1973 Grand Am 455 Super Duty

[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by JMB

I wonder if this is how there were a couple of "Developmental" 1971 LS-6 Chevelle SS's....

Of course.

It's what the guys at the Proving Grounds (whether Milford or DPG) get paid to do: play around with stuff, all day, every day.

K

Originally Posted by Keith Seymore

The "Little White Race Truck"

I was exchanging PM's with another member here and it made me think of a story you all might appreciate:

As I mentioned earlier, I was reassigned to the GM Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan in 1986. I was delighted to find my new office mate John was, although a bit older than me, a former drag racer that still had the bug. He was/is quite a charismatic man and drew the other racers and motorheads to himself like flies to honey.

He also was the Engineering Vehicle Fleet Coordinator. That meant that if you needed a certain type of truck for a particular test you went to see John. That also meant that if you needed a Suburban for vacation over the weekend, you also went to see John. He was a popular guy.

Well, just before I got there, he and his racing cronies had found a nondescript little white GMC short box stepside pickup in the fleet, vehicle number CP5085. It started life as your typical 1985 small block pickup truck, but the guys had been playing around a bit with it and decided it could use a little more "punch". So - they found a garden variety 454 big block, plus all of the 1973 vintage parts (ie, crossmembers, two piece drive shaft, etc) to convert the driveline, and made themselves a little 454/TH400 powered street truck.

Naturally, after a little bit of that they decided they wanted more. They were able to locate a real LS6 454 motor and dropped that in. About that time they started taking short jaunts off property, including "test sessions" to Milan dragway. Those who had been working on the truck (on second shift, mostly) were given an opportunity to make a pass in it. I think by this time the truck was running high 12s/maybe low 13's, and also starting breaking things. A 9.5" ring gear axle from a 3/4 ton truck, with the axle shafts redrilled for a "5 on 5" bolt circle, was installed about this time, as well as a rear mounted fuel tank (from a Blazer/Suburban) and bed mounted battery.

Well, as you might guess, soon that wasn't enough. A trip to the parts counter netted an original LS7 454 motor and within a day or so that was installed. Times dropped to the low 12s and, with some tuning/cold air, etc, dropped into the high 11's. By now a roll cage was necessary and installed, as were some traction aids.

Unbeknownst to the rest of us John was taking us to the next level. He had noticed something over in the parts warehouse: something not only interesting for the present but with some historical value...

Back in late 1968 (calendar year), when the 1969 models were introduced, there was a big event out on "Black Lake" (the Vehicle Dynamics pad). The motoring press was invited in for this auspicious event and, on the pad, were some special vehicles. Namely - one ZL1 all aluminum 427 powered Corvette development mule, plus a smattering of ZL1 powered Camaros. In addition, there was one engine placed on a stand, both for display purposes and as a backup motor in case something happened to one of the engines in the car. John had found this exact engine over in the warehouse.*

John approached the "owner" of the engine (ie, the guy that had the warehouse "property tag") and attempted to make a deal. He was unsuccessful. He tried a couple times more later on and, even after using all his charms, was still unsuccessful.

He was about to despair when suddenly the breakthrough came: this guy was pulling his snowmobiles "up north" and needed a Suburban. With a gleam in his eye John made the pitch and a deal was struck: just like Esau, who sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of soup, this guy could have a Suburban for the weekend in exchange for this original ZL1 454 engine.



* This backup engine was not a 427 like the others, but was a 454. It also appeared on magazine covers and in articles back in the day.

Here is a picture of that specific engine (ie, not "one like it", or "of this type", but THIS EXACT ENGINE):

Originally Posted by Keith Seymore

It didn't take long for that engine to be installed, running and tuned up (again, mostly on second shift). Elapsed times dropped again, first to low elevens and eventually to high 10's (best ET on the truck was a 10.71). Things were going great; we were terrorizing the Proving Ground and we were having a blast.

Then, things started to change. I came in to work one day and, laying on my desk, was a clipping from an enthusiast magazine. The title was "Is it True?" and the article said something about these engineers at the Milford Proving Ground, and that they had put a 454 in a pickup and were "...laying waste to unsuspecting Corvettes and Trans Ams..." or some such thing. I thought it was pretty cool and mentioned it to John. He didn't seem to think it was so cool for some reason.



Some time after that I came in and found another piece of paper on my desk (this was back when we still had hardcopy mail - ie, not email). We had a standard form letter, called a "Vehicle Disposition Worksheet", that we got about once per week. It told where vehicles were going, where they were shipped to, or what they were doing. I scanned this particular letter until my finger stopped cold on one line: "Vehicle CP5085 - Final Disposition - Scrap". All the blood ran from my face; John was sitting there and with a parched mouth I asked "...John, why does this vehicle number look familiar?".

