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forcedfedv6
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what a piece of Sh** and Rust bucket that car is, I give him $50.00 bucks for it if he is lucky, i cant believe people are betting over 84k for it, who ever said the economy is bad with people spending that kind of money in junk like that? 
Cheeseburger
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Supposedly the auction started with a buy it now price of $4000, now there is talk it may go over $150,000!
what a piece of Sh** and Rust bucket that car is, I give him $50.00 bucks for it if he is lucky, i cant believe people are betting over 84k for it, who ever said the economy is bad with people spending that kind of money in junk like that?
You had to have lived during those times to understand.
You had to have lived during those times to understand.
:biggrin: and even in "tuff $$$" times something like this brings in the big $$$
Warp6
Mine since '92
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- May 25, 2001
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- 1,882
If he'd slap some 34's on it it'd go for 200K!
MeanBuicks
Scaring the neighbors!
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FYI, until now, only two of the original six SD Tempest coupes were known to exist. A restored one sold two years ago for $875,000.
Raymond Bunch
"Turbo Enthusiast"
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:wink: :smile:
stack1
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ONE 1/4 MILLION DOLLARS!!!!!! 
About 4 years ago I bought a 1970 GTO that was a Judge clone for $125. I sold it a couple years ago for $2400 on ebay. I thought that was a great come up.
About 4 years ago I bought a 1970 GTO that was a Judge clone for $125. I sold it a couple years ago for $2400 on ebay. I thought that was a great come up.
obviously some guys would kill for the car :biggrin: add prob another 100 k to do a restoration and he has a "deal" 
oh a few years ago one of the 6 Shelby Cobra Dayton coupes was found in similar condition as this.. It did have a drivetrain.. went for $3.5 mil .. with guys pissed off they couldn't buy it because it wasn't "found" yet .. What a story went with the car .
oh a few years ago one of the 6 Shelby Cobra Dayton coupes was found in similar condition as this.. It did have a drivetrain.. went for $3.5 mil .. with guys pissed off they couldn't buy it because it wasn't "found" yet .. What a story went with the car .
You had to have lived during those times and then be dropped on your head to understand.
Fixed.
Who ever won it also paid $16K for a set of used Ram Air V heads and intake manifold, so I sensing a Pontiac hard on.
When the car is done and you take it to a local car show, you'll have 3 old guys come up to you to give you thumbs up... until they hear what you have in it... then they shake their heads, walk away and talk about you behind your back.
The "fastest car in 1963" is like like saying the "fastest car in 1977" to our generation. BFD.
87GN_ponykillr
Buick addict
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- Nov 25, 2003
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WOW! What the hell!
stack1
Senior Stacker
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Here's an article from Hemmings that talks about the SDs.
"It's the real deal," Bobby Iaconi told his cousin, Joe DeNick, over the phone from Daytona Beach in January of 1963. "I personally saw Beswick blow away Dyno Don."
Both Iaconi and DeNick had heard about this new Pontiac Tempest station wagon that was turning 11s and dusting the competition anywhere it went. They were both regular guys from northern Delaware, though, running a pair of Mopars on shoestring budgets on the weekend, funded only by their day jobs.
But while in Daytona, Iaconi blew the engine in his 1963 Dodge and proclaimed he'd had it with Mopars. Despite the fact that only the big-name racers or guys who had an in with the company could arrange a 421-powered car to run in the Factory Experimental and Super Stock classes, Iaconi wondered if DeNick's pal Harold Ramsey, the salesman over at Union Park Pontiac in Wilmington who told them about Beswick's new car, could help.
As it just so happened, Tony Umarossa, the owner of the dealership, had ordered a Tempest station wagon from the factory for his son to race. The son, however, entered ROTC, and Ramsey, Union Park's star driver, already had a Super Duty Pontiac Catalina to campaign for the 1963 season.
So as simple as that, DeNick bought one of the rarest and most unusual built-for-racing Pontiacs, then drove it home. In the rain. On slicks.
The Tempest already had a reputation for unusual engineering, even before Pontiac's engineers decided to make a Factory Experimental racer out of it. When it debuted in 1961 alongside the Buick Special and Oldsmobile F-85, it shared the compacts' general unit-body design and front-engine placement, but little else. Its base engine, the 194.5-cu.in. four-cylinder (essentially half of a 389 V-8) allowed the division to offer an entirely new engine with almost zero development or tooling costs. It also outsold the optional all-aluminum Buick-sourced 215-cu.in. V-8 by incredible, almost comedic margins during the Tempest's first two years.
