As far back as I can remember, I've loved Pontiacs. It's something I inherited from my father when I was a child. As I grew older, my love for hot rods grew as well.
My father, Tom, was a car guy when he was a teenager, and spent his early years building and racing cars on historic Woodward Avenue in Royal Oak, Michigan. He owned a '62 Super-Duty 421 Catalina, and in May 1964, my parent's purchased a '64 LeMans hardtop from Ace Wilson's Royal Pontiac in Royal Oak, Michigan. My mother, Dency, drove the LeMans until the late '60s, at which time my father decided it needed some more performance.
He and one of his childhood friends, Larry Payne, decided to put a GM 6-71 supercharger on a Pontiac 421ci, four-bolt-main block, housing a steel crank and aluminum rods. A new custom paint job was done around 1970, and it won awards at the Detroit Autorama for several years, where superchargers were not as common as they are today. He also used to race the car at local racetracks and on Woodward Avenue.
I can remember all the attention the LeMans got every time my brother, sister, and I went for a ride with my father. I guess that's where my love for cars really began, especially Pontiacs.
After years of going to car shows and spending countless dollars on engine parts, my father broke one of the 421's pushrods and finally parked the car in the garage for several years. My older brother, Mike, and I always tried to talk him into fixing it, and once we were old enough to drive, we applied even more pressure.
In early 1989, my brother purchased a numbers-matching '69 Liberty Blue GTO Judge with a Ram Air III engine, hideaway headlights, and a four-speed transmission, however we still wanted to drive my father's Pontiac one time, just because we loved the sound the supercharger made and the horsepower it produced. Finally after years of talking to dad about it, he gave in and told us that if we did all the work, we could have it.
We started buying parts to get it back on the road. That's when we realized car parts are expensive. We pulled the cylinder heads off the engine to have them reconditioned and replace the broken pushrod. We also purchased a new blower intake from Blower Drive Services. (Unlike the old intake, which was made simply to race and didn't have any water passages to help cool the engine, the new one flowed water.)
Now that the LeMans was running again, my brother and I were finally able to drive it. I fell in love with the whine of the blower from the first time we drove it down the street. For a few years we had a lot of fun driving our Pontiac around, but after spinning a main bearing, we were forced to park the car again when we didn't have the money to fix it.
It sat for a couple years until the spring of 1993. My plans were to pull the engine, replace it with a 455ci Pontiac motor, and give the body a new paint job. My father agreed, so we got to work, but we never imagined how much our original plans were going to change.