He looked around and said "...step into my 'office'". (Naturally, we were already "in his office" - which was MY office, too. What he meant was "come with me to my truck". As fleet coordinator, he could order whatever vehicles he felt were necessary. One vehicle that was ALWAYS necessary was a white/red Crew Cab dually, diesel, with Alcoa aluminum wheels. He always had at least one of these vehicles in the fleet, and since it was the "Queen of the Fleet", we always called it "the Queen". A secondary meaning was that it was as large as the Queen Mary. At any rate, "step into my office" = "come with me to the Queen so that we can discuss this privately").

We sat in the truck in the parking lot and the story began to unfold: Our boss, Jim, was a pretty easy going guy. He had kept a blind eye to all this fun and frivolity, but every man has his breaking point. When the little blurb in the magazine came out, well, that was the last straw. He had called John into his office a couple Fridays before and said (...and I quote...): "John, that truck has notoriety far beyond what you think or imagine. I want it gone and I want it gone NOW!".

John could see that Jim was in no mood for negotiation. However, by the next Monday (after this meeting), when things had cooled down a bit, he had a proposal. The truck was currently broken (broke a rocker arm stud) and not running. Could he repair the engine, so that the motor could be stored as an intact, functioning unit, and THEN scrap the truck? Jim thought that would be ok, so the plan was carried out. The truck was repaired, stripped of all the goodies, and the remaining hulk (ie, cab, box and frame) scrapped.

CP5085 was no more...

...Or was it?........

Originally Posted by Keith Seymore

Some of you may already be familiar with the GM "PEP" program (ie, "Product Evaluation Program"), whereby vehicles can be ordered and driven as a company vehicle and then purchased at a discount. John was also a PEP driver and when it came time for his next vehicle we were all amused to see the cutest little red 1987 GMC V6 shortbox stepside pickup arrive with his name on it.

John drove the truck for the required 3000 miles and purchased it. Almost immediately after it got home the V6 was removed (and sold), a 454/TH400 driveline installed and much of the technology from CP5085 added. Out of the box John's little red truck was running low 11's and shortly thereafter dipped into the high 10's. Many observers at the track thought it was simply the original white truck with a new red paint job.

You might be wondering if the engine in this new truck was aluminum or cast iron. It's cast iron (...we checked.... with a magnet). I've asked John where the aluminum engine is, my interest being in preserving a piece of history, and he will only tell me "it's safe". To this day I do not know where it is but only that "it is safe".

I really have to stop and comment for a minute on how much I learned during this time, even though by then I had been racing almost 10 years. John really helped me learn the value of collecting data and analysis, tricks and tuning of a big Chevy and if it weren't for him and the guys my race program would not be where it is today.

CP5085 lives on, not only in my memory but in the abilities of those who were involved with it and are continuing to take what we learned and apply it to our own race programs.

[Keith Seymore]

Two additional sidebars, as I read back through those (written almost 15 years ago):

Sidebar #1: back then we were running "Super Chevy" events all the time and you had to run a Chevrolet nameplated vehicle. We would swap out the GMC grill and tailgate for Chevrolet versions, but leave the GMC fender emblems and dash emblems. No one ever noticed or said anything, to my knowledge.

Sidebar #2: Here are all the mistakes in that very tiny blurb of an article:

1) "Rumor has it" - well, as you can see, it was no rumor. It was true.

2) "...some engineers at GMC Truck and Coach..." - well - no, by then we were GM Truck and Bus. Truck and Coach implies the bus factory in Pontiac; we were obviously located in Milford.

3) "...found a fresh ZL1 in a crate in a dusty storage room somewhere in the bowels of Detroit..." - not correct, unless you consider Milford to be "the bowels of Detroit". It's a 45 minute to an hour drive, depending on where you are coming from.
And - the warehouse is not dusty. It's pretty clean.

4) "...they jerked the 454 out of a 1986 shortbed pickup..." - we've already established it was originally a small block truck and was a 1985 shortbox, not an '86.

5) "...switched over all the brackets and hardware onto the aluminum 427..." - as discussed, this specific motor was a 454 rather than a 427.

6) "..it's been screaming around the Milford Proving Grounds and laying waste to unsuspecting Corvettes and Trans Ams." - well, ok, that was true...

Makes one wonder how accurate all the articles we read actually are.

Except for mine, of course.

K

[Crush]

Great story!

[Big Block Bill]

Originally Posted by Crush

Great story!

Very entertaining story

Bill

[muscle_collector]

keith how hard was it to get the job of testing vehicles there? i would only imagine you would have to be an engineer, several years of service and ??? did you ever get to do that job?

