We give Malaise Era General Motors a lot of flak, but virtually nobody here at The Autopian denies the General at its junkiest still made some great-looking cars. Sadly, it’s difficult to disassociate the appearance of some of their products from what we know to be to be the harsh reality of their innate flaws.
One example of this came up on my screen a few days ago in the guise of the Sunbird Formula, and I was shocked at how exciting this late-seventies Pontiac appeared to be. If I weren’t a fiftysomething car nerd, I’d imagine this thing to be a pocket rocket to embarrass Milan’s finest. In reality, Italy and Germany had nothing to worry about – but despite its obvious flaws, that doesn’t mean the star-crossed Sunbird Formula isn’t worth taking a look at today.
Lordstown Lamborghini
Pontiac’s first real subcompact sport coupe had the deck stacked against it from the beginning. Just the fact that it was built on the dreaded H-platform shared with the new-for-1971 Chevy Vega was bad enough. We won’t beat that dead horse yet again, but if you need the CliffsNotes, I can give you the high levels of the low points.
First and foremost, the aluminum engine had linerless cylinders with a coating that didn’t really work, exacerbated by an inadequate cooling system. Also, the rust protection unknowingly left substantial areas of bare sheet metal. Combine that with the labor unrest at the Lordstown assembly plant, and you have a truly horrendous example of malaise garbage, one that was badge-engineered as the Pontiac Astre for 1975.
With Ford’s drastic downsizing of the Mustang in 1974, the old pony car was no longer meaningful competition for the Camaro and Firebird, so GM decided that a Vega-based coupe might make a better match for the tiny Mustang II. Say hello to the 1975 Chevy Monza.
The Monza “2+2” featured a design that critics said resembled (or even ripped off) the Ferrari 365 GTC/4 (below); if nothing else, to my eye it looked far better than the rival Pinto-based Mustang II. I’ve heard fans of the Monza whine that if it had actually come from Italy, the car geeks would be swooning over the styling; I reluctantly agree.
For 1976, Pontiac launched a twin of Chevrolet’s Monza Town Coupe dubbed the Sunbird. A sort of baby personal luxury coupe, the thing looked different enough from the Vega/Astre that a lot of buyers seemed to ignore that it still was powered by that same awful aluminum-block four.
However, that’s not the version of the Monza that we enthusiasts wanted. No, the body style of this Vega-based coupe to have was that Ferrari-style hatchback which John Delorean apparently dubbed “the Italian Vega,” though I think he was referring to the appearance and not the reliability that more closely resembled cars from that nation at the time.
The next year, Pontiac and enthusiasts got their wish with the 1977 fastback-bodied “Sport Hatch” Monza 2+2 clone Sunbird that ditched the now-infamous Vega head-gasket-buster motor for the 2.5-liter Iron Duke that still helps deliver your mail every day of the week.
That engine was fine for the base models, but to compete with the Charlie’s Angels Cobra II, more power was needed under the hood. This is where the Sunbird and all of the H-body coupes also got off to a terrible start. You see, in the late sixties and early seventies, the rotary engine was going to be The Answer for the future; a motor that was smaller than the transmission it attached to and could rev to the high heavens as smooth as a dynamo. General Motors not only planned to go all-in with this Wankel powertrain but also intended to offer it to lowly American Motors for powering a curious-looking egg-shaped “compact” they’d been developing.
It’s been written about here before, but I’ll give you the spoiler: it didn’t work. The infamous rotor seal issue couldn’t be solved, and, worse than that, no amount of engineering effort was able to improve fuel economy from “abysmal” to “really bad” – a big deal when people started lining up around the block for gas in 1973. Naturally, the whole rotary program got the axe, but it was too late for the cars earmarked for this small, lightweight motor like the Monza and Sunbird to be drastically changed. That meant the plan for upgraded power in H-coupes was GM’s old and heavy V6 and V8 engines.
Naturally, this is starting to sound like the seventies GM we’re all ironically fond of.
So Many Combinations Of “Bird,” “Fire,” and “Sun”
In the malaise era, it was more important to look good than to feel good; if that’s the case, how did the Sunbird Formula fare? Other GM divisions received sporting versions of the H-body Monza, too; a couple of them have been the subject of Jason’s Glorious Garbage series, like the Buick Road Hawk.
The styling accents were literally glued and riveted in place.
Chevy’s Monza Mirage edition suffered from similar painfully tacked-on customization:
By comparison, the top-of-the-heap Sunbird Formula looked pretty damn good. The family Pontiac split-grille nose added a Firebird-style appearance that looked better than the Monza’s deeply sunken headlamp buckets. The kamm tail and spoiler seemed very well integrated into the styling. Graphics were relatively subdued, and hey, can you ever do better than Pontiac “snowflake” rolling stock? No, you cannot. Well, maybe Pontiac “honeycombs”.
