe on Labor Day weekend of 1981! The car still needed some body repairs to fix some rust and bad Bondo repairs done by a prior owner, which he was going to have done in the spring of 1982, but before he could get those repairs done, the car was STOLEN from our dorm parking lot in the spring of 1982! The car was never recovered. My guess is that it was stripped for parts and the empty shell was dumped into either the Merrimack River or one of the canals in Lowell, MA.
I’m shocked R&T was using liters that early. Was it just because of the subtitle?
They mostly tested imports, and their readers were used to it.
The Sprint 6 Firebird actually had “3.8 Litre Overhead Cam” emblems on the hood! You can’t see them in those magazine photos, but they are there!
Pontiac themselves used liters intermittently
That always drove me nuts as a 389 converts to 6.4 liters.
I’m so sorry to hear about that my name is Pete I live in California I had a 1967 Pontiac firebird convertible I had started to restore the car for my son when you turn 15 started high School the car was stolen before I could finish it for him and I never recovered it I found out where it’s real about was I am looking for one now but they’re so expensive but I love the Pontiac Firebirds
And acquaintance Pontiac tech back in the mid-70s had a second gen Tempest Sprint, four speed. It was a decent car but he decided that the relatively heavy car needed a more tractable engine so put the non-Sprint single-barrel Rochester and mild cam in it. He claimed it got decent gas mileage for a mid-60’s midsize car. I know these had top end problems early on but if they could have been worked out it could have replaced GM’s corporate Chevy six for another 15 years.
I owned a 67 Lemans Sprint that I bought used back in 72. That 230 ohc would rpm & never miss a beat. It had a Rochester Quadrajet & a split exhaust manifold. I ended up retiring that 230 ohc engine, and swapping in a 66 389 Catalina motor. Looking back, wish I would’ve kept the six cylinder & hung onto to that car.