But the "rope drive" flexible torque-tube driveshaft became the first-generation Tempest's hallmark feature. John DeLorean, in his initial occupation with Pontiac as director of advanced engineering, envisioned a line of independently sprung full-sizes for the division, a vision that would have also used a rear-mounted transaxle. DeLorean dreamed up a flexible driveshaft at the same time, and after a series of full-size prototypes, his engineering group found that the flexible driveshaft best isolated the torsional vibrations of the vibration-prone slant-four--thus its use in the Tempest.
The Tempest debuted to decent numbers--better than the conventional F-85 and Special, at least--and even earned Motor Trend's Car of the Year Award.
But it took awhile for racers to consider the Tempest as anything but a commuter curiosity. In 1961, the slant-four started out at 110hp, bumped up to 155hp by an available four-barrel carburetor in the Indy version. The two-barrel 215 V-8, laughably, generated the exact same horsepower figure that year. Matters improved slightly in 1962, when Pontiac made available a four-speed transmission and nudged the Indy slant-four to 166hp. Buick bestowed an additional 35hp to the 215.
Still not enough for racers, despite the fact that Tempests weighed almost 1,000 pounds less than their (steel-nosed) Catalina counterparts at a time when lightweight versions of full-size cars had just started to dominate the Super Stock drag racing classes.
Perhaps the rope drive and rear-mounted transmission scared them away. Mickey Thompson famously tinkered with the slant-four in a variety of supercharged configurations for land-speed record attempts, but veered away from using those engines in Tempests.
Instead, both Thompson and the crew from Royal Pontiac in Royal Oak, Michigan, seemed to hit upon the same idea at the same time. According to Larry Davis's book, Quarter-Mile Muscle: Detroit goes to the Drags, both teams converged on the 1962 NHRA Winternationals with Tempest two-door coupes fitted with 421-cu.in. Super Duty V-8s. However, both cars ran the power back through a conventional clutch and manual transmission and then to narrowed Catalina rear axles.
"The two Tempests turned times at least a half-second quicker than the quickest Super Stock cars," Davis wrote. "Hayden Proffitt drove the Mickey Thompson-prepared A/FX Tempest to victory, turning a 12.37 on the final run."
Proffitt also drove a 421-powered Catalina in the Super Stock class during that event, but ran just 12.75 seconds with it.
Likely for that reason, Pontiac engineers grabbed 12 1963 Tempests--six four-door station wagons and six Le Mans two-door coupes--and spent their 1962 Christmas break preparing all 12 cars for drag race duty.
"The engineers pretty much knew that the (January 1963) racing ban was coming down from GM, so they wanted to build as many race cars as they could before it did," said Pontiac historian Don Keefe. "The Catalina was just too heavy and the 'Swiss cheese' frame broke all the time, so they figured they'd do a lightweight job on the Tempest and use the benefit of the rear-mounted transaxle to get as much weight over the rear tires as possible."
Pontiac had already made extensive changes to the Tempest for the 1963 model year. They chucked the Buick 215 and added the two-barrel 260hp 326-cu.in. Pontiac V-8 to the option sheet. To beef the chassis in anticipation of the 326, Pontiac strengthened the axles, gears and transaxle case; increased the diameter of the drive shaft by ¾ inch; redesigned the rear suspension's control arms; made standard the previously optional handling package of heavy-duty springs and shocks; and introduced a new, stiffer optional handling package.
To prep the Tempests for race duty, Pontiac's engineers first replaced the 326 with the notoriously underrated 405hp Super Duty version of the 421, complete with forged internals, 980 cylinder heads, an 859 medium-riser dual-quad intake manifold (many, if not all of the Tempests later ran the over-the-counter "bathtub" tunnel-ram dual-quad intake), a McKellar No. 10 camshaft (again, many later received the Isky 505 camshaft) and a 12.0:1 compression ratio, though with a few modifications. While the Catalina Super Duty 421s used cast-aluminum long-branch exhaust manifolds, the Tempest Super Duty 421s used unique stainless steel headers with three-inch diameter outlets, fabricated like conventional headers for the driver side, but stamped into two halves and then welded together on the passenger side. The downpipes then dumped out just behind the front tires, but not before a crossover pipe connected each side and provided a 1¾-inch stub to attach the stock exhaust, should a track or sanctioning body ever require a stock exhaust system.
