One interesting feature of the Holy Grail Pontiac is that the original owner, DaveK, is still alive… or at least he had been recently. He can’t be young. But I know he’s likely still out there because BillW, the fellow I bought the car from, said so. He told me he’d been in contact with him but he wasn’t really a car guy and hadn't been really interested in talking about the car. I would still love to find out a few basic facts, like whether he factory-ordered the car or found it at the dealership. How did it come to be so equipped? Why the delay between the April production and August delivery dates? I learned Mr. K’s name from what is known as a Proteco plate. When you bought a car from GM in 1969 you received a little metal credit-card with your name and the car’s VIN and some other data embossed on it backward. When you brought the car in for service, the counterman (remember, it's 1969) could run the card through a machine with your paperwork to “stamp” it with
Back in the late 1960s if you wanted to buy a car in Canada, in most cases, it had to be built in Canada. This was before the NAFTA Free Trade agreement, and it's just the way it was. It would have been prohibitively expensive to build dedicated factories in Canada for every make, so companies like GM economized by building multiple vehicles on the same line. To make that feasible the cars would share chassis and powertrain, and even most of the interiors. Only the exterior sheet metal and the dashboard would be truly Pontiac, and the rest would be Chevrolet Impala. It was a forerunner in many ways for how marques share platforms today. This means Pontiacs delivered in Canada during these years used Chevrolet Impala chassis and powertrain, and so any engine that could be had in the Impala could be ordered in the Canadian Pontiac. It also means that the top powertrain option, the L36 427 Cubic Inch, 390 Horsepower TurboJet, straight from the Corvette, would be available in the Po