[442w30]

Originally Posted by SPEEDYB

Thank you, very interesting read,
always saddens me that while pontiac folks have access to
so much great info, the same corporation has made info for other makes
unoptainable.

Unsolicited opinion:

-- Just like the US government, GM was a decentralized corporation. Each company within dealt with its operations. If something is no longer existing pertaining to a particular marque, chalk it up to operations not needing old paperwork to languish.

-- People also have stolen paperwork from said marques.

-- Today, there are people who have paperwork but won't share. That's a big reason why you may not have access to something.

Nonetheless, if you have needs, check with the GM Heritage Center. You may be surprise what they find.

[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by muscle_collector

keith how hard was it to get the job of testing vehicles there? i would only imagine you would have to be an engineer, several years of service and ??? did you ever get to do that job?

I went to GMI (General Motors Institute – the General’s own college for training engineers and managers) so with my engineering degree, combined with my assembly plant experience, I could pretty much write my own ticket.

After I had transitioned from the assembly plant into an engineering/assembly liaison position, management came around looking for volunteers to move to Arizona. We often vacationed out there growing up and I thought it would be a cool place to live and work, so I raised my hand.

Upon further review they decided I should have some development experience before moving out there so they assigned me to the Milford Proving Ground first. I ended up staying at Milford for three years (’86-’89) and then at the Desert Proving Ground for four (’90-’94).

K

[Keith Seymore]

There are two types of activities that take place at a proving ground: development and validation.

Validation is probably what you are thinking of when you think of the testing. This is where you have rigid test procedures, verifying that the vehicle meets specific regulatory and customer requirements before being sold to the public. There is a team of engineers (usually young, entry level positions*) and drivers who would spend all day doing high speed testing on the circle track, or 8 hours of low speed city traffic, or driveway entry and egress, or emissions testing, or whatever.

Development is where you play around all day. These assignments are usually project based, either improving on an initial/existing design or addressing a specific customer complaint. Often there is no test procedure and the engineer has to create the process of how to evaluate the changes and what the pass/fail criteria should be. Normally this is where the old timers reside.

I did full vehicle development on the C/K trucks (pickups, Blazers and Suburbans) and then, at the DPG, driveline and brake development. Some memorable projects were various brake pulls and pedal feel issues, throttle calibrations, driveline vibrations and noises including launch shudders and rear axle noise and the like, both on the road and in a chassis roll dynamometer cell, and captaining off property road trips to Death Valley or Pikes Peak and other western locales.

I think I was pretty good at fixing stuff but my weakness was in determining what was “good enough”. Having grown up around tri-power Pontiacs with rock crusher transmissions I might have had a greater tolerance for various moans, groans and whines than the typical engineering manager.

I remember one time my boss took me out for a ride in a manual trans truck. Shifting through the gears and pointing out the gear whine he said “hear that? You gotta fix that.”

“Fix it?” I said. “I like it!”

K



*most of these entry level engineering positions were what we would call “5th level” or “6th level” jobs. Because I started in the assembly plant I came into engineering directly as a 7th level engineer, giving me a level or two head start on my peers. All according to plan: 8th level was the “carrot” which is when you were assigned a company owned vehicle. I got my 8th in October of 1991. Everything went pretty much according to plan until "The Unpleasantness of 2008".

[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by 442w30

Unsolicited opinion:

-- Just like the US government, GM was a decentralized corporation. Each company within dealt with its operations. If something is no longer existing pertaining to a particular marque, chalk it up to operations not needing old paperwork to languish.

-- People also have stolen paperwork from said marques.

-- Today, there are people who have paperwork but won't share. That's a big reason why you may not have access to something.

Nonetheless, if you have needs, check with the GM Heritage Center. You may be surprise what they find.

I think it was much less intentional than what this would imply.

The discovery of the Pontiac information was a "happy accident" that we can attribute purely to Fred Simmonds.

Chevrolet was just too big and too spread out to have such a convenient, centralized location for all the information to reside (and subsequently be discovered).

K

Originally Posted by Keith Seymore

Eric -

Have you or anyone ever written an article about the "pre-history" of PHS?

During our trip I asked Fred about the technique he used to find the '62 and '63 Super Duty cars; before answering my question he framed the discussion by giving me the background of how he came to find the records and learn to use them, and how Mattison came to found Pontiac Historic Services.

I was driving and couldn't write anything down but this is how I remember what he said:

Back in the middle 1980's he was "into" HO model trains but as he got older he was frustrated because he couldn't see what he was doing (apparently he has always had poor eyesight). He ended up selling all of his train stuff but found himself without a hobby. His wife suggested that he should get a car so after a brief search he found the '67 Lemans that he still has.

