Pontiac Created The Ultimate Drag Racer By Removing Weight From The Absolute Worst Place Possible

How far would you go to make a car faster in a straight line? You’d obviously add more power and find creative ways to make there be less of the car to move around. However, in terms of safety and integrity, is there a limit on how much you’d take away? Apparently, for Pontiac in 1962 those limits were sorely tested by a final, eleventh-hour effort to make the ultimate drag racing machine in the final days before General Motors put a stop to factory backed racing. With a name like the Catalina “Swiss Cheese”, you know we’re in for a crazy story.

“It Ain’t Cheating If You Don’t Get Caught”

That statement above might be a mantra in the creation of competition cars. More than that, if there are no regulations on some insane idea to make a car faster or more competitive then it’s not illegal at all.

Legendary race car builder “Smokey” Yunick was notorious for these types of things. A twenty-foot long fuel tank filler pipe that held a bunch of extra gallons of gas? Hey, the regulations only mention the fuel tank size, right? In the same manner, “Super Stock” drag racing cars needed to be “stock”, but nowhere did the regulations say with absolute certainly exactly how much of the “stock” car had to remain. That “read between the lines” attitude was critical during this time, since this was the short-lived era of the early sixties when the Big Three was going all-out to battle each other with factory-made specials on the drag strip.

I went through the whole range of these tire burners a few weeks ago:

There was Chevy’s drag strip weapon was the Z11 Impala. It ditched niceties like a heater and radio and featured extensive use of aluminum body panels to reduce weight by 300 pounds over a stock model. Only 57 were made.

Under the hood was a specialized 427-cubic inch “W-series” V8 engine rated conservatively at 430 hp, though it almost certainly was pumping out around 500.

You can be damn sure that Mopar was in the running with Dart Ramcharger. It might have been searingly ugly, but at the track it was just plain rubber-searing.

Under the hood was a 413 cubic inch “Max Wedge” V8 which, like most of these other Big Three powerhouses, featured one carb barrel for each cylinder. With a 13-5:1 compression ratio, it produced 420 horsepower.

Ford also built anywhere between 200 and 212 lightened Galaxies powered by an “R Code” 427 V8.  I’ve written about later versions of this car, but this early incarnation was purely for the strip. A whopping 400 pounds of weight was removed from this behemoth through the use of fiberglass for the hood, fenders, inner fenders, and deck lid, along with aluminum bumpers. The inside was stripped of the radio, heater, as well as any kind of carpeting and sound deadening or insulation; apparently Ford provided simple cardboard sun visors to replace the stock items.

Mechanically, it was a Ford dream spec with a 427 cubic inch R-Code V8 with dual Holley 4-barrel carburetors and insane 14:1 compression. Rated at 425 horsepower, it realistically produced closer to 500, as did the rival Impala. Add a Borg-Warner T-10 4-speed manual transmission and a 9-inch rear axle with 4.11:1 gears, and this was one solid factory dragstrip machine.

That’s some formidable competition there; if Pontiac was going to win against those machines it needed something special.

Super Duty Wasn’t Just Hype

Pontiac began with their “standard sized” Catalina hardtop coupe painted in a special Firefrost Silver Metallic (a Cadillac color) and added their hottest motor: the 421 Super Duty. The team involved was led by Bunkie Knudsen, a man who had reportedly been given five years to turn Pontiac’s fortunes around and revitalize the then-dying brand. Knudsen’s team included the legendary Malcolm McKellar and the man who would soon head the Pontiac division: John DeLorean. Starting with a standard 389, the motor was bored out and given lightweight forged pistons connected to a forged steel crankshaft. Compression was as high as an alarming 12:1; there was no running this thing on dishwater gasoline.

Two Carter AFB four-barrel carbs sat on an aluminum intake, but a controversial option was the aluminum exhaust manifolds. These supposedly reduced weight by around 40 pounds compared to the heavy cast iron ones, but there was a huge catch: aluminum melts! You’d be fine for a sub-twenty-second run down the drag strip, but extended use would result in warping at best or totally molten headers at worst. This was one feature where the weight savings probably wasn’t worth the hassle, but in the heat of battle every pound counts.

As with the Super Duty’s competitors, official power output figures were grossly underrated. On the books these Super Duty V8s made 405 to 410 horsepower, but in reality, they produced at least 450 and even upwards of 500. Oddly enough, these race specials all left the factory with three speed manual transmissions.

Like the rival lightweight racers, the Super Duty Catalina was first totally stripped out; everything that had to do with comfort and handling disappears. No need for a front anti-roll bar if you aren’t going to go around corners, right? A vinyl bench seat up front sat in an interior with no radio, heater, sound deadener or body sealer. Supposedly plexiglass windows to replace the glass was considered but not actually implemented, at least not at the factory.

It’s fun to see all of those blanking plates on the dashboard for the automatic transmission column selector, the radio, the heater controls, the clock and pretty much everything. Looks like they left in the cigarette lighter since this was the era when that was essential. The hand cranks for the front quarter vents also seem like a missed weight loss opportunity.

The next step in “adding lightness” included substituting bolt-on steel items like inner and outer front fenders plus the hood with aluminum ones that were reportedly thin enough that they would dent with rather minor pressure. All these tricks were employed for weight savings to get down to the magic minimum weight allowance of 3300 pounds. These changes all helped, but the big Pontiac was still heavier than the team would have liked. Removing one of the two wipers or losing a sun visor and rear window cranks like Ford did with their drag race specials wasn’t going to get the job done. Still, what else could they have possibly taken out? Well, desperation results in unique but possibly ill-advised solutions.

