Years ago, I remember picking up an issue of High Performance Pontiac magazine and seeing a really strange looking 1967 Pontiac Firebird with crazy “flying buttress” wings attached to the C-pillars. As weird as it looked, I kinda liked it! The article talked about how rare it was, and how it’s OHC Sprint Six and 4-speed manual offered good performance for the time. What I was looking at was a John Fitch-modified Firebird.

Pretty sure it was this one that I was looking at in the magazine! See those weird add-on buttresses? That was John Fitch’s trademark, and they were used on the Corvair-based Fitch Sprint as well as the FitchBird. The one in this shot was the only one of the cars built with the OHC six.

Who was John Fitch? He was an interesting guy, that’s for sure. Early on, he was a P51 Mustang pilot in World War II who was shot down and became a POW. After the war, he became an inventor, and came up with a number of things, including those sand-filled saftey barriers you see on the highway all the time.

You can thank John Fitch when that gold Camry swerving all over the place on the highway slams into these instead of you and your ride.

As much as Fitch had a passion for inventing, he had a greater passion for racing, and he even tried his hand at building a few cars over the years. He first started by selling modified Corvairs, and later tried his hand (along with GM engineer Herb Adams) at coming up with a special performance package for his buddy John Z. Delorean over at Pontiac based on the Firebird. His package included handling tweaks and those trademark buttresses he liked to put on a lot of his cars, and was considered a better street car than the Herb Adams-designed package. But in the end, Delorean went with the Adams design, and the Firebird’s Trans Am package was born. After that, Fitch went back to inventing things, selling modified Corvairs, and even taking another crack at racing before passing away in 2012 at the age of 95.

All in all, Fitch only built a handful of these modified Firebirds, which he sold as non-factory backed tuner cars. Some believe that only 6 to eight FitchBirds were built, and all except one car (the one I saw in that magazine years ago) came with the Pontiac 400ci V8.

As I was trolling the interwebs for Pontiac-related items yesterday for my own 1979 Trans Am project, I came across another one of these FitchBirds for sale up on eBay! It’s very rare that these cars trade hands, and even rarer that anyone even acknowledges their existence, so I felt that it was my duty to share it with all of you Bangshift readers! Let’s have a look…

This car is in rough shape, but it looks to be complete, The Ram Air hood and hood tach are intact, as is the trademark Fitch buttresses. It looks like it’s rust free for the most part, so that’s a big plus. These cars, like the later Trans Am, were intended as more of a special handling package than a drag racer, and included Koni shocks, tweaked suspension and steering settings, and probably one of the first uses of radial tires on a pony/muscle car performance package.

One of the stranger options that these were offered with was a mesh cage that went around the grilles, which were common in the racing world back then (like the very early Corvettes had). This car doesn’t have them currently, but I think it would be cool to reproduce them and install them, just to be different.

A rear look at the car details the giant buttresses that Fitch fitted to these cars. The one on the driver’s side is missing it’s inner diffuser/vent, which I’m sure is made of pure unobtanium, so you’re on your own with that. From what I remember reading about Fitch’s cars equipped with these, he installed them to improve airflow over the rear of the car at high speeds. Think of them as side spoilers in a way. They were also supposed to direct that airflow into the cabin and later models were to direct airflow to the rear brakes as well. And yes, they do look strange, but I think they are cool and functional.

Under the hood of this FitchBird is a new-for-1967 Pontiac 400. As far as I can tell, Fitch didn’t modify anything under the hood of these, but as you know, the Pontiac 400 was plenty stout on its own. This one, even though it’s grungy under there, looks to be complete and mostly original.

Inside, the interior is complete but in tough shape. The steering wheels on Fitch cars were originally leather wrapped, but this one has lost its wrap and most of the wheel plastic as well. Every one of these that I’ve seen has a 4-speed manual transmission, and this one is no different. This is a credit card and a catalog away from being a nice place to sit, as there were not many Fitch-specific parts in the cabin.

The seller says that this car may have been a “magazine car”, which I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he think’s it’s one of the ones that various publications tested back when they were new. Is this that car? Probably not based on the lack of Ram Air vents, but this is what it’s supposed to look like if it was in nicer shape.

Cool car, right? What’s not cool is the very optimistic starting bid price of $250,000!!! Don’t get me wrong, these are fascinating cars and an interesting “what if” footnote in the history of Pontiac, but I think that the seller has a bit of Barrett-Jackson Syndrome. I’ve got a hunch that this thing isn’t going to receive any bids. Who knows. A 1967 Firebird in this shape with the 400/4-speed combo in this condition would probably fetch close to $10k right now, so it’s not a stretch for a genuine FitchBird to fetch a bit over that, but you could buy A LOT of nice 1967 Firebirds for $250k. Maybe there was a typo in the price and there’s an extra zero in there somewhere?

What’s your take on this strange bird? Is it cool, or is it too ugly to be seen in? Let us know what you think!

Here’s a link to the auction over on eBay!