How A Regulation Loophole Created A Ridiculously Hot Pontiac With An Equally Ridiculous Name

The Autopian staff have many different interests, but there’s one thing we all seem to be passionate about: dead automotive brands. Everyone here is a fan of car companies that ceased to exist because they somehow ran against the grain of the establishment or the latest “market initiatives.”

Our recurring Mercury Mondays bit was a fun celebration of Ford’s deceased step-up brand, at least until we kind of ran out of cars. Arguably, the staff-favorite of OEMs that have passed on to the great automotive beyond is the American Motors Corporation, and I’ve devoted endless what-if posts to this Kenosha oddball.

However, if we were to pick a GOAT Dead Brand, I’d have to go with the enthusiast-oriented name that I still find hard to believe is gone: Pontiac. How The General saw fit to cut this storied brand in The Great Purge yet saved Buick, I can’t tell you. I don’t care if they’re big in China. Buick, for God’s sake!

And so, I have declared it’s time to revisit some of the many forgotten hits, misses, and underappreciated gems of The Excitement Brand in a new recurring feature I’m calling Pontiac Pthursday. I’ll kick off the series with a good one, so get on your Pontiac and (sound up you guys) RIDE! PONTIAC RIDE!

El Pollo Esta Muy Loco

I really don’t believe that rules are meant to be broken, but finding legal, nobody-gets-hurt ways around them can be an admirable task. This was especially true in the late seventies when performance cars were literally being strangled to death by emissions controls and the weight of safety equipment. One Pontiac dealership found a unique way around these laws with a great one for our inaugural Pontiac Pthursday

Even if Burt Reynolds hadn’t immortalized it in Smokey and the Bandit, the second-generation Pontiac Firebird Trans Am car would have undoubtedly gone down as a seventies icon. There’s one big reason for that.

Question: How cool was your history teacher at school? Regardless of what you think, unless you took a design history class at Center for Creative Studies in the late eighties, I know that mine was cooler. Hey, did your instructor pen the “Screaming Chicken”? No, I didn’t think so.

Before becoming a teacher at CCS, General Motors designer Bill Porter was inspired by the graphics on a Tiffany vase from his collection to create the stylized “flamed” Firebird logo. I can’t believe that I just said “Tiffany vase” and “Firebird logo” in the same sentence. Porter taped a large version of this graphic onto the hood of a clay model that was to become the second-generation Firebird, only to have design chief Bill Mitchell rip it off with an expletive-laced rant.

The big bird logo didn’t go away, however, and over the next few years Porter and coworkers refined the design. Eventually, they added a graphic to the hood of a new ‘Bird to drive around Detroit suburbs and informally gauge interest. The reaction, as taken from an interview with Porter, was off the charts:

“We took it out to a few gas stations and drive ins and the people went berzerk [sic],” ….. “I mean, absolutely came unglued! They couldn’t believe it and they loved it! ‘Where’d you get that? Where can I get one?’ It attracted so much attention it was almost like you were walking down the street with no clothes on.”

Look, I agree with Bill Mitchell; I would never, ever stick a nine-square-foot bird decal on the hood of my beautiful new F-Body. Would I take hundreds of dollars from each person who wanted to put on this twenty-dollar sticker? Yes, yes I would, and apparently so did Bill (he drove new Ferraris, so it wasn’t like he was willing to suffer too much for his art).

Style over substance was the name of the game by the late seventies with American cars; the Trans Am had plenty of style to spare, but that’s not to say it didn’t have any performance cred. The 6.6-liter (400 cubic inch) V8 could have been had with up to 200 horsepower from the factory in 1977; quite pathetic today, but about as good as any legal production car was going to give you in those dark times. For two sons of a Pontiac dealer in Phoenix, though, that wasn’t enough. They needed more and found a way to make it legally happen.

El Auto Es Nuevo?

Can a “new” car with essentially zero miles be sold as a “used” car? Apparently it can, and much to the likely chagrin of the NHTSA and EPA, it could have legally been done even if that “used” car wasn’t exactly as it was when it left the factory. Here’s the deal: in the Malaise era, manufacturers were strictly forbidden to make changes to the drivetrains of stock cars that were shipped to dealers, and an untitled car couldn’t be hopped up when it hit the lot. That was the end of the story for most dealers, but not for Kyle and Dennis Meacham, two brothers whose father owned a Pontiac store. When the fabled Pontiac 455 CID V8 was dropped for 1977, leaving that 200-horsepower 400 as the top Trans Am motor, they knew they had to find a loophole to bring back the power to the people.

The solution the Meacham brothers came up with was “purchasing” 26 new 1977 W72 Firebird Trans Ams from their father’s Pontiac dealership and doing some tweaks they had perfected on their own cars under the banner of “DKM Engineering”. The 400 V8 received a rejetted four-barrel carb, Hooker headers, two-and-a-half-inch diameter exhaust pipes (but still with a catalytic converter), and punching open the fake hood scoop to make it functional. The changes added around fifty horsepower. Not content with a troglodyte “muscle car,” DKM then matched the power with a dropped front suspension, heat-treated coils, and Koni shocks. Add-ons available included rear disc brakes and even a five-speed Doug Nash manual to replace the four on the floor (and a few automatics were also built). The finished cars were then sold at Meacham Pontiac as “used cars” with new-car warranties. It no doubt helped if your dad owned the dealership, though I would think that Meacham senior had some major exceptions on that warranty. Unlike a lot of “performance specials,” the Meachams didn’t strip out things like air conditioning, radios, or the back seat, so the cars were still usable and pleasant enough things to drive every day.

