PWA "The Lounge" - Page 5560

1320junkie · 10-19-2009, 02:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TJTKSDMJ8

What was it they called the emblem? Screaming eagle, fire something? Seriously.. I tend to remember something like that..

FireBird

68 Z/28 · 10-19-2009, 02:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1320junkie

man i have the full dvd set...matter of fact i am going to fall asleep watching them..heres some junkie Trivia...I have owned firebirds, trans ams and gto's before...but the 5th gen is my first Camaro

Not knocking anyone who does it...but it screams attention whore to me...lol..but thats just me...now some will say the same about the cars that i drive..but i buy them because they speak to me...i drive them to walmart mcdonalds etc...oh well...lol

To each his own

and we all know I'm aa Whore

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1320junkie

I got it for free

now the two other classics..yall will see at the fest..woohooooo. I love driving the car it handles well and will spin the tires as soon as you hit the throttle I try not to drive it hard..but I cant help myself..and I am gonig to track it at the Fest too...maybe race X and Zabo

Gentry78 · 10-19-2009, 02:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1320junkie

I got it for free

now the two other classics..yall will see at the fest..woohooooo. I love driving the car it handles well and will spin the tires as soon as you hit the throttle I try not to drive it hard..but I cant help myself..and I am gonig to track it at the Fest too...maybe race X and Zabo

wow

lol yeah right...you easy on a car....your not fooling us lol

sweet man i hope i get to make it, it sounds awesome

TJTKSDMJ8 · 10-19-2009, 02:35 AM

Kojak with a Kodac!!!!!

1320junkie · 10-19-2009, 02:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gentry78

wow

lol yeah right...you easy on a car....your not fooling us lol

sweet man i hope i get to make it, it sounds awesome

It's my daily driver now..woohoo

TJTKSDMJ8 · 10-19-2009, 02:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1320junkie

FireBird

wasn't it like a screaming chicken or something like that?

1320junkie · 10-19-2009, 02:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TJTKSDMJ8

wasn't it like a screaming chicken or something like that?

Hood bird. Laughing Phoenix. Screaming Chicken.

1320junkie · 10-19-2009, 02:39 AM

The Screaming Chicken, in turn, essentially owes its genesis to one of the first cars to carry the name Firebird, the turbine-powered 1959 GM Firebird III concept car. As former Pontiac styling chief Bill Porter told David Newhardt for Newhardt's 2005 book, Firebird Trans Am, the designer of the Firebird III, Norm James, "had seen this stylized firebird, with its wings spread and sort of feathered" in the Phoenix airport and went on to apply a similar graphic to the nose of the concept car.

Pontiac, of course, debuted the Firebird in 1967 emblazoned with a version of the design, albeit one that appeared on subtle badges no more than a few inches wide. The bird evolved a bit on the 1970 Trans Am, but remained subtle, a decal about 12 inches wide on the Endura nosepiece. In 1970, however, Porter recalled James's graphic, "and it gave me an idea of a device to get the (Trans Am's reverse-facing) hood scoop to look like it belonged on the car, by wrapping these wings around it - it kind of sucked it back into the surface on the vehicle, integrated it."

With the help of graphic designer Norm Inouye (who had already designed the firebird graphic on the 1969 Banshee II), Porter applied his vision to one of the early prototypes of the second-generation Firebird in 1970, but immediately removed it when Bill Mitchell, GM's vice president for design, demanded as much with some choice words. "It has an Indian blanket on the hood!" Mitchell told Porter.

Yet John Schinella, who succeeded Porter soon afterward, plucked the phoenix from its premature ashes, tweaked it, then applied it to a pre-production 1973 Trans Am and took the car up Woodward Avenue, where he knew the car guys hung out, and where he could gauge their reactions.

"They'd go nuts," Schinella told Newhardt. "They loved it and they wanted to know where they could get it."

