I spotted this boss sixties hardtop coupe at the local general store. The car’s surroundings were so unphotogenic and cluttered that I whisked it to the beach via photoshop, where it looks much more attractive.
For decades I wouldn’t look twice at this type of car. The problem was sociological: the guys my age and older who slaved away under the hoods of cars such as this one were not my tribe. I did not aspire to impress a pretty, blonde cheerleader with my ride. In fact, I wasn’t allowed to have a car at school. The received ethos was delayed gratification.
Many decades later, I finally get this vehicle’s wicked styling and its appeal.
Ocean Park, Washington.
———————————————————————————————-
A Car Story:
Hemming’s Feature
"New Math – 1965 Pontiac 2+2"
At Pontiac, in 1965, two plus two equaled 421
By Jeff Koch from June 2006 issue of Muscle Machines
Category: Muscle Cars
Once upon a time, a carmaker offered one size of car. Oh, an extra three inches may have been spliced into or out of the wheelbase to make a more premium model, and some of the bigger-money marques may have had limousine versions, but the basic architecture, the building blocks that made a manufacturer’s lineup what it was, all consisted of the same hearty stuff.
On that chassis was your choice of two-door coupe, two-door hardtop, pillared four-door, four-door hardtop, station wagon or convertible. Beyond that it was all trim and options.
Bonneville was at the top of the line; Star Chief was a budget Bonneville, with fewer frills. The workaday Catalina and sporty Grand Prix were both built on the smaller B-body platform, though the GP got its own roofline. It’s enough to make your head spin.
Sound confusing? Maybe. But Pontiac could do no wrong in those days–from the Wide-Track stance to the GTO, just about everything Pontiac touched (save perhaps the rope-drive Tempest) was a smash-hit–so much so that Pontiac vaulted to a solid third place behind Chevy and Ford in the national sales race. (It wasn’t so many years before that Buick lived in the number three spot.)
Catalina was Pontiac’s volume line in those days, so anything sporty would naturally be attributed to it.
@The Super Duty strip monsters of the early 1960s were Catalinas, and the Grand Prix, introduced in 1962 as a personal-luxury model to compete with Ford’s Thunderbird, was also based on the Cat.
The venerable Ventura name first saw duty on an upscale version of the Catalina.
Add to that mix the moniker 2+2. A sporty subseries of the smaller Catalina (inasmuch as anything with a 121-inch wheelbase could be considered small), the 2+2 had been introduced as the sporty Catalina in ’64–the last year for the old bodystyle and frame, and after the legendary Super Duty power-broker powerplants had been put out to pasture.
A variety of potent powerplants were available (the performance-image 2+2 came with a 283hp 389 and only went up from there), but the sporting intent was carried on inside, with bucket seats and a console.
The ’64 2+2 tends to get a little lost in the news of the momentous arrival of the GTO, however.
And perhaps rightly so. A one-two punch could have lessened the impact of both models had they hit at the same time. It became clear that this was only a placeholder until the all-new ’65s arrived. The deuce-y-deuce was available on convertible, hardtop coupe and hardtop sedan bodystyles, and for 1965 came standard with 421 cubes under the hood good for 338 horsepower.
Keep in mind that was the base engine: variations up to the 376hp HO engine with Tri-Power were available on the option sheet as well, with a selection of gears between 3.23:1 and 4.11:1; yours for the choosing.
It was redesigned with the rest of Pontiac’s (and, really, GM’s) B-bodies that season. That ’65 restyle took Pontiac’s contemporary styling themes–the vertically-stacked headlights, the split grille–and added its own dash of flair, with a deeply exaggerated "Coke-bottle" effect on the rear quarters.
The fastback roofline managed to look back (the first new postwar GM designs of the late 1940s were fastbacks) and forward (toward the Charger, Marlin, and other Detroit fastback-style rooflines) simultaneously.
The result was clean and harmonious, a combination of bold lines and tasteful restraint, and remains a high spot in American-car styling even today.
It’s also one of the few cars that we think works as well with rear wheel skirts as without.
The press reports were beyond fawning, and bordered on the embarrassing.
Car and Driver, hoping to re-capture the zeitgeist of the GTO vs. GTO test that launched the title to the stratosphere the previous year, hoped lightning would strike twice with 2+2 vs. 2+2… this time, a Tri-Power 421 4-speed Pontiac versus a Ferrari 330GT 2+2.
Prepped at Ace Wilson’s Royal Pontiac, where all of Pontiac’s press-car ringers were tweaked in the 1960s, not only did the American 2+2 accelerate to 60mph in less than four seconds (!), without the benefit of 4.11 gears or slicks (!!), but it was just half a second slower around the Bridgehampton race circuit than the Ferrari in the hands of two-time USGP winner Walt Hansgen.