It’s sort of like a baby Trans Am, but with even tidier proportions and more low-key looking. To my eye, it was the best-looking of all the H-coupes by a long shot. There was even a notchback Formula for those who inexplicably didn’t see the charms of the hatchback’s appearance and utility.
Sunbird interiors weren’t bad for the era, with decent-looking seats that admittedly probably gave up on your back before you needed to stop for your first bathroom break. The rear compartment was no place for adults, and you had the feeling of sitting deep in a pit regardless of which seat you were in, but that was kind of par for the course with seventies rear-drive sports coupes.
A full set of gauges and the Firebird-style sport wheel certainly were welcome additions, even if the nasty fake wood that even crept onto the radio knobs was not.
How could this thing miss? It had the looks, an available V8, upgraded suspension, and a price that should have made the Toyota Celica and Datsun 200SX go home, right? Remember what I said about star-crossed.
Rather Have A Real ‘Bird And Not Suzanne’s Vega
First of all, you need to temper the expectations aroused by “adding a V8.” Starting in 1978, the Sunbird Formula offered a Chevy 305 as the eight-banger choice, but contemporary figures I could find list it as producing only around 145 horsepower – not much more than the 110 horsepower V6 (California V8s only pumped out 135 horse). For this so-called “power,” you got the added weight over a front suspension that was almost certainly never designed until the eleventh hour to accommodate an iron block of this size. These jumpsuit-clad ladies below appear to be pushing down on the back of the Sunbird to hide the sag of the car’s nose from the Chevy V8.
Wait, it gets worse! As Mercedes Streeter wrote, the V8 just barely fit into the Sunbird engine bay, to the point that you couldn’t really access the rearmost spark plugs back in the time when plug replacement was a far more frequent task than today. As she found in a quote from the New York Times:
The plug is very close to the steering column and sometimes the engine has to be lifted as much as one‐half inch in order to remove the plug, a spokesman said. “It would be easier to jack up the horn button and put whole new car under it,” said one disgruntled Chevrolet dealer service manager who did not want to he identified.
One thing The General could and did do was work with the chassis and at least make the Sunbird handle better than the original Vega. That they did, utilizing the torque-arm rear suspension introduced on the 1975 Cosworth-Vega that was essential to handling any kind of power sent to the axle. A beefier front and rear anti-roll bars and further tuning of the Formula’s Radial Tuned Suspension helped handling to the point that it could at least outmaneuver the Mustang II’s Pinto axle on leaf springs.
The biggest issue with the Sunbird Formula likely wasn’t the ability to handily beat the Mustang II; the bigger problem might have been its big brother in the picture below. Add the Formula package, the V8, plus a few more options to a Sunbird, and you’d be getting dangerously close to Firebird territory; not a full-on 6.6 Trans Am model, but at least something that didn’t require any excuses and would make your moustache-faced 1978 self look more respectable to the masses.
I do think that the notchback Sunbird Formula also muddied the waters, as well as the fact that Pontiac even offered an Astre Formula at the same time as the Sunbird Sports Hatch for a very brief time. Why?
Sales suffered accordingly. From 1976 to 1980, Pontiac was able to move nearly half a million Sunbirds, but in 1978 the Formula only accounted for about 3,700 of those. I don’t have numbers for how many were V8-equipped or the sales for all of 1979, but I’ve seen accounts that it might have been in the three figures.
Pontiac might have made the best incarnation of the H-coupe, but they didn’t take the idea far enough. Even if they had, it’s likely that such a thing would have been unwanted by pony car and Japanese coupe fans alike.
Waiting For You To Wake It Up
Finding a first-generation Sunbird of any kind today is a nearly impossible task since most have been recycled into appliances and beverage cans several times over. Based on the few non-Formula listings I’ve seen, buying one off the showroom floor as “an investment” would have been a poor choice, since decent examples sell for no more than their price new in pre-1980 dollars at well under $10,000.
Still, that just adds to the appeal for most of us Autopians since you’d feel no guilt by modifying the crap out of one. That Chevy small block? You could double the horsepower of the stock Sunbird in your sleep, while adding modern rubber, shocks, a five-speed ‘box and other aftermarket bits to possibly yield a car with “go” to match the looks. Thankfully, modern spark plugs mean not dropping the engine to change them nearly as often. If you’re tired of seeing Burt Reynolds Trans Am clones or find those things too large for their own good, and you’re a person stuck trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents like many are today, then a tweaked H-Body might be an amusing left-field classic for you.