To the back of the 421s, the engineers bolted a standard, but empty, bellhousing, out of which came the Tempest's flexible driveshaft, which required drilling and tapping six additional holes in the centermost section of the 421 crankshaft to which the driveshaft would then mount.
The driveshaft then sent power straight back to the Powershift, a heavily modified Tempest transaxle that used a standard aluminum automatic transaxle case in the front, a modified cast-iron differential carrier to house the ring and pinion, then a second aluminum case bolted to the back of the differential carrier to provide a total of four forward gears. To the back of the second aluminum case, then, the Pontiac engineers mounted the flywheel, starter and hydraulically operated throwout bearing. The transaxle thus became 1½ feet longer, requiring a corresponding notch in the gas tank, which remained in its stock location behind the transaxle.
"It became a kind of semi-automatic," Pontiac restorer Scott Tiemann said. "You have to use the clutch to get it moving, but once it gets moving, you can shift it without the clutch. Though it doesn't shift automatically--you still have to go through the gears."
And yes, when the starter turned, the entire drivetrain turned with it.
Heavy-duty rear axles and universal joints specific to the race Tempests then transferred power to the rear wheels, wrapped in 10-inch M&H slicks.
The Pontiac engineers didn't stop with the drivetrain, however. In true Super Duty fashion, they had stamped from aluminum both front fenders, the hood, the lower front valance, the grille surround and the radiator core supports. In further attempts to shave weight from the front end (and shift weight to above the rear axle), they replaced the windshield with ¼-inch-thick clear acrylic and replaced the bumpers with severely lightened steel versions.
Neither seam sealer nor sound deadener made it into the 12 cars, and the engineers tossed the front bench seats from the wagons for the lighter bucket seats from the Le Mans, upholstered in the wagon-only tri-tone interior material. Heater delete and radio delete, of course, and they even went so far as to have Harrison stamp unique aluminum radiators. All 12 left Pontiac painted Cameo White and with 326 badges in their grilles.
Which leads us up to a rainy Wednesday night in February 1963 with DeNick driving away from Union Park Pontiac after leaving the dealership with a $1,500 down payment. The other 11 Super Duty Tempests and Le Manses had gone to professional racers across the country: Royal Pontiac, Arlen Vanke and Mickey Thompson among them. And just like them, Iaconi and DeNick campaigned their Tempest through the summer of 1964.
"We didn't have any sponsors--we had to sponsor ourselves," Iaconi said. "That was probably the happiest year we had drag racing. We never blew the car up, we just ran out of money."
Over the next several years, a number of different owners raced the car. According to Keefe, who documented the ownership history of the car, one subsequent owner replaced the transaxle with a conventional driveline, while another painted it Plum Crazy. In 1980, it ended up in the hands of renowned Super Duty collector Randy Williams, who then spent the next 18 years collecting the correct parts for its restoration, including another Super Duty transaxle and all the aluminum front sheet metal pieces. With the majority of the Super Duty-specific parts collected, Williams then handed the Tempest over to Tiemann's shop, Supercar Specialties, for a complete nut-and-bolt 10-month restoration.
Williams, unfortunately, died in 2004, leading his widow, Jean, to sell the Tempest at auction in October 2007. It now resides in the collection of Dana Mecum, at whose auction Jean Williams sold the Tempest.
Iaconi, however, still remembers the car well.
"That car was just a passion for us, and we were just a couple renegades with it," he said. "Unless we were up against another Pontiac or a big-name guy had come to town, we just dominated everything with it."
"It's the real deal," Bobby Iaconi told his cousin, Joe DeNick, over the phone from Daytona Beach in January of 1963. "I personally saw Beswick blow away Dyno Don."
Both Iaconi and DeNick had heard about this new Pontiac Tempest station wagon that was turning 11s and dusting the competition anywhere it went. They were both regular guys from northern Delaware, though, running a pair of Mopars on shoestring budgets on the weekend, funded only by their day jobs.
But while in Daytona, Iaconi blew the engine in his 1963 Dodge and proclaimed he'd had it with Mopars. Despite the fact that only the big-name racers or guys who had an in with the company could arrange a 421-powered car to run in the Factory Experimental and Super Stock classes, Iaconi wondered if DeNick's pal Harold Ramsey, the salesman over at Union Park Pontiac in Wilmington who told them about Beswick's new car, could help.
