1970 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am: The Late Arrival That Made the Name Worth Buying

The new Firebird was months late. Tran-Zam's history puts its debut at the Chicago Auto Show on February 26, 1970, MotorCities dates its arrival in showrooms to the same day, and Old Cars Weekly says simply that the 1970 Firebirds came during the last week of February. MotorCities blames engineering problems for the delay. By then the 1970 model year was well under way. Pontiac answered with a car that had no convertible, no carryover sheet metal and a Trans Am package that, unlike its white-only predecessor, finally looked like it had been designed around the name rather than decorated with it.^1,2,3

The shape was a collective job. MotorCities names Bill Mitchell as head of GM Design, Jack Humbert as the executive over Pontiac exterior design, Bill Porter as head of the Pontiac studio and John Schettler as the interior designer, and it traces the car's influence to the Cirrus show car. The body had no rear quarter windows, a long fastback and full wheel openings, and the coupe was the only style offered. MotorCities quotes design writer Thomas E. Bonshall calling the 1970 Firebird “remarkable for simplicity and elegant excitement.” Beneath that sculpture sat engineering work the Pontiac Preservation Association credits partly to Herb Adams, who had helped shape the 1969 Trans Am and the first second-generation cars.^2,4

Pontiac sold the new body in four models. Tran-Zam's engine table lists a Chevrolet-built 250 six at 155 gross horsepower in the base Firebird, a 350 two-barrel at 255 horsepower as the Esprit's standard engine, and a 400 four-barrel at 330 horsepower in the Formula 400. The Trans Am came with the L74 Ram Air III, rated at 335 horsepower at 5,000 rpm and 430 lb-ft, and offered the LS1 Ram Air IV at 345 horsepower at 5,400 rpm for $390. Those are gross ratings. MuscleCarClub assigns the Ram Air IV 370 horsepower, but that is the figure Pontiac used in the GTO; Pontiac's February 1970 AMA specifications and Tran-Zam give the Firebird version 345.^1,5,6

The Trans Am's look had a working purpose. Tran-Zam lists front and rear spoilers, a shaker scoop protruding through the hood, wheel flares and stripes; Old Cars Weekly adds front air dams, side air extractors and aerodynamic outside mirrors. The shaker had a traceable origin. Herb Adams's hall-of-fame biography says it began on his Firebird Sprint Turismo experiment, when carburetors would not fit under the old hood and he had Pontiac's prototype shop build an aluminum scoop. Color choice stayed narrow: Tran-Zam says the 1970 through 1972 Trans Am came only in white with blue stripes or blue with white stripes. Turbo Hydra-Matic was listed at $227.04 on other Firebirds and at no charge on the Trans Am.^1,3,4

The price ladder was steep. Old Cars Weekly and MotorCities both give the base Firebird at $2,875. Old Cars Weekly reports that the Trans Am Car and Driver tested carried a price of $4,663.63, more than $1,700 above that entry car, although a test car's price includes its options and is not a base sticker. Along the way a Formula buyer could make the hood scoops functional with the Ram Air III for $168.51, add a Hurst-shifted four-speed for $195.36, a Safe-T-Track limited-slip for $42.13 or air conditioning for $375.99. The Trans Am was the most expensive way into the new body, and Pontiac priced it as the top of the line, not as a stripped racer.^3,2,1

Buyers still took more Trans Ams than ever. Tran-Zam and MuscleCarClub, working from different book lineages, agree on 48,739 Firebirds for the short 1970 season: 18,874 base cars, 18,961 Esprits, 7,708 Formula 400s and 3,196 Trans Ams. That made the Trans Am about 6.6 percent of Firebird production, and more than four and a half times the 697 cars of the 1969 package, even though the 1970 cars were built in a season that began in late February. The Esprit, a comfortable 350 two-barrel car for most buyers, outsold everything else in the line by a narrow margin over the base model.^1,6,3

Inside the 3,196, the engine choice was lopsided. Tran-Zam counts 3,108 Ram Air III cars, 1,769 with manual transmissions and 1,339 automatics, and just 88 Ram Air IVs, 59 manual and 29 automatic, a Ram Air IV share of under 3 percent. Its table prints the manual total as 2,828, but its own rows add to 1,828; the rows are used here and the slip is recorded. Tran-Zam also passes on High Performance Pontiac's September 2007 color count for the Ram Air IV cars, 63 Polar White and 25 Lucerne Blue. In the Formula 400, where the Ram Air III was an option, Tran-Zam counts 689 installations out of 7,708 cars, 396 of them with manual gearboxes.^1,6

The whole-line option counts show what most Firebird buyers wanted, and it was not a race car. Of Tran-Zam's 48,739 cars, 39,131 had automatic transmissions, about 80 percent, against 6,008 four-speeds and 3,600 three-speed manuals. Variable-ratio power steering went into 44,891 cars, about 92 percent; air conditioning into 22,378, about 46 percent; a limited-slip differential into 8,188, about 17 percent. Front disc brakes appear on 30,706 cars and power windows on only 2,284. Those counts come from a secondary compilation and are reported rather than verified, but their arithmetic closes: the three transmission rows add exactly to the model total.¹

The magazines found the performance the brochure implied. Old Cars Weekly reports that Car and Driver timed its Formula 400 at 6.4 seconds from 0 to 60 mph and 14.7 seconds at 98.9 mph in the quarter mile, and that the Trans Am the magazine also tested was faster still, and cheaper, at $4,663.63. The Trans Am's own times are not reproduced in that account and are not supplied here. What the report does establish is the order of merit on one magazine's test days: the car with the spoilers, extractors and shaker was not merely the best-dressed Firebird, it was the quicker of the two high-performance cars Car and Driver drove.³

On the circuits the season belonged to others. The final SCCA sheet for the over-two-liter class records net manufacturers' standings of Ford 72, American Motors 59, Chevrolet 40, Dodge 18 and Plymouth 15, counting each maker's best nine results. For the Firebird's racing people, the year brought a loss. Jerry Titus, whose T/G Racing Firebird had won its class at Daytona in 1969, was killed in practice at Road America during the 1970 season, DrivingLine records. The street car had outgrown its racing alibi: the showroom Trans Am of 1970 no longer needed the series to justify it.^7,8

What followed grew out of this body and this package. The second-generation Firebird that arrived in February 1970 would carry the Trans Am through the 1981 model year in Tran-Zam's chronology, and the next great Pontiac engine grew from the same racing thread. The Pontiac Preservation Association says the Super Duty 455 was developed by Pontiac's Special Projects group from engines built for SCCA Trans Am and NASCAR racing, with Adams crediting Jeff Young and Tom Nell. The 1970 Trans Am had turned a rented race-series name into a Pontiac product with its own look, its own engines and its own buyers, a few thousand of them in a season that started in February.^1,4