GTO PONTIAC'S GREAT ONE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter 1
WE'RE GOING RACING!
Chapter 2
DELOREAN'S OUTLAW CAR
Chapter 3
COPING WITH SUCCESS
Chapter 4
A MATURING CAR FOR A MATURING AUDIENCE
Chapter 5
HIGHLIGHTS AND LOW POINTS
Chapter 6
THE SHORT-LIVED REINCARNATION OF THE GTO AND THE DEATH OF PONTIAC
INDEX

In 1963 Pontiac's Chief Engineer John DeLorean and his two favorite staff engineers, Bill Collins and Russ Gee, came up with an inspired way to keep Pontiac cars in the performance limelight: bolt a big engine into Pontiac's upcoming Tempest intermediate body. Thus was the GTO born. Through cunning, resourcefulness, and outright trickery the minds of Pontiac managed to get this rocket into dealerships and out onto America's highways, and to introduce that most iconic of American automobiles, the muscle car, to the nation’s most discriminating drivers.

This is the story of the GTO, of the people who made it a reality and a sales sensation, of those who owned and loved the cars. And it is, above all, a story of the cars themselves, from the initial option package offered for the 1964 model year through the high-performance late-model standouts. With color photographs, drawings, and detailed stats, this book is not so much the story of a historic car as an illustrated biography of American muscle.

Darwin Holmstrom has written or co-written many books on muscle cars and motorcycling, including the best-selling Camaro Forty Years and Muscle: America's Legendary Performance Cars. He lives in Maple Grove, Minnesota.

Photographer and writer David Newhardt was born in Chicago, Illinois and attended Southern Illinois University, majoring in Professional Photography. He served eight years in the US Navy aboard nuclear submarines, before settling in Southern California. Newhardt worked at Motor Trend magazine for three years, and has been on the masthead of many automotive titles. He has worked in the fashion photography field, but finds that automobiles make better subjects. The author of seven books, he has supplied scores of other books with images. A long-time member of the Motor Press Guild, he lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife and two sons.

Review from Peter Lorenzo, Autoextremist.com “ A new and very large (10.5" x 12") coffee table book about the Pontiac GTO is making its debut this month, and I will warn enthusiasts right now: It's a must-have book, no matter what your particular auto passion is. Written by Darwin Holmstrom with photography by David Newhardt, GTO: Pontiac's Great One is the definitive record of how the legendary Pontiac GTO came about, complete with anecdotes by the people who were there and who made it happen. Holmstrom's entertaining, informative and appropriately irreverent writing style captures GM's "maverick" division well and gives one of the all-time great American cars ever built its proper due, and David Newhardt's beautiful images of famous GTOs completes the impact of the book. GTO: Pontiac's Great One is jam-packed with information, but as with any great automotive story it's the people who make the legend of the GTO that much more special. Given the death knell of Pontiac, the remembrances and stories of those times brought to life by Holmstrom are especially poignant. I highly recommend it.”
Review from AutoNewsWire.net on May 22, 2009

"This is a great book, one that you can't put down and so well written that you find yourself skipping the photos and captions and having to go back and read it over again. And that's what you will do with this anthology on the "Goat." You'll pick it back up just to remember, to reminisce the good-ole days when the GTO was king of the streets, and G.M. was the king of automakers around the world. Reading Pontiac's Great One, GTO is like reading a letter from a long-lost friend. It should be arriving in bookstores about now and we suggest you get a copy, find a shady seat under a tree, and take a few days off."

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