In 1963 Pontiac's Chief Engineer John DeLorean and his two favorite staff engineers, Bill Collins and Russ Gee, came up with an inspired way to keep Pontiac cars in the performance limelight: bolt a big engine into Pontiac's upcoming Tempest intermediate body. Thus was the GTO born. Through cunning, resourcefulness, and outright trickery the minds of Pontiac managed to get this rocket into dealerships and out onto America's highways, and to introduce that most iconic of American automobiles, the muscle car, to the nation's most discriminating drivers. This is the story of the GTO, of the people who made it a reality and a sales sensation, of those who owned and loved the cars. And it is, above all, a story of the cars themselves, from the initial option package offered for the 1964 model year through the highperformance late-model standouts. With color photographs, drawings, and detailed stats, this book is not so much the story of a historic car as an illustrated biography of American muscle.

About the Author

Darwin Holmstrom has written or co-written many books on muscle cars and motorcycling, including the best-selling Camaro Forty Years and Muscle: America's Legendary Performance Cars. He lives in Maple Grove, Minnesota. Photographer and writer David Newhardt was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Southern Illinois University, majoring in Professional Photography. He served eight years in the US Navy aboard nuclear submarines, before settling in Southern California. Newhardt worked at Motor Trend magazine for three years, and has been on the masthead of many automotive titles. The author of seven books, he has supplied scores of other books with images.