1965 Pontiac GTO: Building a Winner off the Order Blank

Car Life's May 1965 GTO report began at a dealer's order desk. Roger Huntington ordered a GTO through Royal Pontiac in Royal Oak, Michigan, and the magazine printed the arithmetic under the headline 'Order-Blank Building Produces a Winner.' A LeMans hardtop listed at $2,333. The GTO option added $295.90, and the options Huntington chose brought the sticker to $3,643.79. The GTO was still a line on a LeMans order form, and in 1965 more than 75,000 buyers checked it.^1,2

The $295.90 bought a defined set of hardware. Car Life lists the 335 hp 389, dual exhaust, a three-speed floor shift, heavy-duty springs and shocks, a seven-blade clutch fan and 7.75-14 red-line tires. The 3.23 axle was standard, with 3.08, 3.36, 3.55 and 3.90 on the list and 4.11 or 4.33 available for dealer installation. From there Huntington's order read like a primer: Tri-Power at $115.78, the Hurst-linked four-speed at $188.30 with the close-ratio box at no extra charge, Safe-T-Track at $37.66, power steering at $96.84, the Rally gauge cluster and tachometer at $86.08, and a $16.14 Ride and Handling Package.¹

Pontiac had improved what was under the order blank, too. For 1965 the 389s got revised cylinder heads with re-cored intake passages, higher-rise ports and new intake manifolds, and Over-Drive's fact sheet identifies the new heads by the 9778777 casting. The four-barrel rose from 1964's 325 hp to 335 hp at 5,000 rpm with 431 lb-ft; Tri-Power went from 348 to 360 hp at 5,200 rpm with 424 lb-ft. All are advertised SAE gross figures. A new streamlined hood scoop could be opened with a dealer-installed pan and gaskets. Ate Up With Motor calls this the first Ram Air package, sold first over the counter through dealers and later as a factory option.^3,4,1

The body carried Pontiac's new face. The GTO took the vertically stacked quad headlamps shared with other 1965 Pontiacs, which Ate Up With Motor traces to the 1963 Grand Prix. Over-Drive's fact sheet adds that Rally wheels became available, that the paint chart ran to 16 colors including a one-year-only Iris Mist, and that a Ford-built all-synchromesh three-speed became standard after March 1965. The car was still, formally, an option on the Tempest LeMans: the compiled production table lists it inside the LeMans series, on the 115-inch wheelbase, as a sport coupe, a hardtop or a convertible at factory prices of $2,787, $2,855 and $3,093.^4,3,2

Huntington's order included one of the year's interior improvements. Over-Drive describes the optional Rally gauge cluster as adding a more legible tachometer and an oil-pressure gauge, and Car Life priced it with the tachometer at $86.08. Pontiac's accessory list ran from a $3 parking-brake signal to $349 air conditioning, so the same GTO could be ordered spare or loaded. The compiled table gives shipping weights of 3,478 pounds for the sport coupe and hardtop and 3,700 for the convertible; Car Life weighed its hardtop at 3,590 pounds at the curb and measured 206.1 inches of overall length on the 115-inch wheelbase.^3,2,1

Car Life separated the dealer's car from the showroom car, and that distinction is the heart of the test. Royal's hardtop, with Tri-Power, the close-ratio four-speed and a 3.90 axle, got a minor tune from the dealer, open exhausts, air cleaners removed, plugs and timing, and ran 14.06 seconds at 102.14 mph on M&H slicks with only the driver aboard. The data panel came from a separate, identical GTO that Royal had not prepared, with a 4.11 axle and stock mufflers and tires. At a 3,920-pound test weight it ran 0-60 mph in 5.8 seconds, 0-100 in 14.5, and the quarter mile in 14.5 seconds at 100 mph. It listed at $2,556 and was tested at $3,579.¹

The same issue of Car Life shows how the other General Motors divisions had answered the 1964 GTO. Oldsmobile's 4-4-2 moved to a 400-cubic-inch V-8 rated at 345 hp, and Car Life's automatic Cutlass Holiday ran the quarter mile in 15.5 seconds at 89 mph. Buick's new Skylark Gran Sport used the 401 rated at 325 hp, and its automatic test car ran 15.3 seconds at 88 mph. Those were two-pedal cars with tall gears against a four-speed, 4.11-geared GTO, so the numbers compare configurations as much as brands. Late in the year Chevrolet put a 375 hp 396 into the Chevelle with RPO Z16, and ChevelleStuff counts 201 installed at $1,501.05.^5,6,7,8

None of those three came close in volume. The compiled table credits the GTO with 75,352 cars for 1965: 55,722 hardtops, 11,311 convertibles and 8,319 sport coupes. That is 2.3 times the 32,450 of 1964. The hardtop's share rose from about 57 percent to about 74 percent, while the convertible's fell from about 20 percent to 15 and the pillared sport coupe's from about 23 percent to 11. Over-Drive's tables count 25,003 Oldsmobile 4-4-2s and 15,780 Buick Gran Sports for the same year. The split between four-barrel and Tri-Power GTOs circulates only in uncited copies whose total misses the table by ten cars, so it remains unknown.^2,9,6,10

Inside Pontiac the boom had already rewritten a rule. Ate Up With Motor reports that GM management did not sack general manager Pete Estes, who had just delivered one-year sales growth of more than 25 percent, for putting the 389 into the intermediate body. He was, in that history's words, slapped on the wrist, and the A-body displacement limit was raised to 400 cubic inches. Estes moved on to succeed Bunkie Knudsen at Chevrolet in 1965. By the same account, sales of the facelifted 1965 GTO jumped to more than 75,000 units while Pontiac's total sales topped 801,000.⁴

The consequence was the next year's catalog. For 1966 Pontiac gave the GTO its own series number, 242, on a new body, and production climbed to 96,946, the highest in the compiled tables. The 1965 car was the last GTO sold as an option on another model and the last on the original 1964 body shell. It had done what the order-blank story promised: a buyer who picked the $295.90 option, a few more boxes and the right axle got a car that ran the quarter mile in 14.5 seconds without a dealer's tune, and 75,352 buyers made the GTO a line of its own.^11,4,2