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Beginning in the late 1940s, automakers such as Oldsmobile started to drop powerful engines from their heavy full-size series of cars into smaller and more affordable vehicles where the engine’s power would shine. Models such as the 303 cubic-inch Rocket V8 equipped 1949 Oldsmobile 88 began a slow evolution that took off during the Super Stock boom of the early 1960s when Chrysler and Ford squared off selling turnkey drag racing cars. Seeing how “winning on Sunday sells cars on Monday,” John DeLorean of the Pontiac Motor Company approached the conservative management at Pontiac to let him offer a performance package to the budget Tempest he named “GTO”.
The GTO featured the company’s powerful 389 cubic inch V-8. The top brass at Pontiac felt the GTO would flop, projecting a possibility of 5,000 sales. DeLorean blew expectations out of the water by selling over 32,000 GTO packages that year. The success of the GTO was a paradigm shift that caused every major American automaker to introduce such “Muscle Cars” across all their makes. Since the 1960s, classic muscle cars like the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger, and Pontiac GTO have helped reshape the American performance car industry as we know it today. Here are ten of them from the 1970s and 1980s that deserve more recognition than they get.
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