1969 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am: The Name Pontiac Rented for Five Dollars a Car

Pontiac did not own the name it put on its new Firebird at the Chicago Auto Show. The Trans Am package that the division introduced there, partway through the 1969 model year, borrowed its title from the Sports Car Club of America's Trans-American road-racing series, and Old Cars Weekly records that Pontiac paid the SCCA a royalty of $5 for every car that wore it. That small invoice tells the whole story in miniature. Pontiac wanted the standing of a road-racing championship in which its Firebirds were chasing factory Camaros and Mustangs, and it was willing to pay for the words before it had earned them on the track.^1,2

The brief behind the car, as the Pontiac Preservation Association's hall-of-fame biography of engineer Herb Adams tells it, came from John Z. DeLorean in a meeting with Adams and Bill Collins: build a Firebird better than the Camaro Z/28 that Chevrolet was expected to field. The biography gives the instruction as “No detailed instructions, just get it done.” That is a retrospective account from an organization honoring Adams, and it is told here as one. It credits Adams with engineering work that led to the production 1969 Trans Am and to the first second-generation cars, and it puts Collins in the same room. The Trans Am was a team product, not a lone inventor's car.³

What the buyer actually got was mostly chassis. The June 1969 CARS introduction prints the specification: Pontiac's 400-cubic-inch Ram Air V-8, rated at 335 gross horsepower at 5,000 rpm and 430 lb-ft at 3,400 rpm, with a single Quadrajet and 10.75:1 compression; a heavy-duty three-speed floor shift; a 3.55:1 axle; front disc brakes; variable-ratio power steering; a one-inch front stabilizer; and F70-14 tires on seven-inch rims, with a rear deck air foil and stripes to announce it. Over-Drive Magazine's fact sheet, compiled from Pontiac literature, gives the package code as WS4. The one engine upgrade was the Ram Air IV 400, which Motor Trend's engine table lists at 345 gross horsepower at 5,400 rpm.^2,4,5

It came in one color scheme. Every regular 1969 Trans Am, Old Cars Weekly reports, was Cameo White with blue stripes; the exception was a silver prototype. It was not cheap, either. The same account puts the WS4 package at about $725, a Trans Am sport coupe's window sticker at around $3,556 and a convertible's base price at about $3,770, with the Ram Air IV another $390 on top. For scale, Motor Trend's March 1969 comparison listed the six-cylinder Firebird hardtop at $2,814 before options. A Trans Am coupe therefore stickered more than $700 above the entry Firebird, and the premium bought a firmer chassis, bigger brakes, a louder hood and a borrowed racing name.^1,5

Very few buyers paid it. The commonly published count is 697 Trans Ams, 689 coupes and eight convertibles. Three separately compiled tables agree on those numbers, but none names a primary record, and Over-Drive Magazine notes that Pontiac did not keep production records by option package. Even the denominator is argued over by small margins: Over-Drive Magazine prints 87,709 Firebirds for 1969, The Pontiac Trans Am Page 87,708, and MuscleCarClub 88,708, a figure exactly 1,000 higher that looks like a transcription slip but is kept in view rather than quietly discarded. Against either of the lower totals, the Trans Am was about eight-tenths of one percent of Firebird production. The eight convertibles sat beside 11,649 other Firebird convertibles on Over-Drive's count.^6,7,8,4

Engines divide the 697 cleanly: 55 Ram Air IV cars, every one a coupe, and 642 with the standard Ram Air 400 that Pontiac people later called the Ram Air III, 634 coupes plus all eight convertibles. Transmissions do not divide cleanly at all. The Pontiac Trans Am Page gives the Ram Air IV coupes as 46 manual and nine automatic and the Ram Air III coupes as 520 manual and 114 automatic. MuscleCarClub prints the identical numbers with the columns reversed. Old Cars Weekly sides with the second reading, saying 114 of the Ram Air III cars had a manual gearbox, though it folds four convertibles into that 114, which does not square with 634 coupes. No factory table has been read to settle the question, so both versions stand.^7,8,1,4

The car arrived late and was built in a hurry. The earliest production Trans Am that Old Cars Weekly could document, VIN 223379L118850, was assembled at Van Nuys on April 29, 1969, and the first Norwood-built example followed on May 29. The whole run therefore fit into the tail of the first-generation Firebird's final model year. Motor Trend's March 1969 pony-car comparison, printed before the Trans Am reached buyers, shows what an ordinary Firebird was: its test car, a 350 two-barrel hardtop with automatic and a 2.78 axle, took 10.0 seconds to reach 60 mph and ran the quarter mile in 17.0 seconds at 81 mph. Those numbers belong to that car alone, but they measure the gap the Trans Am was meant to open.^1,5

On the track the name still belonged to other people's cars. The 1969 over-two-liter Trans-Am championship was fought out between factory Mustangs and Penske's Camaros, and the final manufacturers' table in the SCCA result sheets reads Chevrolet 78, Ford 64, Pontiac 32 and American Motors 13. Pontiac's points did not come from a Pontiac engine. The Firebirds that raced used Chevrolet power: Jerry Titus's T/G Racing car, backed by Canadian businessman Terry Godsall, was a converted Camaro carrying a Chevrolet 302, legal, DrivingLine explains, because Firebirds were sold in Canada with Chevrolet engines. Titus and Jon Ward won the Trans-Am class at the 1969 Daytona 24 Hours and finished third overall.^9,10

Pontiac did build an engine for the class. Old Cars Weekly describes a 303-cubic-inch V-8 designed to fit the Trans-American displacement limit, of which only 25 were built and sold to competitors as replacements for the factory-installed 400. The silver prototype carried one, and the same article reports that Motor Trend tested it for its October 1969 issue, recording 0-60 mph in 8.83 seconds and a 16.37-second quarter mile at 93.5 mph. Those are one prototype's numbers with an engine no showroom buyer could order, and they say nothing about a production Trans Am. They do show the gap between the race program the CARS introduction alluded to and the 400-cubic-inch street car the dealers actually sold.^1,2

The first-season numbers were thin, but the package outlived them. Adams's biography traces the 1970 Trans Am's shaker hood scoop to his Firebird Sprint Turismo experiment, in which carburetors that would not fit under the first-generation hood led him to cut an opening and have prototyping build an aluminum scoop. He believes, the biography adds, that Ford and Dodge saw the magazine story and reached the market with shaker scoops of their own for 1970. The 1969 car was also the last first-generation Firebird and the last Firebird convertible of that generation; the 1970 second generation came as a coupe only. From 697 white cars and a $5 royalty, the Trans Am name ran on to the 2002 model year.^3,4,11