With all of the high-dollar craziness associated with the musclecar market recently, there has been a resulting increase in value of late-'70s Second-Gen T/As. Though factory-built SEs, Anniversary, and/or W72 cars are rising in both popularity and price tag, what of the tuner cars of the same era?
The Fire-Am of Herb Adams' VSE (Very Special Equipment) is one such tuner car that deserves recognition. It was born of an idea to run in the IROC (International Race of Champions) series or an SCCA celebrity series that never happened, depending upon the source-Herb said IROC in an '00 HPP interview. It was also a developmental project for Pontiac's WS6 suspension program, for which he was a consultant.
A former Pontiac special projects engineer, Herb was instrumental in the development of the Trans Am and SD-455 engine packages, among others. He also did plenty of racing, fielding cars, including in SCCA his wife's '64 Tempest-"The Grey Ghost" and a host of Firebirds; and even a '73 Grand Am in NASCAR. They were built by Herb with other engineers, such as Tom Nell, Jeff Young, among others, in their spare time sans factory backing. So it should come as no surprise that Herb continued on his own, creating F-body chassis upgrades to forward his racing efforts after leaving Pontiac in 1973.
Fire-Am graphics were produced exclusively for VSE by 3M back in the day. Here you can see differences in the "Bionic Firebird" hood graphic between the two cars. This is because Chris Harris' orange Fire-Am has the original decal from VSE. Mike Kozar didn't like the proportions of the original, so he designed one that looked more like the logo on the cover of the VSE catalog and the version shown on the white and blue '79 Fire-Am that Herb Adams raced at Daytona. Also, Mike's hood bird is painted on. The decals on the hoodscoop of the orange car are actually for a Can Am.
He built a '76 Trans Am employing those parts and showed it to Pontiac's John Schinella and Bill Collins. They liked the car, and since-according to Herb-Pontiac was interested in IROC at the time, he was contracted in late 1976 to build eight Fire-Ams to compete in said series.
Their performance was great, but Pontiac racing in a showroom-stock-style venue with celebrity drivers at the wheel didn't come to fruition. Herb sent a few of the eight cars to automotive magazines for testing. The resulting coverage was very positive, so he decided not to waste the effort by shelving all the great parts he had developed. Instead, he pursued the idea of building tuner cars for the street.
As Herb recalled in HPP's '00 interview, "Though Pontiac's proposed race program didn't fly, we still knew that we had a good car that performed better than anything the division was building. We asked Cars and Concepts' Dick Chrysler and Dave Draper to build a turnkey package to be sold through Pontiac dealers." With Pontiac less than interested, according to Herb, the required logistics of the endeavor would increase the price by $1,000-$2,000 over the premium already paid for the conversion. As a result, very few Fire-Ams (or Cheverras, the Camaro version) were actually built at Cars and Concepts.
On a much brighter note, Herb did sell all the components of the Fire-Am via mail order, individually or in three-tiered packages, so intrepid Trans Am owners could build their own. VSE also offered installation services on privately owned Pontiacs, from simple bolt-ons up to complete stages. But since these cars were not numbered or heavily documented, it's difficult to verify whether or not the car was built at VSE without receipts to prove it.
Consequently, the possibility exists that a Fire-Am could have been created by one of three different methods; Cars and Concepts built it from a new car delivered from a Pontiac dealer, VSE built it from a private-owner car, or a private owner ordered the parts and built it himself. The latter scenario is true for our two feature cars.
Mike Kozar of Russell, Pennsylvania, decided to build his '77 Y82 SE Trans Am into a Fire-Am in 1981 and has recently had it completely restored. Chris and Toni Harris of Plainfield, Indiana, hold the keys to the '77 Trans Am that became a Fire-Am back in 1980 at the hand of the original owner. It has not been modified or restored since, remaining as it was built in the early days of the Reagan era.