Pontiac dropped the V8 option for 1980 (pictured above), the final year of this H-body Sunbird. Actually, it was an extended model year since their next subcompact wasn’t ready yet. The replacement car was a much more advanced front-wheel drive product that would obviously be more resolved, higher quality, better looking, and faster than the old Monza clone, right?
No on all counts! Launched for 1982, the J2000 featured a 1.8-liter four under the hood with 85 horsepower to motivate a car rather heavy for its size due to cost-saving utilization of larger X-body parts. With a three-speed automatic, Road & Track’s hatchback coupe model took an agonizing 16.3 seconds to crawl up to 60MPH.
Ah, the malaise era: a time when no matter how bad you thought that you had it, the Big Three could hit you with something worse.
Pontiac Points: 63/ 100
Verdict: Yet another GM product that made the customer do the testing and finishing, but an easily-added 100 extra horsepower and suspension tweaks might be juice worth the squeeze today – but good luck finding one decent enough to start your project with.
Never seen a V8 Sunbird, thought only the V8 was available in the Monza. Had a daily driver 77 Skyhawk for 8 years V6 4 speed, added the Monza Spyder spoilers. It was a decent car for the time. The interior quality was bad, everyone that you seen had the broken armrest/door pulls. My Vinyl seats were split when I got it at 4 years old. An LS swap with a 6 speed, swap in S-10 front spindles and brakes. Use two rear axle shafts (can’t remember which side) from an S10 to get the 5 lug in the back.
“A new Monza!” from “White Punks on Dope” – The Tubes
Although they sound like a dismal driving experience, the H body cars were better looking than almost ALL of Ford’s offerings of that era.
I wasn’t a Ferrari fan back then, but I don’t think I’d ever confuse a Sunbird as coming from one the stylish Italian houses.
As a kid, I had an uncle with the Oldsmobile version of this. A 79 or 80 Starfire with the Firenza package. It had the 305 V8 and T50 5-speed. It was the all black version of the car at the top of this post. As a less-than-10-year-old, I thought it was the bees’ knees. https://autopolis.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/1975-1980-oldsmobile-starfire-firenza-threes-a-crowd-four-is-forgotten/
A HS buddy had a Monza in 1983. Looked good, but I can best describe it as ‘wallowing’. Another friend’s 79 Cutlass with the tiny v8 was a much superior vehicle even with the slush box.
That blue Sunbird coupe w/ the landau roof and the blue velour and woodgrain interior were exactly what a USAF buddy had, which he allowed me to drive around Monterey when we were stationed on the Presidio in the late 80’s.
This after another buddy let me drive his Dad’s hand-me-down 1972 Volvo 164E.
Pontiac Sunbird: What a piece of crap.
No, I don’t see the subtle curves and design themes that would make me think this design was anything but American. Sure the cabin lines are the same, with matching A, B, and C pillars, but everything below that is just not quite Italian. The wheel openings on the Monza are slightly squared off, whereas Italians were still going with wheel matching arcs. There is a light body crease down the side that straightens the whole look of the car, and looks either too high or too low compared to what the Italians were doing in 1975.
Just my opinion.
I have always, unironically liked the design of the Monza, and was unaware of the Sun Bird dating back this far, and would probably find much joy in replacing that V8 lump with a Turbo K20. Double the horsepower, half the weight plus VTEC noises!
A friend in High school had a 75 Monza Coupe with the 283 and a 4 speed in it. the car was fast on the highway, but the clutch for the Manual Transmission has an 8 inch clutch apparently.
I was in the car when the 80MPH speedometer was at the “P” in the MPH label on the bottom of it ( about 120)
The Monza that I prefer the most is Opel Monza (especially the facelifted 1982–1986 A2), one of the best looking vehicles from the 1970s and 1980s.
Monza fun fact; it was the first American car to be designed around square headlights, beating the Cadillac Seville which only appeared a couple months after the official start of the model year. All the other GM cars with them (and they were GM-exclusive in ’75) were the 1971-generation big cars on at least their third facelift.
There’s at least one photo floating around of a test car on a trailer with dual rounds. It’s kinda trippy!
I’d love to see what the Italians thought when they saw that turd named Monza. A lot of confused looks I suspect.
In ’84 or so my dad had a choice between buying a Sunbird V6 or a Monza V8 manual. I was one year into being a licensed driver at that point. My dad chose the Sunbird despite my pleading for the V8 manual. Probably kept me alive.