As it just so happened, Tony Umarossa, the owner of the dealership, had ordered a Tempest station wagon from the factory for his son to race. The son, however, entered ROTC, and Ramsey, Union Park's star driver, already had a Super Duty Pontiac Catalina to campaign for the 1963 season.
So as simple as that, DeNick bought one of the rarest and most unusual built-for-racing Pontiacs, then drove it home. In the rain. On slicks.
The Tempest already had a reputation for unusual engineering, even before Pontiac's engineers decided to make a Factory Experimental racer out of it. When it debuted in 1961 alongside the Buick Special and Oldsmobile F-85, it shared the compacts' general unit-body design and front-engine placement, but little else. Its base engine, the 194.5-cu.in. four-cylinder (essentially half of a 389 V-8) allowed the division to offer an entirely new engine with almost zero development or tooling costs. It also outsold the optional all-aluminum Buick-sourced 215-cu.in. V-8 by incredible, almost comedic margins during the Tempest's first two years.
But the "rope drive" flexible torque-tube driveshaft became the first-generation Tempest's hallmark feature. John DeLorean, in his initial occupation with Pontiac as director of advanced engineering, envisioned a line of independently sprung full-sizes for the division, a vision that would have also used a rear-mounted transaxle. DeLorean dreamed up a flexible driveshaft at the same time, and after a series of full-size prototypes, his engineering group found that the flexible driveshaft best isolated the torsional vibrations of the vibration-prone slant-four--thus its use in the Tempest.
The Tempest debuted to decent numbers--better than the conventional F-85 and Special, at least--and even earned Motor Trend's Car of the Year Award.
But it took awhile for racers to consider the Tempest as anything but a commuter curiosity. In 1961, the slant-four started out at 110hp, bumped up to 155hp by an available four-barrel carburetor in the Indy version. The two-barrel 215 V-8, laughably, generated the exact same horsepower figure that year. Matters improved slightly in 1962, when Pontiac made available a four-speed transmission and nudged the Indy slant-four to 166hp. Buick bestowed an additional 35hp to the 215.
Still not enough for racers, despite the fact that Tempests weighed almost 1,000 pounds less than their (steel-nosed) Catalina counterparts at a time when lightweight versions of full-size cars had just started to dominate the Super Stock drag racing classes.
Perhaps the rope drive and rear-mounted transmission scared them away. Mickey Thompson famously tinkered with the slant-four in a variety of supercharged configurations for land-speed record attempts, but veered away from using those engines in Tempests.
Instead, both Thompson and the crew from Royal Pontiac in Royal Oak, Michigan, seemed to hit upon the same idea at the same time. According to Larry Davis's book, Quarter-Mile Muscle: Detroit goes to the Drags, both teams converged on the 1962 NHRA Winternationals with Tempest two-door coupes fitted with 421-cu.in. Super Duty V-8s. However, both cars ran the power back through a conventional clutch and manual transmission and then to narrowed Catalina rear axles.
"The two Tempests turned times at least a half-second quicker than the quickest Super Stock cars," Davis wrote. "Hayden Proffitt drove the Mickey Thompson-prepared A/FX Tempest to victory, turning a 12.37 on the final run."
Proffitt also drove a 421-powered Catalina in the Super Stock class during that event, but ran just 12.75 seconds with it.
Likely for that reason, Pontiac engineers grabbed 12 1963 Tempests--six four-door station wagons and six Le Mans two-door coupes--and spent their 1962 Christmas break preparing all 12 cars for drag race duty.
"The engineers pretty much knew that the (January 1963) racing ban was coming down from GM, so they wanted to build as many race cars as they could before it did," said Pontiac historian Don Keefe. "The Catalina was just too heavy and the 'Swiss cheese' frame broke all the time, so they figured they'd do a lightweight job on the Tempest and use the benefit of the rear-mounted transaxle to get as much weight over the rear tires as possible."
Pontiac had already made extensive changes to the Tempest for the 1963 model year. They chucked the Buick 215 and added the two-barrel 260hp 326-cu.in. Pontiac V-8 to the option sheet. To beef the chassis in anticipation of the 326, Pontiac strengthened the axles, gears and transaxle case; increased the diameter of the drive shaft by ¾ inch; redesigned the rear suspension's control arms; made standard the previously optional handling package of heavy-duty springs and shocks; and introduced a new, stiffer optional handling package.