His initial introduction to the Pontiac records was through trying to find out information about his own car. He mentioned to one of the secretaries that he would like to know how his car was built and she said "oh, I can find that out". Sure enough, within a couple days she produced the invoice and option content (sort of a prehistoric "PHS" packet!). He asked her how she did that and she replied that the information still existed on property and that it was guarded by a financial person.

Fred later found out this financial guy was going to retire, so he began to visit with him and learn where the information was located and how it was stored. During this time (still mid 80's?) there was a lot of employee turmoil in the form of retirements and outright separations so there was a lot of stuff getting thrown out. Fred told all his friends he was interested in "right of first refusal" so anything they had that might be interesting was passed by him before being pitched. He said he would literally make a trip home every night with all kinds of photos, literature, memorabilia, hardware, trophies, paint samples, etc.

By this time they were receiving maybe a request or two a day from Pontiac enthusiasts (usually fellow employees) that had heard about this service. Between Fred or his friend they were able to fulfill these requests. Additionally, Fred would come in early and poke around, then maybe return at lunch time and finally spend some time in the records before heading home for the evening, just nosing around.

Eventually the requests got to be too much for one person to handle on a part time basis, maybe 20 or so a day. He and Jim Mattison had been friends before that and Jim had become quite familiar with the records and how they were organized (more on that in a minute). It was at that point that Jim approached Pontiac Motor Division and suggested that he could form a company (Automotive Services) and maintain the records and fulfill these requests for information. At that point the information would still belong to Pontiac (I'm guessing) but he would provide the service as a contractor (I'm sure). All of this was taking place while the records were down in the vault, in the basement of the Administration building.

When the Administration building was "closed" (maybe not the right wording, but when the functions were rearranged or offices reallocated) that's when Jim and the records were relocated to Shows & Shoots (which is where I found him). I think you are familiar with the story about Pontiac taking the records back, and in their infinite wisdom they actually threw them out. Jim literally retrieved them from the dumpster which formed the foundation of the dispute over ownership which still exists today or was only recently resolved.

So - about the Super Dutys: The very first request had to do with one of the '62 Super Duty Grand Prix (Allan Gartzman's '62 Grand Prix; one of 16). Fred got a request to check into that car and, having been provided the VIN, he was able to confirm that it was in fact a Super Duty car. There was some variation in how the records were stored based on model year; the '62s were one way (maybe by VIN by Plant) and the '63s were different (like in VIN order by plant but grouped by body style). At any rate what he did was search for that car and then extend his search a little bit in both directions, looking for the engine option code. Eventually, he had a list of VINs going and so he expanded his search to include Catalinas and Bonnevilles (ie, non Grand Prix models) until he had a comprehensive list of 1962 cars. He looked through every 1962 invoice record; He said he continued on into '63 but did not actually look at them all - he went through 160,000 or so invoices but when he got out into the May or June timeframe it had been so long since he had seen any car that even remotely resembled a performance car that he gave up. Bottom line is that Fred literally went through hundreds of thousands of invoices, one by one (on the microfiche) in order to find those cars.

I thought it was fascinating and that others might also be interested. It might be a good idea to get this down on paper (accurately) before it's too late.

[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by Keith Seymore

Development is where you play around all day. These assignments are usually project based, either improving on an initial/existing design or addressing a specific customer complaint. Often there is no test procedure and the engineer has to create the process of how to evaluate the changes and what the pass/fail criteria should be. Normally this is where the old timers reside.

Those first couple moves occurred as I was replacing an older gentleman who was retiring.

The guy from Milford was named Hayes Hoboth. He was probably involved during the creation and development of dirt.

About that same time I had just finished reading Delorean’s book “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors”. In it he describes this time when an engineer was trying to emulate the ride/handling of some MOPAR model and had procured a steering gear from that model. He had the gear put into one of our vehicles and was told the car was ready to drive. After clearing the hoist he turned the wheel to exit the building and immediately backed into a post. Trying to move forward he hit a couple more stationary objects before judiciously shutting everything down.

Turns out the gear was “front steer” and the car he put it in was “rear steer” (or vice versa, or whatever) and so the road wheels were turning in the opposite direction of the steering wheel. They hadn’t comprehended that prior to going for a drive.

Anyways – I went to Hayes’ retirement party. As the night wore on the stories got more animated and began to flow more lubriciously. At one point one of his buddies gets up and starts telling this story about how Hayes got this steering gear and then wrecked the car before he could even get out of the garage.

Turns out the guy I was replacing was the guy in Delorean’s book.

K