The best part of the story of this rescued and revived 1991 Pontiac Firebird is much more than getting lucky and scoring a pretty decent third-gen F-body for damn near nothing. It has nothing to do with the car itself, or the details of the undertaking of turning a car that had been parked under a tree for years and cleaning it up, putting it into a roadworthy state. It’s always cool to go through the steps of taking a mud and grime-covered car that spent a season or two too long in the open and polishing the diamond that was found in the rough. That isn’t the part of the story that we want to focus on here, though. Most of that is pretty straightforward: check items, change fluids, clean like your life depends on it. Don’t worry, you’ll see plenty of that.

The part of this Firebird’s story that got to us is the reasoning behind the car. The Pontiac has a deeper meaning than just being a cheap-car score of epic proportions. It’s more than just having a throwback to the early 1990s, with T-tops and a V8 that would get curb-stomped by a late-model four-banger in a race. It isn’t often that the personal and emotional side of owning a car is shown. The closest you’ll ever come is hearing something like, “my dad had one”, but does that tell the whole story of the car? Not quite. My dad owned a 1976 Pontiac Grand Prix, a gigantic brougham coupe that ran a smog-choked 400 Pontiac mill. And it is ONLY because of that fact that I’d look at one. The same can be said of a 1980s Jeep with the word “Renegade” on the hood, or a black 1969 Chevelle, or any other car that was part of my upbringing. Cars like that are a way to have some kind of connection with my late father. That can go for anyone, from the kid who is meticulously maintaining the Buick that his grandfather left him to the friend who keeps up his buddy’s car because of the memories he has from their time in the Army. Emotion drives everything we do as humans, but often the emotion is explained away as something else to protect ourselves.

Just watch the video, and stick around for the final explanation at the end. If you’ll excuse me, I think someone’s chopping onions in my kitchen…