Rather than try an end-run around Mitchell as his predecessor did, Schinella appealed to aesthetics that he knew Mitchell already approved of: He took another pre-production 1973 Trans Am, had his studio repaint it black, then applied a gold foil hood bird graphic and gold stripes. He then took the Trans Am, along with one of Bill Mitchell's motorcycles, which Mitchell had already painted in a similar black-and-gold scheme to emulate the John Player Special Lotus race cars, and parked them both underneath Mitchell's office window. Mitchell suddenly changed his mind on the hood bird, essentially paving its path to production.

That black car, which still exists (see www.1973-76transamconcept.com for that story), also directly inspired the 1976 50th Anniversary Limited Edition Trans Ams and the 1977-'81 "Bandit" Special Edition Trans Ams, but Schinella and the Pontiac design studio needed more than just one car to completely sell the hood bird for production. According to Newhardt, Schinella plastered the bird over the hoods of three more Trans Ams--one red, one white, one blue--to present to Pontiac management for approval. Rather than make the bird standard for the 1973 model year, however, management specified that it remain an option, code WW-7, which would set back style-conscious buyers another $53.

Mitchell himself must have warmed up to the big bird rather quickly. He had another Trans Am, this one a 1972 built at the Norwood, Ohio, assembly plant (that quite possibly could have sat idle during the 1972 strike), assigned to the Pontiac design studio, with a number of specific design requests. For the exterior, he asked for pearl white paint, trimmed in blue (with matching blue fenderwells, no less), and accompanied by a set of white honeycomb 15-inch wheels, even though Pontiac never offered honeycombs in any colors other than argent silver and gold.

(According to Tom Goad, the product planning manager for Pontiac at the time, the company that supplied Pontiac with the honeycomb wheels, Motor Wheel Corporation, had pitched the idea of body-colored honeycombs to Pontiac, and the division contemplated adding them as an option for 1973, but Pontiac ultimately canceled the option before it reached production.)

Mitchell specified pearl white leather seats and white door panels trimmed in blue with blue dash, blue console, blue carpet and blue steering wheel spokes. Whether it came as such off the line or whether Mitchell specified it this way, the Trans Am came with an automatic transmission, tinted glass, the aforementioned console, 8-track, air conditioning and power windows. As with all cars that passed through his studio, Schinella added stainless steel grates in place of the floor mats and affixed to the door panels a pair of General Motors Design badges.

According to Jim Mattison of Pontiac Historical Services, those last two items were a kind of trademark of cars that emerged from the Pontiac design studio.

"Generally speaking, cars that got those weren't normally put on the street for use, just on turntables," Mattison said.

Stylistically speaking, however, the most significant addition to the Trans Am remains the black and blue hood bird, which carried the same general design as the production graphics of 1973, but much more modest dimensions--roughly two-thirds of the production bird's size, with wings that came far from wrapping around the hood scoop.

The decal on the hood scoop has a similarly vague origin. Though it claims a Super Duty 455 under the hood--an engine that didn't see the light of day until late in the 1973 model year--the X in the car's VIN identifies a 300hp 455 H.O. as the engine. Neal Wichard, who owned this car when we photographed it, confirmed the engine as a 455 H.O., though he said the V-8 did receive some tweaks at the hands of Pontiac's engineering department.

"Engineering installed an experimental aluminum intake manifold, which I've gathered to be a leftover from their testing with those in 1971," Wichard said. "We also saw that it has Ram Air IV heads, as well as a Ram Air IV camshaft and a little higher stall converter--around 2,300 to 2,500 rpm."

So, conceivably, Pontiac's styling studio simply decided to use this car as a test mule to see how the upcoming SD-455 decals fit to the hoodscoop.

According to Wichard and Mattison, Mitchell then took the car out to Road America at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, several times over the next eight to 10 months, both to indulge his love for racing and to show off the car and gauge the public's response in the same way Schinella took his first hood bird Trans Am up Woodward.

