HPP was invited recently to speak with Lou Wassel, the sporty-car marketing manager at Pontiac in the '80s and one of the men most responsible for the development, design, and introduction of the Trans Am GTA in the fall of 1986. The GTA was the top-of-the-line Trans Am from 1987 to 1992, and many fans remember it as the most beautiful Third-Gen ever built.
Lou said of his background, "I joined the Pontiac Motor Division in 1982 after earning an industrial engineering degree from Wayne State University in Detroit and an MBA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was the sporty-car marketing manager when the Trans Am GTA was introduced for the '87 model year. Following my six-year stint at Pontiac, I moved through a number of GM finance staff positions before becoming a comptroller of the GM Tech Center. I left GM in 1996 to become vice president and partner of Phoenix Technical Services. Upon sale of the company last year, I established Michigan Bio-Motive Technologies, a firm that provides business support services for the commercialization of advanced automotive powertrains, alternative fuels, and renewable materials."
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Lou, his wife, Mary, and their four children reside in Troy, Michigan. In his spare time, he volunteers as a youth travel baseball coach, is a mentor for the First Lego League, and is an active member of the Boy Scouts of America.
After being introduced to Lou through Frank Rider of the GTA Source Page (gtasourcepage.com), we contacted the former GM executive at his home. Here is what Lou Wassel had to say about his role in the development of the GTA.
HPP: Please tell us about how you were introduced to the GTA program, when it was, and what your initial thoughts were.
LW: First of all, I conceived the program. I got to work on the F-car really from the day I walked in the door at Pontiac in June 1982. I started on the successor to what was then the '82 Firebird. Pontiac had already started thinking about the next generation and was looking at initially an '87, '88 [model year] introduction. Of course, the successor of the '82 didn't come out until 1993, so there were a lot of changes to that program.
In 1984, I was promoted to sporty-car marketing manager and given responsibility for both the future program and the current program, which at the time was the '82 Firebird. I did a study of the sporty-car market as it was back then-who the competitors were, which ones were successful, which ones weren't, and why the successful ones were. As part of my job, I was able to get any car I wanted from the Milford Proving Grounds, so I drove every sporty car in the market to and from work: Mustangs, Supras, Celicas, Siroccos, you name it. I was pretty familiar with the product, and then through my analysis of the marketplace, I understood what was successful, what wasn't, and where the gaps were.
HPP: What gaps existed in the Pontiac F-body lineup in 1985?
LW: Posted on the GTA Source Page is a chart I provided of what the competitors were in the sporty-car market in those days and how we segmented the thing. You could immediately see two gaps for Pontiac. One gap was at the top end. At that time, Chevy had an IROC. We just had a Trans Am-and the uplevel Trans Am was still just called a Trans Am-but we noticed there was a gap when we studied that part of the market. We saw that Pontiac wasn't even on the consideration list of people who bought 300ZXs and Supras, a little bit on the Corvette, a little bit on the IROC, but certainly there was a gap there for Pontiac, or an "opportunity," as I put it. And then the second gap was in the middle of the market right where the Mustang GT was. Very few who bought the Mustang GT had the Firebird, the Camaro, the Z28, or the Trans Am on their shopping list. Or if they did, it wasn't affordable to them-the Mustang GT had that price point all to itself. So there were two gaps there, where the GTA ended up and where the Formula eventually ended up.