Vintage Car Life Review: 1965 Pontiac Tempest GTO – The Special-Order Supercar

Imagine you could travel back in time and order the ultimate ’60s muscle car, with all the most desirable performance options and minimal unnecessary frills. It might look something like the Pontiac GTO Car Life arranged to special-order from Royal Pontiac in 1965. Let’s take a look at what they set out to do and what they ended up with.

This article by Roger Huntington, originally published in the May 1965 Car Life, isn’t so much a road test as a buyer’s guide, indulging in that most formative enthusiast pastime: imagining exactly how you’d order the perfect car to suit your particular tastes and priorities. The car in this case was the quintessential mid-’60s Supercar, the Pontiac GTO.

To “build” the ultimate order-form GTO, Huntington turned to the ultimate Detroit-area performance Pontiac dealer: Royal Pontiac in Royal Oak, which had already made a name for itself in drag racing and with its limited-production Bobcat conversions. Huntington explained:

Special-ordering a special-purpose ’65 Pontiac is an interesting story in itself and, of course, the obvious dealer in these parts is Ace Wilson’s Royal Pontiac dealership in Royal Oak, Mich. Royal has been the top Pontiac performance dealership in the country for years. It has catered to the youth market, sponsored many dragstrip cars, set up a sales force that is fully informed on the available options and has even developed a special ‘’Bobcat’’ tune-up package that can be done in the Royal shop for a few dollars. This latter treatment is guaranteed to give a Royal Pontiac better street performance than other Pontiacs of the same model.

For technical details on the “special ‘Bobcat’ tuneup package” mentioned in the text, see my earlier post about Huntington’s 1963 Car Life feature, “The Screwdriver Tune-Up.”

The logical man to see at Royal is the live-wire performance sales manager, Dick Jesse. Dick sold more GTOs last year than any other Pontiac salesman in the country—118 in all, 68 of them to out-of-state buyers.

According to famed Pontiac ad executive Jim Wangers, Dick Jesse had been the first Royal Pontiac salesperson to really understand how to sell to performance-minded customers. In his book Glory Days, Wangers recalled:

He [Jesse] was jokingly called the “Performance Sales Manager.” He sat in the front office and in the early days was the only guy interested in spending time with special customers. At first, the rest of the salesman all laughed at the idea and snickered at Jesse’s title. They quit laughing, however, when they saw customers literally standing in line waiting to talk only to Dick Jesse.

Knowledgeable salespeople were a crucial element in making performance cars a viable commercial proposition in this era. The factory offered a lot of performance equipment, but you had to understand what it was and what boxes you needed to check to get it, some of which weren’t on the regular production order form. The salesperson also needed to understand the priorities of the customer, and not fight them if they wanted metallic brake linings and heavy-duty suspension rather than air conditioning and power windows.

 

Huntington had a very clear idea about what kind of GTO he wanted to arrange:

Then, we wanted something that would be reasonably flexible to drive on the street and highway, would have excellent handling and braking for fast traveling on rough, twisty secondary roads, would have a fighting chance in the B/Stock class at the dragstrip with only minor changes, would be a decent rally car and would have a few fancy gimmicks here and there.

This dovetailed pretty well with the priorities of the average under-30 performance fan of the time: not a narrowly focused pure drag car, but a well-rounded hot street machine suitable for date nights as well as the Stoplight Grand Prix.

For this kind of GTO, Huntington explained:

There are actually two different order blanks. One lists the regular production options and a second pink order blank carries the limited production options. These latter are available for assembly-line installation but the installation rate is so low that it’s a headache to stock the equipment on the assembly lines so the factory doesn’t encourage these orders. A Pontiac salesman probably won’t offer to get out the “LPO” order blank unless you ask him for the “Special Equipment” list.

Before we get into his selections, I need to point out that Huntington made a peculiar error in his calculations, which I hadn’t registered until I looked at the window sticker from the red car pictured in the color photos: On the following page, he quotes the base price of a 1965 Tempest Le Mans sports coupe (two-door hardtop) as $2,333, which is wrong — the actual list price (as seen on the top of the right-hand form below) was $2,556, so while the option prices he quotes are correct, his tally of the as-equipped total was $223 low. Very strange.

