Though desirable vintage vehicles can still be found hidden in barns or tucked away in garages across much of country, in the Southwest, carports are prominent. Under some of them there is gold to be mined for the industrious car guy. Brian Buhl is one of those car guys.
"I had been regularly doing yard work for a lady for about nine years," he tells HPP, "and on the opposite side of the house-behind a privacy gate and under a carport and tarp-was this car on blocks." After seeing what appeared to him to be a customized '79 WS6 Trans Am with just 16,000 miles on it, Brian offered to buy it and a deal was struck.
When he and his wife Charmel arrived to pick up the T/A with camera in hand, he told her, "Keep taking pictures." Those are the photos that you see here.
After bolting on a set of wheels and tires that would hold air to get it loaded into a trailer, they brought home their new prize and began to wonder about its history. The details and the dating of the hand-painted exterior graphics, the presence of a 455 sporting an H-O Racing TurboForce system with water injection, and the Turbo 400 trans led them to believe that this T/A was more than an enthusiastic hobbyist's buildup.
Information was hard to come by, but Craig Hendrickson of H-O Racing, who first brought the California T/A Outlaw Special Edition to my attention, was able to shed some light on it. "Though I cannot recall the name of the man behind this project, I do remember that he was inspired by Dennis Mecham's Macho T/As," he told HPP. "He, however, wanted something more-hence the 455 and the H-O TurboForce system. He wasn't too concerned about CARB emissions compliance.
"If I remember correctly, H-O built the first 455, but since that really wasn't our mainstream business, a third party built the others. It would have been a D-port engine (to fit the TurboForce), but unfortunately, I don't remember any of the engine specs. A dealer planned to make 50 of them, but the person who was leading the project was killed in a plane crash, so only 6 were built."
According to Brian's research, "Epsteen & Quaid Pontiac-Buick in Palm Springs, California, is where the T/A originally came from, and mine is the number four car of those six." The dealer still exists but has been sold multiple times, so no one there has any info on the T/A.
Ask some hobbyists and they will tell you that a California T/A Outlaw Special Edition is a ghost; it has been researched and debated, but never seen. It appears that this particular ghost is alive and well and living in Nevada.
Bear in mind, however, that all of this information is based on 30-year-old memories. Though the high-performance equipment and the graphics are certainly on the T/A-and they appear to have been there for a very long time-Brian has yet to locate any paperwork to verify this T/A's tuner-car pedigree. That's why we are presenting the California Outlaw Special Edition T/A here in a mini feature. We would like to get more history on it to do a full feature, so we are asking the readership for any credible information or paperwork regarding this special T/A, or any of the others that were built.
Please email me at tomdemauro@windstream.net with any insight that you can provide. Thank you all in advance for any help.