"Mitchell developed a great number of friends up there," Mattison said. "So, generally, any car that he had control over, he sent to them."

The car's origin on an assembly line meant it remained DOT- and EPA-approved, which saved it from heading straight to the crusher once Mitchell was done with it. Rather than sell styling study cars directly to Mitchell's friends, however, GM had to arrange the sale through the Brass Hat Dealers, a small network of dealerships set up to handle such transactions. Public Pontiac in Skokie, Illinois, thus sold the Trans Am in late October 1972 for $4,197.34 to Dave Doren, an acquaintance of Mitchell's who admired the car. It then passed through another couple owners before Wichard, of La Jolla, California, discovered it in unrestored condition in Michigan.

Wichard, in turn, allowed our Jeff Koch a turn at the wheel of this special one-off Trans Am. Koch, a man who likes his sleep, reported that the bright blue interior, which he described as "aqua," rather shocks a man awake, but the soft buckets invited him to sink right in and the rumbly 1,000 rpm idle felt like a quarter-operated magic-fingers-type motel bed.

Which seems invitation enough to get busy, right? At half-throttle he found himself accelerating steadily and felt the deep exhaust rumble, but heard some engine pinging. Sixty miles an hour came up in no time, but the real shocker came not from the easily attainable speeds and the endless torque available from the 455, but from the heavy (especially nose-heavy) car's ability to take corners. "Tight and solid," Koch reported, "with agility and poise that European sports cars packing half the curb weight would be wise to emulate. The nose just sticks, the rear comes around with it, and that's it. The surprise is that it's not surprised--it just takes it."

So maybe it doesn't have a Super Duty or a four-speed, but it certainly has the performance--both straight-line and in the corners--to match its flash, an attribute many Trans Am buyers sought for years afterward.

Then again, maybe all they wanted was a big Screaming Chicken on the hood.

Gentry78 · 10-19-2009, 02:41 AM

oh yeah can't wait till this weekend

http://www.adrl.us/index.php/main/event/

Gentry78 · 10-19-2009, 02:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1320junkie

It's my daily driver now..woohoo

sweeeet

Gentry78 · 10-19-2009, 02:47 AM

should be cool watching the monster trucks race on the track lol

but i think they should go the full 1320 lol

http://www.adrl.us/index.php/main/

1320junkie · 10-19-2009, 02:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gentry78

should be cool watching the monster trucks race on the track lol

but i think they should go the full 1320 lol

http://www.adrl.us/index.php/main/

that reminds me i have to check and see what happened at the LSX shootout this weekend

TJTKSDMJ8 · 10-19-2009, 02:51 AM

"Then again, maybe all they wanted was a big Screaming Chicken on the hood."

djsnoflake · 10-19-2009, 02:55 AM

Makes me miss my 76 and 81 :(

10-19-2009, 02:35 AM	#77830
TJTKSDMJ8 I COMMAND YOU TO HOOK 'EM Drives: 2010 Black Camaro SS2/RS R6P Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Re-building Death Star (Need Contractors) Posts: 2,670 View My Garage	Kojak with a Kodac!!!!! __________________ Proud Owner of a R6P Black SS/2, RS, CGM Stripe Package Delivered July 3!!!

10-19-2009, 02:51 AM	#77839
TJTKSDMJ8 I COMMAND YOU TO HOOK 'EM Drives: 2010 Black Camaro SS2/RS R6P Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Re-building Death Star (Need Contractors) Posts: 2,670 View My Garage	"Then again, maybe all they wanted was a big Screaming Chicken on the hood." __________________ Proud Owner of a R6P Black SS/2, RS, CGM Stripe Package Delivered July 3!!!