Quotes like "It doesn’t just go around the corner, it does a mighty fine job of it!" and "I don’t think the Ferrari would be quite as good in the rain as the Pontiac, but that’s largely because of the [Ferrari’s] disc brakes" and "if we could get every American car on the road to handle and perform this well, I think we’d be doing a tremendous job toward having safer American highways," all attributed to Hansgen, dotted the piece.
Motor Trend simply cut to the chase and gave the entire 1965 Pontiac line its Car of the Year award–2+2 included.
We were pretty sure that Bill Hatch of Palm Springs, California hadn’t prepped his Fontaine Blue 2+2 like one of those Ace Wilson’s Royal press ringers, so although we weren’t sure exactly what to expect when we got behind the wheel, we suspected that four-second 0-60 times were out of the question.
Purchased from the original owner in 2000 and completed in 2003, this 95,000-mile original is driven regularly to the local Fuddrucker’s car show in grand style.
New chrome, a respray, and some new interior bits (a headliner, a sewn-up driver’s seat cover) comprise most of the modifications.
Such are the perils of buying a 35-year-old car kept in a garage in a warm climate. Oh, and Bill took this original four-barrel car to the next level of Pontiac-style cool by dropping a period-correct Tri-Power setup on top of the block. (Our performance numbers come from Car and Driver’s four-speed 421 HO 2+2 test done 41 years ago.)
What’s it like to drive? Slip inside, and shut that massive door behind you. The first surprising thing here is that you actually sit fairly high up, looking down on the gauges and the console, which seems so very far away.
Your head scrapes the headliner since the 2+2 is a card-carrying member of the longer-lower-wider school of design, but the view out the windows is SUV-like, doubly surprising considering how low the car sits as you stand alongside it.
Still, it’s wide enough that if you wanted to lean across the interior to roll up the passenger’s side windows, you’re SOL.
The dark blue coloring gives everything a relaxed elegance; the relentless glitz of the chrome becomes even more eye-catching against this deep background, and the overall effect certainly offers more pleasant atmosphere than is provided in today’s what-shade-of-gray-do-you-prefer cabins.
We turn the key in the middle of the dash and though it’s not terribly raucous compared to a lot of what we’ve manhandled over the years, there is a mild lope to the idle that will ensure that you know when it’s running.
The long exhaust and mufflers do their part in quieting the noise, so most of what you hear comes from under the hood. The tach isn’t feeling well the day we’re visiting and can’t make it out of its slumber for the occasion.
Acceleration is a little trickier than just mashing the pedal on the right: you can only access the center carb, and can’t give it more than half of the pedal, unless you want to hear that uncomfortable marble-in-a-coffee-can sound.
Since the engine in our test 2+2 hasn’t been apart for a valve reseating, we can only guess that it’s the contemporary 91-octane gas that’s making things difficult.
When you’re cruising at 70 (or 80) mph across the desert, operating only off the center carb works fine–and doubtless helps fuel economy as well. When you’re trying to make an impression off the line, however, it’s a different story.
On the open road is where the 2+2 shines. The ride is smooth enough–a little rough-and-tumble in town, in both noise and feel, but once you’re out on the open road, everything smooths out and you’re cruising. The steering offers a solid, quick-acting connection to the front wheels, and the steering wheel, wrapped with an aftermarket kit, doesn’t feel as spindly as some we’ve twirled.
On the other hand, the power steering offers no feedback at all, like talking to an orange, and corners can be negotiated with a single finger.
Cornering feels flat–flatter than you’d expect from something this size, anyway–but boy, you sure slosh around in the cabin in the turns.
Surely we’re not alone in admiring Pontiac’s blend of melding form and function in the marque’s eight-lug four-wheel drum brakes?
Aesthetics aside, they work fine too: nothing grabby or snatchy, and stopping distance is linear according to how much pedal you give.
The truth of the matter is, although Pontiac paid special attention to handling attributes in its cars and it is in fact several clicks tighter than some other big cars we’ve piloted, this isn’t the car to buy if you want to carve corners.
As such, with hot intermediates in play, the notion of hot full-sized cars was losing steam, and the 2+2 version of the Catalina disappeared after 1967.
Hot full-size cars disappeared from GM altogether after 1969, until the return of the Impala SS in 1994.
Though it didn’t sell in the numbers Pontiac might have hoped, the 2+2 was far from a failure.
A traditional-sized Pontiac that looks and goes better than most cars of its day couldn’t be lumped into that ne’er-do-well category. It didn’t quite cause the ripples in the marketplace that the GTO did, but some would argue it didn’t have to. The 2+2 stood out on its own considerable merits, which are just as plain to see more than four decades on, even if it got a little lost in the hype of other performance models back in the day.
www.hemmings.com/stories/article/new-math-1965-pontiac-22
