Photos by author.
Note: I write up driving impressions of virtually every car I photograph, within a couple of days of the drive, so everything is fresh in my memory. Occasionally, because of the constraints of format, the prepared text doesn’t run. Now, thanks to the joys of the blogosphere, it can.
This 1969 GTO Judge is a real Carousel Red Ram Air III 4-speed Judge with A/C; the owner/restorer, Todd Hood of Tucson, AZ, bought it in boxes and discovered that the included 400-inch Pontiac V8 was not numbers-matching. This freed him up to divert from absolute numbers-matching correctness and make driveline modifications as he saw fit, as well as some clever air conditioning mods. (You can read all about the nearly-invisible changes he made in the January 2015 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines magazine.)
We drove Todd’s car in the evening, after the photos were taken, and did not have a chance to try out his A/C mods; it was a cool enough night out that we drove with all of the windows down instead. At idle, everything simmers–it’s a degree or two snortier than a stock Judge might be, but nothing that’ll turn you head or make you cover your ears. Not so under acceleration: even under partial acceleration the exhaust lets loose a deep bellow, but open all four barrels on the Q-Jet and the ferocity of the engine note is only matched by the blur of the shoulder and median in your peripheral vision. Will you get caught because you’re doing 85 in a bright orange GTO, or because the sound carries for miles in all directions in the open desert, alerting distant officers on patrol?
And the best part is, just when you think you’re ready to shift out of fourth because you’re cruising at 80mph and the engine is revving a little too hard … you can! The Legend five-speed is easy to shift without being mushy, tactile without being taciturn. The shift action doesn’t have the yards-long throw of yore, and makes shifting a pleasure. It’s well-matched to the Centerforce clutch, which doesn’t require a ton of leg muscle when changing gears. The addition of a fifth gear lends peace to the cabin, dropping revs by 1000 in top gear at freeway speeds, turning the 3.55 rear into an effective 2.45–it lets you move faster, and feels utterly uncompromised. An added bonus: the lower revs drop fuel consumption. The owner reports achieving 17mpg on a round-trip run between Tucson and Scottsdale–at 75mph, with the air conditioning on.
Indeed, once the acceleration party is out of the way, there is really no sense that you’re driving a car that has been fiddled with or modernized in any way. Stand along side it, and you’d have to have a keen eye to discern the 15-inch wheels and larger-diameter dual exhaust poking out beneath the rear bumper. The Parchment interior, with its oyster sheen, looks and feels as Pontiac’s Morrokide did back in the day. The gauges remain deeply tunneled and hard to see in bright lighting conditions. The metal Hurst T-handle shifter is cool to the touch. Everything here, from the look to the driving position, is 1969 all over. Only the steering wheel feels odd–and that’s because it’s a standard-issue base wheel, rather than one of the factory upgrades that the restoration crowd love to hang off the column. The radio head unit is modern, but looks more vintage than it is, and speakers are hidden about the cabin in places that we didn’t see.
And in truth, you’d be hard-pressed to feel the difference in most driving situations. The power steering hasn’t been quickened with a more modern variable-ratio ‘box–you twirl the wheel and the fronts track accordingly. The ride is marginally more secure with the 235-section Goodyear radials on 15-inch wheels, if only because bias-plies are generally so wobbly you feel practically at sea. We often sense that older radial-shod cars set up for bias-plies are tippier more in the corners, if only because radials secure you better in the bends and allow greater speed, but for whatever reason this GTO didn’t have that issue. Perhaps because it was a fresh build with only a couple of hundred, rather than tens of thousands, of miles? Similarly, the brakes: functioning perfectly, but there’s no feeling that you’re going to bang your head on the rim of the steering wheel if you stop too quickly.
Many of the cars we feature in our Modified Muscle pages seek to behave and feel more contemporary. This is not one of those cars: the goal was to have excellent performance and a cool cabin, simultaneously. The feel of 1969, inside and out, was not an issue to be dealt with–rather, in its fastidious attention to detail, that feel was embraced. Todd Hood got it right on.
from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/1vbxuaC
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