 

Since the special-order car was intended for the street, Huntington specified an AM radio with power antenna ($62.41), power steering ($96.84), power brakes ($42.50), a padded dash ($16.14), front seat belts ($7.53), backup lights ($12.91), windshield washers ($17.27), door edge guards ($4.84), floor mats ($6.24), and an under-hood lamp ($3.55). He also specified the $21.30 chrome-tipped exhaust splitters, “for looks and ‘image,'” and the $39.27 woodgrain Custom Sports steering wheel (pictured below).

 

Another essential was the $86.08 Rally Gauge Cluster (below), which included water temperature and oil pressure gauges as well as an 8,000-rpm tachometer.

 

From there, Huntington got into what enthusiast readers would have considered the good stuff, beginning with the heavy-duty Ride & Handling Package suspension ($16.14) and styled steel Rally wheels ($35.50):

These are new all-steel wheels made by Budd, with more offset, wider base, and inner styling to look like the popular magnesium wheels. Pontiac engineers found that some of the inexpensive cast mag and aluminum wheels on the market were not safe in hard cornering. They tend to crack and break in the spoke area or around the bolt boss. These new rally wheels look almost like the mag wheels (you have to look twice), they’re a lot cheaper, and the heavy-duty all-steel construction is perfectly safe under the hardest conditions.

He also specified a Safe-T-Track limited-slip differential ($37.66) and Delco transistorized ignition ($64.51), a rare option Pontiac claimed “really does help engine power above 4500 rpm.”

 

Naturally, any serious GTO needed a four-speed, which was an extra $188.30, and the $115.80 Tri-Power engine, which claimed a 25 (gross) horsepower advantage over the GTO’s standard four-barrel 389 cu. in. (6,375 cc) V-8. At Dick Jesse’s recommendation, Huntington specified a 3.90 axle for better street performance, although with 18.9 mph per 1,000 rpm in fourth, this was a little high-strung for highway driving.

Then Dick and I had to go to the Special Equipment list for a couple of things to round out the package. The metallic brake linings are on this list, at $40. I should mention here that there is a regular heavy-duty brake option on the RPO list. This uses aluminum front drums with harder organic linings. These are good brakes, but Jesse suggested the stronger metallic linings for really hard rally work with the vacuum booster to keep decent pedal pressures in normal driving. Another important choice on the LPO list was the close-ratio gearset for the 4-speed. GTOs normally come through with a wide 2.56-low gearset in the Muncie-built transmission. But Jesse generally recommends the 2.20-low gearset with 3.90 axle gears. This still gives plenty of punch in low, and the closer ratios above (1.64 in second, 1.28 in third) give better all-around performance in the upper speed ranges. The close ratios are very handy for downshift braking in rally work. There is no extra charge for these special gears in the transmission.

 

The red GTO in the color photos has an important option Huntington didn’t specify, which is air conditioning. You could order air on a GTO, even with the Tri-Power engine and four-speed (the red car is so equipped), but I assume that doing so marked you as a poseur with more money than sense. Air conditioning cost $430.40, added 120 lb (most of it on the front end, where the GTO least needed it), and limited you to the standard 3.23 axle. It was more pleasant in hot weather, of course, and A/C-equipped cars may be worth more today, but it wasn’t really suited to the ultimate street performance mission. An all-around more useful option, which I would have specified with or without air, would have been tinted windows, at $31.20.

As I mentioned earlier, Huntington’s base price is wrong, so his as-equipped price ($3,643.79) is also wrong: Starting from a base price of $2,556, the total for “his” car would actually have been $3,876.79. The sticker price of the red car in the color photos, which lacks heavy-duty suspension and metallic brakes, but has air conditioning, a center console, and some other extras, was $4,320.66 (excluding destination charge, which I think Huntington also omitted). Adjusted for inflation, Huntington’s car would be about $38,800 in 2024 dollars, while the red car would be about $43,200; MeasuringWorth puts their relative values as $45,239 and $50,419 respectively. Given their actual collector value today, that seems like a bargain, but in 1965, I suspect it was out of reach for quite a few Car Life readers who coveted such cars.

