1969 Pontiac Firebird Automatic 2-door Convertible on 2040-cars

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2023 Grand National Roadster Show Mega Photo Gallery | Hot rod heaven

POMONA, Calif. — From an outsider's perspective, it would be easy to assume that the Grand National Roadster Show has always been a Southern California institution. After all, it celebrates the diverse postwar car culture of the region — hot rods, lead sleds, lowriders, and more. However, the show had its roots in NorCal in 1950 when Al Slonaker and his hot rod club showed their custom cars at the Oakland Expo. The GNRS moved to Pomona, California, in 2004. By then it had grown exponentially and seen about a dozen more car customization trends come and go. However, the show and its centerpiece award, the America's Most Beautiful Roadster prize, celebrate what is perhaps the first of those trends: the American hot rod in its purest form. Today, in its 73rd year, the GNRS is the oldest indoor car show in America. Annually it welcomes 500-800 cars, gathered into special themes like Tri-Five Chevys or Volkswagen Bugs. At this year's show, which was last weekend, a special hall was dedicated to pickup trucks built between 1948-98, including mini-trucks, groovy camper bed conversions, and resto-mods.  However, of all the vehicles presented, only nine are eligible for the America's Most Beautiful Roadster award. Winners get their names engraved on a 9-foot-tall perpetual trophy that was, according to The Ultimate Hot Rod Dictionary, the largest in the world when it debuted in 1950. Slonaker chose the word "roadster" initially because "hot rod" bore slightly negative outlaw connotations in 1950. Only American cars built before 1937 of certain body styles — roadsters, roadster pickups, phaetons, touring cars — are eligible, and they cannot have roll-down side windows.  Cars in the running for the cup cannot have been shown anywhere else before their debut at the GNRS.  Contestants for this accolade essentially build their cars to the a platonic ideal of a hot rod. This year the honors went to Jack Chisenhall of San Antonio, Texas, for his "Champ Deuce," a 1932 Ford Roadster. It's exactly what you picture when you think of a hot rod, but distilled to its absolute essence.  Other standouts included "Green Eyes," a two-tone green 1959 Chevy El Camino  with a heavily metal-flaked bed, "Blue Monday," a 1964 Buick Riviera lowrider, and a personal favorite, "Purple Reign," a purple and black 1951 Mercury. Cars may have started out as tools, but there aren't shows like this filled with custom refrigerators.

Junkyard Gem: 1968 Pontiac Catalina sedan

During the late 1960s, General Motors ruled the American car landscape, growing so dominant that the federal government considered antitrust action to break up the company. The General offered sporty Corvettes and muscular GTOs and rugged pickups and opulent Fleetwoods, sure, but the fat part of the sales numbers came from the bread-and-butter full-sized sedans and coupes, which boasted superior engineering and modern-looking styling; in 1967 alone, the Chevrolet Division moved 972,600 full-sized cars, and that's not even counting the 155,100 full-sized Chevy station wagons that year. Pontiac, Buick and Oldsmobile sold the same big cars with division-specific engines and bodywork, and they flew off the showroom floors. For 1968, the entry-level full-sized car from Pontiac was the Catalina, and I've found an example of the most affordable version of the most affordable big Pontiac for 1968, discarded in a northeastern Colorado wrecking yard about 50 miles south of Cheyenne, Wyoming. A '68 GM full-sized coupe, convertible, or even a four-door hardtop might be worth the cost and effort of a restoration, but a no-options base-trim-level post sedan with rust and plenty of body filler just won't get many takers these days. Like so many vehicles that sit outside for decades on the High Plains, this one is full of rodent nests. I wouldn't want to work on the interior of this car without a respirator and a lot of work with a shop-vac, because hantavirus is a significant danger in these parts. Alfred Sloan's plan to offer a stepladder of prestige for GM buyers, in which your first new car was a Chevrolet and you moved up through Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick until you became sufficiently prosperous for Cadillac ownership, worked brilliantly for decades. In 1968, the Catalina was a notch above its Impala sibling on the Snob-O-Meter, with the sedan starting at $3,004 (about $22,600 in 2019 dollars). In fact, the V8-equipped 1968 Chevrolet Impala sedan listed at $3,033, and the Oldsmobile Delmont 88 went for $3,146, so the lines were beginning to blur between the relative positions of the lower-end GM divisions by this time. The base engine in the 1968 Catalina was a 400-cubic-inch (6.5 liter) V8 rated at 265 horsepower and enough torque to tow an aircraft carrier.

Junkyard Gem: 1988 Pontiac 6000 LE Safari Wagon

The Detroit station wagon was fast losing sales to minivans and trucks as the decade of the 1980s progressed, but Pontiac shoppers still had plenty of choices as late as the 1988 model year. A visit to a Pontiac dealership in 1988 would have presented you with three sizes of wagon, from the little Sunbird through the midsize 6000 and up to the mighty Parisienne-based Safari. Today's Junkyard Gem is a luxed-up 6000 LE, complete with "wood" paneling, found in a car graveyard in Fargo, North Dakota. Confusingly, the "Safari" name in 1988 was used by Pontiac to designate both a specific model — the wagon version of the Parisienne/Bonneville— and as the traditional Pontiac designation for a station wagon. That meant that the wagon we're looking at now was a Safari but not the Safari in the 1988 Pontiac universe. The 6000 lived on the GM A-Body platform, as the Pontiac-badged version of the Chevrolet Celebrity. Production ran from the 1982 through 1991 model years, with the A-Body Buick Century surviving all the way through 1996. The LE trim level came between the base 6000 and the gloriously complex 6000 STE (which wasn't available in wagon form, sadly). I visited this yard in Fargo after judging at the Minneapolis 500 24 Hours of Lemons in Brainerd, Minnesota, last fall. Up to that point, I had visited 47 of the Lower 48 United States, with just North Dakota remaining, so I made a point of doing a Fargo detour in order to check that state off my list. I'm pleased that I found such a good example of the 1982-1996 GM A-Body in this yard, because the most famous of all the A-Bodies is the 1987 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera driven to Brainerd by the inept Fargo-based kidnappers in the film "Fargo." This Minnesota-plated 6000 had some rust, but just negligible levels by Upper Midwestern standards on a 31-year-old car. The interior looked very good, with the original owner's manual still inside. The 6000 LE boasted "redesigned contoured seats and London/Empress fabric," which sounds pretty swanky. Something less swanky lives under the hood: an Iron Duke 2.5-liter pushrod four-cylinder engine, known as the Tech 4 by 1988. The Iron Duke was, at heart, one cylinder bank of the not-quite-renowned Pontiac 301-cubic-inch V8; while fairly rugged, the Duke ran rough (typical of large-displacement straight-four engines) and made just 98 horsepower in this application. Pontiac offered a couple of optional V6s in the 6000 in 1988, but no Quad 4.