Pontiac's SD 455

[Keith Tedford]

I think I read somewhere that the very early road test SD cars were ringers with a different cam. They were running mid 13s when anything else in '73-'74 couldn't get out of its own way. It seems that even the production ones ran pretty well. In the sixties, Pontiac wasn't above a little creative advertising as in the Ferrari-GTO road test comparison so nothing surprises me there. In '68, I had a warmed over RA 400 Firebird, later a '69 GTO, and more recently a '72 Lemans Sport with a warmed over '70 455. These can be mild mannered, smooth as glass to drive and still run 12s with very little work done to them. Not bad for a basic design from the '50s. Those 454 Firebirds were built here in Canada where they built the 302 Firebirds that Titus raced in the TransAm series in the late '60s.