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Old 07-21-2024, 02:02 PM
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b-man b-man is offline
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Question

Quote:
Originally Posted by PAUL K View Post
I'll pass on a Super Duty racing story from the original owner of my SD Formula. After waiting nine months for the car to show up he was a high school senior. The fastest car in school was a souped up mid sixties small block Corvette who was chomping at the bit to get a piece of the brand new SD Formula. They raced from a light that had a marked off quarter mile. The Formula hole shotted the Corvette across the intersection and kept the faster Corvette at its passengers door crossing the finish line... The guy refused to ever give the Corvette a second chance.

What awesome cars Pontiac built for us and gear head management cleverly got into production. Kind of the same way they started the first muscle car ERA with the 64 GTO they ended it with the Super Duty Firebird.
11 years of legendary Pontiac performance excellence that forever changed the performance car industry.


Back when the ‘73 SD T/A made its debut I read an article in Hot Rod magazine where they did a few tuning modifications to a new one and got it to run 13.50s. It had 3.42 gears and I’m almost positive a TH400 automatic.

They put some better rear tires on it for traction, welded some flanges into the exhaust to be able to uncork it, did minor distributor mods to bring the advance in quicker and played with secondary metering rods from what I recall from reading that article with great interest.

I found the article particularly intriguing as a young teenager because I was already a car nut by then and was lamenting the death of the performance car, the SD Firebird was pretty much the last gasp at that time.

Does anyone have any off the showroom floor actual performance data, in other words time slips from one of these cars from back in the day?

__________________
1964 Tempest Coupe LS3/4L70E/3.42
1964 Le Mans Convertible 421 HO/TH350/3.08
2002 WS6 Convertible LS1/4L60E/3.23
1966 VW Type 2 Single Cab Pickup 140hp 2276
1956 VW Type 2 Panel Van 36hp 1200
1957 VW Type 1 Beetle 180hp 2276