The relationship between an automaker’s public relations department and car journalists sometimes hinges on a lie – a lie that describes a test vehicle as a completely stock, factory-fresh, assembly line press car. And for decades, we journos have strapped our timing gears to these cars, recorded some absolutely mind-boggling numbers, and printed them. The problem is, some of these cars are anything but stock.
While it’s more of an exception than the norm, when the stakes are high, a phenomenon known as a “ringer” can emerge from corporate engineering bays. A ringer is a press car that looks, smells, and feels like something you can pick up from the showroom floor, but it has often been hand built with a blueprinted engine, and, in some cases, it’s over bored, over boosted, and weaponized to blow us away during test day. A prime example, and one that comes with receipts, is the 1964 Pontiac GTO press car, which ran a larger engine to hoodwink testers into believing that it was the fastest muscle car around.
In all fairness to car journalists, a ringer is hard to spot, and even when we did in the past, most enthusiast publications back then relied heavily on keeping manufacturers happy (and the manufacturer returning the favor) to maintain access to the media fleet. If you called out a brand for sending a heavily massaged car, you risked your access getting cut, while your competitors got the scoop. Here’s how Pontiac pulled off the ruse.
A muscle car that was faster than a Ferrari
For the Pontiac GTO ringer story, you will have to find a March 1964 issue of Car and Driver and flip to the page describing a legendary, unhinged road test comparing a brand new Pontiac Tempest GTO against what is now a multi-million-dollar Ferrari 250 GTO. However, the Tempest GTO here was a ringer, and the man behind it was Jim Wangers, Pontiac’s marketing guru. Wangers knew that a standard production 389-cubic-inch V8 was a respectable engine, but it wasn’t going to deliver the kind of earth-shattering acceleration needed to turn the rebranded Tempest into a cultural icon. So, he cheated.
Pontiac dropped off two cars for the test. A red GTO, designated strictly for acceleration testing, was a complete sleeper. Underneath the standard Pontiac sheet metal, the engineers at Royal Pontiac had pulled the stock 389 and secretly swapped in a massive, high-torque 421-cubic-inch High-Output engine. To top it off, it was completely “Bobcat tuned” and even got NASCAR suspension. Because Pontiac’s engine blocks looked identical from the outside, the journalists had no clue about the changes.
The ringer posted a blistering 0-to-60 mph sprint of 4.6 seconds and cleared the quarter mile in 13.1 seconds, which felt like science fiction in 1964. This test cemented the GTO’s legendary status, but it was based on a lie.
A suspected ringer that turned out to be a casualty of new emmision norms
By the early 1970s, the dark cloud of federal emissions regulations and corporate liability was actively suffocating American muscle. But Pontiac wasn’t going down without a fight, and it intended to use the media fleet to stage a glorious, albeit temporary, rebellion. When early pre-production press cars of the 1973 Trans Am Super Duty 455 were handed over to the enthusiast magazines, journalists were overjoyed. The car felt like a time machine back to the peak era of American muscle, delivering a spectacular 13.54-second quarter-mile run.
However, the press fleet SD-455 was an engineering prototype that had been hand assembled, perfectly blueprinted, and fitted with a highly modified engine and a performance rear axle. By the time regular buyers actually took delivery of their production SD-455 cars from their local dealerships, the reality of strict EPA mandates had caught up with Pontiac. While the pre-production test cars, one of which was reviewed by magazines of the time, ran hotter cams, assembly line cars were fitted with significantly milder camshafts and lower compression ratios. The production cars also dropped the functional hood scoops seen on the test cars.
The 310 horsepower numbers published in 1973 Pontiac brochures turned out to be from pre-production engines that weren’t tested and therefore weren’t emissions compliant. The correct horsepower was published in the 1974 brochures. With the compliant engines pushing out just 290 horsepower, the actual production cars could do the quarter-mile run in the 15-second range. It obviously led enthusiasts to believe that Pontiac had again delivered a ringer, but the reality was that the carmaker was forced to modify its muscle car to satisfy new emission norms.
