[MikeNoun]

1978 Macho T/A #178 (red and white, featured a few pages back) was a car owned by a kid I went to high school with back around 1982. When he bought the car, he was embarrassed to drive it around town because of the "Macho T/A" stickers along the rockers, but he loved the red/white paint scheme and the 4-speed. All our friends seemed to have Trans Am's at the time. At our high school, there was a Brewster Green 73 Trans Am 455, a Martinique Blue 78 WS6, and an Admiralty Blue 74 400-speed.

My oldest brother had special ordered a brand new 1979 Trans Am Special Edition WS6 400 4-speed, and by 1981, he had already put in a 1969 GTO engine, removed all the emissions, ported #16 heads, radical Comp Cams 305H cam, and installed 4.10 gears. Car looked bone stock, but sounded hairy as hell through the exhaust splitters. Quite a shock to those back in 1981-1982 when they heard this thing fire up. Also, my high school teacher had a 1970 Trans Am RAIII 4-speed, Lucerne Blue (as well as a half a dozen other cool Pontiacs), and he went on to become a major contributor to POCI, HPP, etc. for a few decades.

Anyway, the high school kid that bought Macho T/A #178 asked me to come over and look at it, plus I had a set of 15x8 snowflakes that I sold him. The turbo setup for this car was stashed in the trunk. Apparently the original owner of #178 complained of detonation, so he had the turbo removed (finding premium gas back then was difficult) and had it converted to a standard 4-barrel. By 1982, he sold it to the guy I knew in high school (pictured earlier).