 

This Car Life article has two sets of performance figures. The ones in the data panel (below) are for “an identical, but non-Royalized, GTO,” tested in stock form in Car Life‘s usual manner, “with stock mufflers and tires in place.” The figures ones in the main text were recorded at a drag strip with Dick Jesse driving, after some tweaking. Huntington explained:

I wanted to see what kind of times we could get with the car right off the factory lines, with only a very minimum of tuning—and these only of the “screwdriver” variety that anybody could do. Accordingly, we had Royal specialist Milt Schornak make a very minor tune-up with the car in otherwise showroom trim. His moves: Drop the exhaust pipes from the manifolds, switch to new Champion J-12-Y plugs with 0.032 in. gaps, remove air cleaners (and underhood pad to keep the stuff from being sucked into the carburetors) and jack up the initial spark advance from the standard setting of 6° BTC to about 16°. Nothing was done with the carburetor jetting or rocker stud adjustment for high rpm. They did throw on a set of M&H Super Stock 9.00-14 tires on 6-in. wheels to try to get a better bite (the standard GTO red-line tires are not the best on a dragstrip).

It should be noted that while this wasn’t stock (except perhaps in a drag racing classification sense), it was not the full “Royal Bobcat” treatment, which also included re-jetted carburetors and various other minor changes. In any event, here’s how the results compared to the unmodified stock car:

1965 Pontiac GTO Tri-Power, Stock vs. Modified

Time in seconds	Stock GTO, Two Aboard	Royal Pontiac Modified, Driver Only
0 to 60 mph	5.8 sec.	5.4 sec.
Standing 1/4 Mile	14.5 sec. @ 100 mph	14.06 sec. @ 102.14 mph

 

Huntington remarked, “This is pretty good performance for a minimum of tuning. The quarter-mile times should win the B/Stock class on a good many dragstrips around the country on a given Sunday afternoon.”

 

As he sometimes did in his road tests, Huntington also used accelerometer readings to calculate the actual output of the modified car at the clutch, which he estimated at 345 hp at 4,800 rpm and 420 lb-ft of torque at 3,400 rpm, compared to published gross ratings of 360 hp at 5,200 rpm and 424 lb-ft at 3,600 rpm. He unfortunately didn’t do this with the stock car, which would have been more instructive: The open exhausts and modified spark advance obviously gave the modified car more power, but how much more was still ambiguous. (Pontiac didn’t publish net ratings for this engine, but my guess would be around 300 net horsepower.)

The two bottom photos on the above page appear to be brochure shots of the Tri-Power carburetors and optional metallic brake linings. Here they are in color:

The data panel unfortunately doesn’t include braking results, and Car Life didn’t do skidpad or slalom tests in those days. However, Huntington said:

Handling (with the red-lines back on the rear) was just as good as the acceleration. Jesse racked it around a few corners in the southern Michigan area. There is still plenty of understeer but the stiff roll bar controls body lean enough so the front end doesn’t plow too much. The tires seem to have considerably more casing stability than the average passenger car tire and they’re an excellent compromise between ride and handling. And the metallic brakes are great. Pedal pressure with the vacuum booster is reasonable (although more than with organic linings) and there is no noticeable fade under very rough braking conditions.

While the increased heat resistance was definitely a plus, I think buff book editors tended to oversell the virtues of metallic brake linings for street use. They didn’t fade when hot, but they also didn’t bite well when cold, made a lot more noise than organic linings, and could cause swerving if they were unevenly heated. A car like this really needed ventilated discs, but even front discs weren’t available on the GTO until 1967.

 

Nonetheless, short of buying a Corvette Sting Ray, this was about as well-rounded as domestic performance cars got in 1965, and a 100-mph quarter mile trap speed put the GTO among the first rank in straight-line performance. It wasn’t cheap, but it also wasn’t unreasonably expensive for what you got, and except perhaps in the darkest days of the ’70s Energy Crisis, it’s never really stopped being desirable.

Related Reading

Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1962 Pontiac Royal Bobcat – Dry Run for the GTO (by me)
CC Tech: Pontiac Royal Bobcat Kit – “The Screwdriver Tune-Up” For Hot 389s And 421s (by me)
Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1964 Pontiac GTO – “Honest In Performance”? (by Paul N)
Vintage Car & Driver Review: 1964 Pontiac GTO – The Ultimate Ringer (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1965 Pontiac GTO – How To Create a Legend and Build a Brand (by Paul N)
Vintage Review: 1965 Buick Skylark Gran Sport – Buick’s Hot New GTO-Fighter Falls A Bit Short (by Paul N)