1969 GTO - Green Bondo 2 door hardtop.
After an exhaustive search I could only come up with one bonafide muscle car for under $800. A clapped out 1969 Pontiac GTO. It is funny, I found this picture on the web and it looks a lot like my actual car. Do all 1969 GTOs wind up looking like this? Mine was the same color green you see on the quarter panel. Next to the maverick this was one of worst car purchases. It was rusted out all over and was a mixture of red and grey primer and some original British Racing Green. To add insult to obvious injury the title was erased on so even though I had the title, DMV in NJ would not accept it. The kid I bought the car from was clueless and no help except to get me the phone number of the original owner. When I contacted the original owner he was not a happy camper. He had sold that rust bucket some time ago and here came that car back to haunt him. Apparently he had put the kids name on the title when he sold it to him and the kid never re-titled. So he just erased his name and put mine in there. Simple. We did not know it then but the term we would use now is "sweet". Not. Finally I got the car legal. I could now drive it. it felt like such an accomplishment. That was the pest part of GTO ownership. It only had "67,000" miles. Of course this before they put that extra hundred thousand digit on car odometers. We can thank Honda and Toyota for that. Their cars would actually last for more than 100,000 miles. But in those days the odometer would just go back to zero and start over. I think this was the case with GTO. It certainly did not look or drive like it had 67K miles. But the car did hold up OK. I was planning to paint it, but once I discovered the amount of rust on the body I gave up on the idea. Sanding the Bondo down to smooth might actually cause some piece of metal to fall off. So I drove around in Spot Mobile 2. Somehow I can up with the cash for a decent stereo so the tunes were good. The car did have some guts. But this was a basic GTO 400 with a TurboHydramatic. As a muscle car it was not all that fast. As a car it was covered with spots. Shortly I lost interest in GTO. I will say Muscle Cars are easy to sell. I sold it right away to a friend for just a little less than I paid for it. Of course I also spend about $400 on needed repairs. My friends all liked buying cars from me. Goodbye GTO......
|