This one goes right after 53-003. I mention it because I saw this car (or its twin) when I was at Pontiac in 1968. After my mentor helped me find the engines from the circa '64 Hot Rod cover (in a heap in the basement of the engineering building) he mentioned Pontiac's stillborn sports car.
He took me out to the back lot of the engineering building and there were several large crates - big enough for a low car, but not tall enough to stand up in. The two Banshees were in two of these crates. We opened one up to see the car. I recall thinking that it was a cross between an Opel GT and a '68 Corvette, and my mentor mentioned that corporate vetoed the idea because they thought it might cannibalize the Corvette. The base model with the OHC inline six MSRP would have been about $3500, and there was room for a V-8.
I was really surprised back in the eighties when I read that one had gotten into the public domain. I recall that they were built circa '66, but B-J lists them as "1964".
Another interesting, but macabre story of this foray was the Tempest convertible. The story was that it was used to shoot a commericial that resulted in the death of a female model. She was to drive toward a camera boom that was to swing away at the last moment, but it didn't, and she was decapitated.
My mentor did technical research for the corporate legal staff and testified in lawsuits as an engineering expert witness. He knew where a lot of skeltons were stashed away and had some great war stories including customer complaint letters. One I recall was from a guy from Brooklyn, and he wrote exactly the way a working class Brooklynite talks - not quite the way I was taught to write English.
Duke
He took me out to the back lot of the engineering building and there were several large crates - big enough for a low car, but not tall enough to stand up in. The two Banshees were in two of these crates. We opened one up to see the car. I recall thinking that it was a cross between an Opel GT and a '68 Corvette, and my mentor mentioned that corporate vetoed the idea because they thought it might cannibalize the Corvette. The base model with the OHC inline six MSRP would have been about $3500, and there was room for a V-8.
I was really surprised back in the eighties when I read that one had gotten into the public domain. I recall that they were built circa '66, but B-J lists them as "1964".
Another interesting, but macabre story of this foray was the Tempest convertible. The story was that it was used to shoot a commericial that resulted in the death of a female model. She was to drive toward a camera boom that was to swing away at the last moment, but it didn't, and she was decapitated.
My mentor did technical research for the corporate legal staff and testified in lawsuits as an engineering expert witness. He knew where a lot of skeltons were stashed away and had some great war stories including customer complaint letters. One I recall was from a guy from Brooklyn, and he wrote exactly the way a working class Brooklynite talks - not quite the way I was taught to write English.
Duke
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