The kid in me wants to go out to the nearest store and see if he can locate the scale version of this 1970 Pontiac GTO. It shouldn’t be too difficult…restored body, redline tires with five-spoke wheels, scooped hood and spoiler. It looks like something Johnny Lightning cranked out, right? The approachable, useable muscle car. This thing is too clean for driver status to most people. We’d drive it until the snow fell ourselves, but be real about things for a moment. This will be someone’s sunshine car, the one that’s treated well and babied and cared for. Nothing wrong with that at all…we’d rather see someone love, treasure and care for a machine like this instead of just squirreling it away as another collector car, or worse yet using it as if they’d just scored a great deal on a used G8 sedan on a used-car lot.
We hope that once this car is sold at the Mecum Phoenix auction, that it lives a good life. But we hope that the new owner does have the good sense to put their foot to the floor every once in a while. You see, under that hood isn’t a 400 or 455, but one of Pontiac’s underrated gems, the 428. In production for three years, the 428 was the successor to the 421 that spent the mid-1960s teaching lessons on Tin Indian grunt. Normally, you’d find a 428 in a bigger car, like a Catalina. In a GTO…whoo, boy. We aren’t saying we’d abuse this thing at first glance, but there’s a road somewhere that desperately needs your rubber signature all over it, and we can’t think of a better writing instrument.
