Between the Pontiac Grand Am CA and the Chevrolet Malibu Black Sterling that I recently found, I’ve been foaming at the mouth of a 1978-82 GM A-body build. Look, I like the G-body cars. I’ve owned five of ’em over the years. But when it comes to looks, out of the entire run of mid-size RWD GM cars made after the 1978 downsizing, the Malibu and Grand Am win over the Cutlass or the Monte Carlo. I prefer the sloped back glass and the slightly longer space between the top of the roof and the taillights. It’s not like there’s that much of a difference between the two models anyways. There’s a great chance that a Chevrolet small-block is underhood, but Pontiac units were installed too. It’s like most 1980s products: stone-stock, it’s what it is. But get creative with a build, and it can be a beast and a half.
So, to the Rough Start find. We don’t know the exact year of the car, we don’t know what the power train is and we are told that the converter might have a stall and that there is probably a locker in the rear axle. So what do we know? That the paint needs to be done badly, that the Cragars on the car need to stay, that the stock gauges with the wimpy 80-MPH speedo need to be ditched (you can read Dave Nutting’s piece on how he redid the Pontiac dash in his Monte Carlo SS by CLICKING HERE) and that some grunt that’s packing at minimum 450 RWHP needs to be in place. We’d be in a hurry to start talking down the $4,000 price, or maybe we’d get lucky and show up with a cheap lifted Jeep that the seller couldn’t pass up.
