63 Catalina w/ Daytona 500 Provenance

[Bill Pritchard]

A friend of mine was at a local cruise night in Geneva, IL recently, and came across this unrestored 63 Catalina with 47K original miles. Since he is a big Pontiac enthusiast, his interest was piqued. Seems that this car is one of nine identical 63 Catalinas assigned to shuttle VIP's around for the 1963 Daytona 500. What's really interesting is that all nine of these cars were evidently produced with 2 barrel 389 engines and automatic transmissions; Pontiac chose to convert them all to tri-power 421's with 4 speed manual transmissions, retaining the factory a/c that they were also originally equipped with. The owner had a whole bunch of original documentation (including PHS) to verify this provenance. It would seem to me like it would be easier, cheaper and faster to just produce 9 more new cars with a tri-power 421, 4 speed, and a/c than to do the conversions, but that's evidently NOT what they chose to do. Interesting.

[Xplantdad]

That's cool Bill!

[Bill Pritchard]

I made the pictures larger [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/blush.gif[/img]

[68 Vert]

Cool car...Bill, did you see the PHS docs.?

Mike

[Tracker1]

Full-size muscle at its best. Thanks for sharing this cool piece.

[Bill Pritchard]

Mike,

No, unfortunately I didn't even see the car let alone any docs. My friend saw the car and the docs, and he has PHS documentation on his own 66 GTO, so I think he had a reasonably good idea what he was looking at. He said the owner had a large display board with all the documentation mounted on the board.