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10-19-2009, 02:39 AM	#77834
1320junkie Drives: The Imperial Army Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: The Darkside Posts: 15,742	The Screaming Chicken, in turn, essentially owes its genesis to one of the first cars to carry the name Firebird, the turbine-powered 1959 GM Firebird III concept car. As former Pontiac styling chief Bill Porter told David Newhardt for Newhardt's 2005 book, Firebird Trans Am, the designer of the Firebird III, Norm James, "had seen this stylized firebird, with its wings spread and sort of feathered" in the Phoenix airport and went on to apply a similar graphic to the nose of the concept car. Pontiac, of course, debuted the Firebird in 1967 emblazoned with a version of the design, albeit one that appeared on subtle badges no more than a few inches wide. The bird evolved a bit on the 1970 Trans Am, but remained subtle, a decal about 12 inches wide on the Endura nosepiece. In 1970, however, Porter recalled James's graphic, "and it gave me an idea of a device to get the (Trans Am's reverse-facing) hood scoop to look like it belonged on the car, by wrapping these wings around it - it kind of sucked it back into the surface on the vehicle, integrated it." With the help of graphic designer Norm Inouye (who had already designed the firebird graphic on the 1969 Banshee II), Porter applied his vision to one of the early prototypes of the second-generation Firebird in 1970, but immediately removed it when Bill Mitchell, GM's vice president for design, demanded as much with some choice words. "It has an Indian blanket on the hood!" Mitchell told Porter. Yet John Schinella, who succeeded Porter soon afterward, plucked the phoenix from its premature ashes, tweaked it, then applied it to a pre-production 1973 Trans Am and took the car up Woodward Avenue, where he knew the car guys hung out, and where he could gauge their reactions. "They'd go nuts," Schinella told Newhardt. "They loved it and they wanted to know where they could get it." Rather than try an end-run around Mitchell as his predecessor did, Schinella appealed to aesthetics that he knew Mitchell already approved of: He took another pre-production 1973 Trans Am, had his studio repaint it black, then applied a gold foil hood bird graphic and gold stripes. He then took the Trans Am, along with one of Bill Mitchell's motorcycles, which Mitchell had already painted in a similar black-and-gold scheme to emulate the John Player Special Lotus race cars, and parked them both underneath Mitchell's office window. Mitchell suddenly changed his mind on the hood bird, essentially paving its path to production. That black car, which still exists (see www.1973-76transamconcept.com for that story), also directly inspired the 1976 50th Anniversary Limited Edition Trans Ams and the 1977-'81 "Bandit" Special Edition Trans Ams, but Schinella and the Pontiac design studio needed more than just one car to completely sell the hood bird for production. According to Newhardt, Schinella plastered the bird over the hoods of three more Trans Ams--one red, one white, one blue--to present to Pontiac management for approval. Rather than make the bird standard for the 1973 model year, however, management specified that it remain an option, code WW-7, which would set back style-conscious buyers another $53. Mitchell himself must have warmed up to the big bird rather quickly. He had another Trans Am, this one a 1972 built at the Norwood, Ohio, assembly plant (that quite possibly could have sat idle during the 1972 strike), assigned to the Pontiac design studio, with a number of specific design requests. For the exterior, he asked for pearl white paint, trimmed in blue (with matching blue fenderwells, no less), and accompanied by a set of white honeycomb 15-inch wheels, even though Pontiac never offered honeycombs in any colors other than argent silver and gold. (According to Tom Goad, the product planning manager for Pontiac at the time, the company that supplied Pontiac with the honeycomb wheels, Motor Wheel Corporation, had pitched the idea of body-colored honeycombs to Pontiac, and the division contemplated adding them as an option for 1973, but Pontiac ultimately canceled the option before it reached production.) Mitchell specified pearl white leather seats and white door panels trimmed in blue with blue dash, blue console, blue carpet and blue steering wheel spokes. Whether it came as such off the line or whether Mitchell specified it this way, the Trans Am came with an automatic transmission, tinted glass, the aforementioned console, 8-track, air conditioning and power