As Long As It Makes It To The End Of The Strip

I’m not even close to being an engineer, but I know that metal parts get their strength from bends and folds; the frame of a car is a perfect example. The side walls play a part as well, but you could take away some material, and you’d still probably be fine. However, those developing the Super Duty Catalina seemed to have no fear when it came to testing these limits.

That’s right: the name “Swiss Cheese” for this Pontiac came from the controversial way that weight was taken out of the heavy frame. First of all, like most cars the stock frame was a “box” section in profile with four sides; the builders of the Super Duty took the bottom side off of this “box” so that the frame was now just and inverted “U”. Combined with removal of one of the cross braces those changes took out some weight and obviously compromised the structure, so they stopped there, right? No, the fabricators also grabbed a hole saw with the diameter of a grapefruit and proceeded to drill over 120 holes through both sides of each frame rails.

I’ve set the video below (which the still above is from) to the spot where you can see more images of how bonkers the frame on this thing was.

In total, the modifications took something like 150 to 175 pounds out of the Catalina’s frame. This sounds like a recipe for disaster if this Catalina was to carry six American-sized adults over bumpy, salt slush covered roads. Again, that wasn’t even remotely in the cards: the Super Duty would live its life off of the streets and inclement weather, a quarter mile at a time.

Regardless, even as a purpose-built machine these changes caused problems. Reportedly, on the factory line they needed a two-by-four wood structure to keep the frame from distorting during the assembly process. Worse than that, during the factory part of the build that frame was so fragile that they had to go down the line with a smaller, sacrificial engine to be removed later; the weight of the 421 Super Duty would have risked bending the lace-like frame into becoming a pretzel. The bigger motor was installed later at a different facility. Truthfully, it was almost as if the body was holding the frame together and not the other way around.

Tach It Up, Tach It Up

The completed “Swiss Cheese” SD Catalina was a car with zero durability, no comfort features whatsoever, and an inability to do anything but go in a straight line. Everything was sacrificed to the simply shut down whomever was in the other lane. There’s no point in asking if this thing was fast since you already know the answer; on the tires of the day, it could pull a zero to sixty time of around five and half seconds, but on modern rubber it’s estimated that the big old coupe could get down into the lower fours.

Only 14 “Swiss Cheese” Catalinas were built and either given or sold in a rather back door manner to selected top race teams. These included legendary Mickey Thompson (who got two), George DeLorean (brother of John and a strong competitor in his own right), and racer-and-soon-to-be GTO marketing guru Jim Wangers. Driving for the iconic Royal Pontiac dealership, Wagners won the B/FX (factory experimental) class victory at the 1963 NHRA U.S. Nationals.

Championships are great, but it was Wanger’s fellow Pontiac racer Howard Maselles that put the Swiss Cheese Pontiac into the national record books. He set the NHRA C/Stock class record with an elapsed time of 12.27 seconds at 114.64 mph. In a testament to how formidable the “Swiss Cheese” was, that record stood untouched for five years.

Despite the frame that can barely hold up the car, nine of the fourteen “Swiss Cheese” Catalinas are still accounted for. Not surprisingly, when they come up for sale they go for house-in-good-school-district money. The Jim Wangers Royal Pontiac car seen in the topshot sold in May of 2025 for $742,500. That price makes it currently third most expensive Pontiac ever to change hands, just below a Motorama show car and a super-rare GTO Judge Ram Air Convertible. As expected, much of the “top ten most expensive Pontiacs” list is made up of surviving Catalinas with the infamous drilled frame; most have sold in the half million-dollar range.

The Racing Ban Unleashes Hell

Didn’t Pontiac try to beat their own records best quarter mile times with an even faster car in the ensuing years? Sadly, that was not to be; on January 24th of 1963 General Motors issued an immediate ban on any factory racing programs or products aimed at competition. The reasons for this sudden turn of events were twofold. General Motors at the time had over fifty percent of the American car market, a fact that the Kennedy administration saw as potentially violating anti-trust regulations and threatening a lawsuit that never came. The General felt that their first step to alleviate this was drop high-profile activities like racing. Also, the early sixties were when safety concerns were finally starting to arise in America, and having factory-backed machines with 500 horsepower tearing up dragstrips was not good for that image. With the racing ban, the Big Three power war was done for good; or so people thought.

With the abrupt end to all competition activities, what happened to all of the Pontiac people responsible for the “Swiss Cheese” Catalina after the ban took effect? They still broke the rules, but not for racing. In a GM garage out of the way from watchful eyes, John Delorean had the team plop a 389 Pontiac V8 into a mid-sized Tempest in a total violation of the unofficial displacement limit on smaller cars. Somehow, the team was able to get it produced by John finding a loophole that the big-motor ban only applied to standard engines, not optional ones.

Barely a year after the last “Swiss Cheese” was made, the first Pontiac GTO was released and marketed by former “Swiss Cheese” driver and race champion Jim Wangers. The planned first year production run was supposed to be a few thousand cars: they sold 32.450 of them.

The competition ban had totally backfired; the muscle battle had now moved from the racetrack to the street, and it was going to be glorious.

Pontiac Points: 99/100

Verdict: What should have been a magnificent last gasp indirectly launched the muscle car movement and cemented Pontiac’s reputation for attainable excitement. The GOAT before the “goat.”

topshot source: Mecum