To prep the Tempests for race duty, Pontiac's engineers first replaced the 326 with the notoriously underrated 405hp Super Duty version of the 421, complete with forged internals, 980 cylinder heads, an 859 medium-riser dual-quad intake manifold (many, if not all of the Tempests later ran the over-the-counter "bathtub" tunnel-ram dual-quad intake), a McKellar No. 10 camshaft (again, many later received the Isky 505 camshaft) and a 12.0:1 compression ratio, though with a few modifications. While the Catalina Super Duty 421s used cast-aluminum long-branch exhaust manifolds, the Tempest Super Duty 421s used unique stainless steel headers with three-inch diameter outlets, fabricated like conventional headers for the driver side, but stamped into two halves and then welded together on the passenger side. The downpipes then dumped out just behind the front tires, but not before a crossover pipe connected each side and provided a 1¾-inch stub to attach the stock exhaust, should a track or sanctioning body ever require a stock exhaust system.
To the back of the 421s, the engineers bolted a standard, but empty, bellhousing, out of which came the Tempest's flexible driveshaft, which required drilling and tapping six additional holes in the centermost section of the 421 crankshaft to which the driveshaft would then mount.
The driveshaft then sent power straight back to the Powershift, a heavily modified Tempest transaxle that used a standard aluminum automatic transaxle case in the front, a modified cast-iron differential carrier to house the ring and pinion, then a second aluminum case bolted to the back of the differential carrier to provide a total of four forward gears. To the back of the second aluminum case, then, the Pontiac engineers mounted the flywheel, starter and hydraulically operated throwout bearing. The transaxle thus became 1½ feet longer, requiring a corresponding notch in the gas tank, which remained in its stock location behind the transaxle.
"It became a kind of semi-automatic," Pontiac restorer Scott Tiemann said. "You have to use the clutch to get it moving, but once it gets moving, you can shift it without the clutch. Though it doesn't shift automatically--you still have to go through the gears."
And yes, when the starter turned, the entire drivetrain turned with it.
Heavy-duty rear axles and universal joints specific to the race Tempests then transferred power to the rear wheels, wrapped in 10-inch M&H slicks.
The Pontiac engineers didn't stop with the drivetrain, however. In true Super Duty fashion, they had stamped from aluminum both front fenders, the hood, the lower front valance, the grille surround and the radiator core supports. In further attempts to shave weight from the front end (and shift weight to above the rear axle), they replaced the windshield with ¼-inch-thick clear acrylic and replaced the bumpers with severely lightened steel versions.
Neither seam sealer nor sound deadener made it into the 12 cars, and the engineers tossed the front bench seats from the wagons for the lighter bucket seats from the Le Mans, upholstered in the wagon-only tri-tone interior material. Heater delete and radio delete, of course, and they even went so far as to have Harrison stamp unique aluminum radiators. All 12 left Pontiac painted Cameo White and with 326 badges in their grilles.
Which leads us up to a rainy Wednesday night in February 1963 with DeNick driving away from Union Park Pontiac after leaving the dealership with a $1,500 down payment. The other 11 Super Duty Tempests and Le Manses had gone to professional racers across the country: Royal Pontiac, Arlen Vanke and Mickey Thompson among them. And just like them, Iaconi and DeNick campaigned their Tempest through the summer of 1964.
"We didn't have any sponsors--we had to sponsor ourselves," Iaconi said. "That was probably the happiest year we had drag racing. We never blew the car up, we just ran out of money."
Over the next several years, a number of different owners raced the car. According to Keefe, who documented the ownership history of the car, one subsequent owner replaced the transaxle with a conventional driveline, while another painted it Plum Crazy. In 1980, it ended up in the hands of renowned Super Duty collector Randy Williams, who then spent the next 18 years collecting the correct parts for its restoration, including another Super Duty transaxle and all the aluminum front sheet metal pieces. With the majority of the Super Duty-specific parts collected, Williams then handed the Tempest over to Tiemann's shop, Supercar Specialties, for a complete nut-and-bolt 10-month restoration.
Williams, unfortunately, died in 2004, leading his widow, Jean, to sell the Tempest at auction in October 2007. It now resides in the collection of Dana Mecum, at whose auction Jean Williams sold the Tempest.
Iaconi, however, still remembers the car well.
"That car was just a passion for us, and we were just a couple renegades with it," he said. "Unless we were up against another Pontiac or a big-name guy had come to town, we just dominated everything with it."