What would they call this barely legal creation? The brothers supposedly struggled with this; according to Hemmings in an interview with Dennis Meacham they landed on a popular word from the era:

“Everything was macho. In desperation, I said, ‘Why not call it Macho T/A?’ It was almost tongue-in-cheek. It may not be the best name, but how can you forget it?”

Indeed. If a giant screaming chicken on the hood wasn’t extroverted enough, you’d have been glad to see MACHO T/A emblazoned in big, obnoxious letters down each rocker panel. Well, some say it ain’t bragging if you can back it up, and the Macho T/A certainly could do that.

Hot Rod magazine was able to get a quarter-mile time of 14.29-second ET at 98.79 mph out of a Macho T/A compared to the stock Trans Am’s 15.20 at 96 mph. While hardly great numbers by today’s standards, that beat the 15.5-second time of the same-year 1977 Corvette. The Macho T/A package added a whopping $3000 to the base Trans Am’s $5500 sticker; the total price equaled the sticker of that ‘Vette, but the initial 26 Machos essentially dematerialized off of the Meacham lot. The following year, DKM pumped out 204 cars at its now-standalone facility, an investment needed to meet demand.

Still, was that base car really macho enough? The Meacham brothers figured they could use this regulation loophole to go after bigger and more costly exotic fish.

Es Rapido, Si?

Let’s say it’s 1978 and you’re a stockbroker or attorney clad in your Savile Row-tailored suit. Sitting at a light in your $20,000 Porsche 911SC, the Rachmaninoff or Boz Scaggs playing through your quadrasonic Blaupunkt is interrupted by the burble and high-pitched whine of a car with the subtle appearance of a parade float next to you. The driver sports a polyester shirt plus a mustache the size of a push broom, and as soon as the light turns green, you assume that your Ivy League-educated self will dispatch him immediately.

Well, you won’t, at least not if this Macho T/A is one of the 30 or so that DKM built with a Rajay 301-E turbocharger (and water injection) that was compact enough to clear the A/C compressor and other under-hood accessories. The 325 horsepower the blown 6.6 pumped out dwarfed the mere 185 of a standard 911 or even the 253 produced by a turbocharged 930. Hot Rod magazine claimed that a Turbo Macho could run a 13.9-second quarter mile, or only about .2 seconds slower than Car and Driver achieved from that US-spec turbo Porsche.

Naturally, performance times recorded on a tuner car fifty years ago were about as unreliable as the turbocharged and carbureted motor of the hottest Macho likely was, but rest assured that this thing was a force to be reckoned with.

The full Macho Turbo treatment was an additional $6400 you paid on top of the price of a new Trans Am itself; you could almost buy two new 1978 Chevettes with the cost of just the conversion. Still, that would have been far less than the price of slower European exotics and essentially half the price of that turbo 930. The name might have been stupid, but the Macho was no joke.

Hasta La Vista, Macho

A further 98 cars were converted to Machos in 1979 with the revised soft-nosed car that had the ultra-cool blackout taillights.

The conversion price had now risen to $3300; still a reasonable deal for a bespoke American style Alpina- or AMG-style performance machine.

A fender and trunk lid graphic plus an etched plaque inside indicating the production number on each car added to the exclusivity (the brothers were somehow prescient of what would get muscle car people going decades later at car shows).

Scheel racing-type seats were available to replace the less-than-spectacular stock ones, but it was a rare option that the one below doesn’t have.

You can see that with a full-sized spare (or Turbos with the battery relocated there) that the trunk would have been a bit comical. Again, the F-body was still far more usable and practical than a ‘Vette or most contemporary exotics.

All good things come to a close, and the last six Machos left the DKM facility in 1980 when Pontiac discontinued the 400 V8 and replaced it with the rather disastrous turbocharged 301CID motor. With no more big Pontiac eights to work with, the whole Macho project died. The end of the decade marked the end of disco; nobody dared play Macho Man in public anymore, and a car with that over moniker plastered all over it was done as well.

Macho Es Bueno

Despite the resurgence of seventies culture today, prices of surviving examples of the 332 Macho T/As built seem remarkably low, with most examples selling for anywhere between $30,000 – $50,000, with the exceptions of projects or museum pieces. That’s not chump change, but it’s a far cry from the absurd mid-six-figure sums you’ll pay for something like a Yenko Camaro or “numbers matching” boat of a car that isn’t even much fun to drive. For a legendary ultra-rare American sports coupe with serious performance, some semblance of handling, and over-the-top looks, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better value and investment than a Macho T/A.

The only question is: are you macho enough to drive it?

Pontiac Points: 94 / 100
Verdict: Criminally undervalued bombastic fun. Who needs a restomod when you can get a real vintage tuner car for similar money? Hope you’re not the shy type, though.