windows. As with all cars that passed through his studio, Schinella added stainless steel grates in place of the floor mats and affixed to the door panels a pair of General Motors Design badges. According to Jim Mattison of Pontiac Historical Services, those last two items were a kind of trademark of cars that emerged from the Pontiac design studio. "Generally speaking, cars that got those weren't normally put on the street for use, just on turntables," Mattison said. Stylistically speaking, however, the most significant addition to the Trans Am remains the black and blue hood bird, which carried the same general design as the production graphics of 1973, but much more modest dimensions--roughly two-thirds of the production bird's size, with wings that came far from wrapping around the hood scoop. The decal on the hood scoop has a similarly vague origin. Though it claims a Super Duty 455 under the hood--an engine that didn't see the light of day until late in the 1973 model year--the X in the car's VIN identifies a 300hp 455 H.O. as the engine. Neal Wichard, who owned this car when we photographed it, confirmed the engine as a 455 H.O., though he said the V-8 did receive some tweaks at the hands of Pontiac's engineering department. "Engineering installed an experimental aluminum intake manifold, which I've gathered to be a leftover from their testing with those in 1971," Wichard said. "We also saw that it has Ram Air IV heads, as well as a Ram Air IV camshaft and a little higher stall converter--around 2,300 to 2,500 rpm." So, conceivably, Pontiac's styling studio simply decided to use this car as a test mule to see how the upcoming SD-455 decals fit to the hoodscoop. According to Wichard and Mattison, Mitchell then took the car out to Road America at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, several times over the next eight to 10 months, both to indulge his love for racing and to show off the car and gauge the public's response in the same way Schinella took his first hood bird Trans Am up Woodward. "Mitchell developed a great number of friends up there," Mattison said. "So, generally, any car that he had control over, he sent to them." The car's origin on an assembly line meant it remained DOT- and EPA-approved, which saved it from heading straight to the crusher once Mitchell was done with it. Rather than sell styling study cars directly to Mitchell's friends, however, GM had to arrange the sale through the Brass Hat Dealers, a small network of dealerships set up to handle such transactions. Public Pontiac in Skokie, Illinois, thus sold the Trans Am in late October 1972 for $4,197.34 to Dave Doren, an acquaintance of Mitchell's who admired the car. It then passed through another couple owners before Wichard, of La Jolla, California, discovered it in unrestored condition in Michigan. Wichard, in turn, allowed our Jeff Koch a turn at the wheel of this special one-off Trans Am. Koch, a man who likes his sleep, reported that the bright blue interior, which he described as "aqua," rather shocks a man awake, but the soft buckets invited him to sink right in and the rumbly 1,000 rpm idle felt like a quarter-operated magic-fingers-type motel bed. Which seems invitation enough to get busy, right? At half-throttle he found himself accelerating steadily and felt the deep exhaust rumble, but heard some engine pinging. Sixty miles an hour came up in no time, but the real shocker came not from the easily attainable speeds and the endless torque available from the 455, but from the heavy (especially nose-heavy) car's ability to take corners. "Tight and solid," Koch reported, "with agility and poise that European sports cars packing half the curb weight would be wise to emulate. The nose just sticks, the rear comes around with it, and that's it. The surprise is that it's not surprised--it just takes it." So maybe it doesn't have a Super Duty or a four-speed, but it certainly has the performance--both straight-line and in the corners--to match its flash, an attribute many Trans Am buyers sought for years afterward. Then again, maybe all they wanted was a big Screaming Chicken on the hood.

10-19-2009, 02:41 AM	#77835
Gentry78 HOOK'EM Drives: 97 c1500/92 olds Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Texas Posts: 5,279	oh yeah can't wait till this weekend http://www.adrl.us/index.php/main/event/

10-19-2009, 02:47 AM	#77837
Gentry78 HOOK'EM Drives: 97 c1500/92 olds Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: Texas Posts: 5,279	should be cool watching the monster trucks race on the track lol but i think they should go the full 1320 lol http://www.adrl.us/index.php/main/