How the General began the tussle of the muscle cars

ONCE upon a time, General Motors was the biggest and most powerful car-maker in the world. It was also one of the most conservative, letting others take the risks with new designs then, once the risk had been minimised, bringing its vast financial and production muscle to bear to flood the market and steal all the sales.

It did it in the United States with Chevrolet, in Germany with Opel and in the UK with Vauxhall.

And it made loads of money from all three.

Then, one day almost exactly 45 years ago, the General did something absolutely crazy. It launched the muscle car.

It shamelessly lifted the GTO badge from Italian comparative minnow Ferrari, chrome-plated it, stuck it on the back of a two-door saloon, stuffed a 325bhp V8 under the hood and a legend was born.

The muscle car era that the Pontiac GTO triggered would last the best part of two decades, though its most successful years were between the launch of the original in 1965 and the series of oil crises which changed the face of motoring in the early 1970s.

In fact, the 1 October 1963 debut of the GTO wasn't quite as straightforward as it should be, for the ultra-cautious General Motors actually launched the GTO as a performance pack for the Le Mans range of sports coupes and convertibles. But such was its overwhelming success that, within weeks, the GTO became a model on its own.

Its top speed, just like the exact number of true horsepower available, owed as much to the marketing department copy writers as to serious road testers back in those days, but we do know for a fact that the standard car could run the standing quarter-mile in 14.3 seconds.

That's still pretty respectable today, and nothing short of miraculous when you consider that US cars back in 1964 came with skinny tyres and woefully inadequate brakes. Cornering was pretty much limited to three-point turns and the gentlest of curves into the local shopping mall. And there were no seatbelts, never mind airbags.

But the public loved them and the "Goat", as the GTO was nicknamed, triggered a muscle car war of attrition – both on and off the track – between General Motors and the other members of America's big three, Ford and Chrysler.

By the end of the 1960s and the summer of love, it was a flat-out race between the three to provide the most automotive bang per buck.

Chrysler and its Mopar special, the Plymouth Roadrunner, was the leader on performance but Ford tried hard by putting a Cobra V8 into the otherwise mundane Fairlane Coupe.

The General, now being run by John DeLorean who would go on to fame followed by infamy building sports-cars in Northern Ireland,, came back with a spectacular reply.

Named after a catchphrase in the popular TV show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in, the Judge was initially available only in radioactive carousel red paint, with a 366bhp V8 engine but no wheel trims. The need to cut the basic price as low as possible to compete with the cut-throat opposition had, inadvertently, given birth to the expensive options list which opened up a whole new avenue of profitability for car-makers the world over.

But competition was also keen from rival divisions within General Motors, and Oldsmobile has some legitimate claim to be the originator of the muscle car with the V8-engined Cutlass Coupe of 1961. However, its first true rival to the GTO was the Cutlass 442 of 1965.

Rather than telling the cubic capacity of the engine in cubic inches as some would later do, the numbers actually stood for four-barrel carburetor, four-on-the-floor gearchange and two exhaust pipes.

It was a type of descriptive nomenclature which would be resurrected by Toyota nearly a quarter of a century later when it came up with the M (mid-engined) R (rear-wheel drive) 2 (seats).

In the war to offer the most power, the first casualty was almost always the truth with, for instance, the novel use of alcohol injection in a turbocharged Oldsmobile V8 – which was fair enough until they decided to label the additive as Turbo Rocket Fluid. No, honestly, they did.

For nearly a decade, GM and its cross-town rivals were locked in a battle for street supremacy, with victory usually going to the cheapest car that could do the fastest time on the quarter-mile drag away from the lights. The war escalated each model year with faster and more powerful offerings from each camp. Each GM division had its own definition of the ideal muscle car, and each gave its rendition a personality of its own.

While the muscle car has continued to appear on the scene ever since, its real hey day drew to an end in 1974 due to escalating insurance rates (these things were seriously dangerous) power-choking emissions and the huge escalation in fuel prices for the 1973 Arab Israeli war.

Today, only a handful of the General's muscle cars remain, almost exclusively in the hands of museums and collectors which is a good thing because, for anyone used to today's cornering and braking capabilities, these things could prove lethal in modern traffic.

But in a cracking new book from Mike Mueller you can enjoy the whole muscle car era from the comfort of a fireside chair, with absolutely no risk at all.

• The Complete Book of GM Muscle, Mike Mueller published by Motorbooks, £35.