Legendary Knafel Pontiac GTO - The Tin Indian Family Reunion

In the early '90s, Arlen Vanke located and purchased it, bringing the GTO back to Michigan, where he had moved. He kept the car with the intent to restore it but before he could get started, Mike heard about the Judge. We'll let him tell the story:

"One day in 2000, I received a call from my friend Fred Engelhart. He had just hung up from a call with Arlen Vanke and thought I might be interested in an old drag car that Arlen had found in Virginia. Since old drag cars are one of my collecting passions, I of course wanted to hear more. I had recently become aware of Merle Green's restoration of the Knafel "Tin Indian" '66 GTO, so when I heard that the Knafel '70 Ram Air IV racecar was available, I asked Fred to arrange the deal as soon as possible. A call was made to Arlen, a price was agreed upon and, in short order, the car was in my garage awaiting restoration."

Having seen some of the work that Micky Hale performed for collector Dick Bridges, Mike called Hale to see if there was an opening for his Pontiac. By March of 2001, the Judge was on its way to Micky Hale Restorations in Ashtabula, Ohio, and its engine went back to the man who originally built it, one "Akron Arlen" Vanke.

The engine was one of those "never supposed to have happened" situations. As GM was still officially out of racing, things like the Super Duty program were only distant memories. Still, Knafel had been the recipient of special cars and support in the past, and the Judge had a unique engine.

Seeing that the Ram Air V cylinder heads were just too much for the 400 engine, a short-lived proposal was hatched in 1970. The idea was to take the severe-duty Ram Air V short-block and mate it to the top end of the Ram Air IV, taking the best attributes of both engines and curing both of their problems-the low-velocity heads of the R/A-V and the cast bottom end of the R/A-IV.

The result was a durable and rev-happy round-port Pontiac V-8 to be called the 400 Super Duty. It would have been released with engine code LS1, slated for use in the '70 1/2 Trans Am. Though never released for production, there were a few examples built by Pontiac Engineering. They looked externally identical to a regular Ram Air IV and, after a quick stop at the Engineering Garage before its delivery, the Knafel Judge had one sitting in its engine bay.

This particular engine received a few extras, though. At the time, Pontiac was working with Warren Brownfield at Air Flow Research. The majority of the work on the heads was for the R/A-IV version of the 303 Pontiac used in the '70 SCCA Trans Am season. These heads were ported in a similar fashion to the 303 versions. Their flow potential was also augmented by an angle plug conversion that put the spark plug in a more advantageous position for the combustion event. Even by today's standards, these were pretty trick pieces.

The camshaft was also a non-stock piece. As the Ram Air V used a larger cam gear than other Pontiac engines as a means to reduce spark scatter, a special camshaft was needed to retain this feature and also provide for the standard Pontiac valve location of EIIEEIIE, as opposed to the RAV's EIEIIEIE. Though we do not know the specifications of the flat-tappet camshaft used, the grind was probably developed as part of the "Latin Squares" program for the 303.

A prototype intake manifold mounted a 1,050 cfm Carter Thermoquad. Like the stock Rochester Q-Jet used on production Pontiac V-8s, the TQ was a spreadbore design but featured a phenolic resin main body to insulate heat and was able to flow more air in stock form.

Arlen was fortunate in that all of the exotic pieces that made the engine so rare were still with the car, making the rebuild a fairly simple exercise. The engine was rebuilt using as much of the original componentry as possible, including the 11.5:1 forged R/A-V pistons, augmented with new Sealed Power rings and the forged R/A-V crankshaft, treated to a new set of Clevite 77 bearings.

Retained were the original camshaft, valves, roller rockers and all the major castings and bottom end parts. The Thermoquad still uses the 0.087 primary and 0.113 secondary jets it raced with, and an ACCEL distributor and wires fire the AC sparkplugs. A new set of Hooker Super Comp headers with 2-inch primaries and 3.5-inch collectors replaced the badly weathered originals and, with that, the engine restoration was complete.

Moving to the transmission, which is the original M-40 Turbo 400, Vanke retained the custom pieces it originally was built with, including the 4500 rpm stall, 9-inch Vitar torque converter, manual valve body, shift kit and Hurst Dual Gate shifter. Power is transferred to a 10-bolt rearend with Safe-T-Track and a set of 4.56:1 Shiefer gears.