Summary

From 1961 to 1963, the “senior compact” Pontiac Tempest had a novel powertrain layout featuring a front engine and a rear transaxle, connected with an unusual flexible driveshaft known as the “rope drive.”

What price novelty? If you walked into a Pontiac dealer in November 1960, the answer was $2,167, the list price of one of the most unusual American cars of its era: the all-new 1961 Pontiac Tempest. In this installment of Ate Up With Motor, we’ll take a look at the short career of the “rope-drive” 1961–1963 Pontiac Tempest and the hows and whys of its peculiar front-engine/rear-transaxle powertrain.

Detroit Compacts Revisited

As the fifties became the 1960s, it appeared that American automotive engineering was settling into a comfortable routine, leaving behind a brief flurry of experimentation with features like air suspension and fuel injection. The “standard” American car of the time was a big three-box notchback (coupe, sedan, or two- or four-door hardtop) or a station wagon, with body-on-frame construction, independent front suspension, an open propeller shaft driving a live rear axle, drum brakes, and a choice of carbureted cast iron V-8 or inline six-cylinder engines. A few manufacturers chose unitized construction over body-on-frame, and Buick and AMC still clung for a while longer to their traditional torque tube drive, but such variations only served to emphasize that most American cars were more alike than different in all but looks. Not even the contemporary Chevrolet Corvette had independent rear suspension or disc brakes.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that when the latest wave of smaller “compact” and “intermediate” models arrived for the 1960 and 1961 model years, they generally hewed closely to the status quo except in size and more widespread use of unit construction. The case in point was the popular new Ford Falcon, which quickly emerged as the segment leader in part because it did nothing to test buyers’ appetite for novelty.

By far the most notorious exception was the Chevrolet Corvair, which was less a scaled-down big Chevrolet than a scaled-up, Americanized take on certain popular European economy cars. The Corvair, as most readers already know, featured a rear-mounted, air-cooled flat six; a rear transaxle; and independent rear suspension by swing axles, whose shortcomings have made the Corvair controversial to this day.

A year after the Corvair came the other great departure from Detroit engineering orthodoxy: the 1961 Pontiac Tempest. Sharing some pieces with the Corvair (including its swing-axle rear suspension), the Tempest was if anything even more iconoclastic, mounting its engine up front and its transmission in the rear, connected by an unusual curved, flexible driveshaft (the eponymous “rope-drive,” of which we’ll have more to say presently). The engine too was unusual, a big water-cooled slant four of rather intemperately large displacement, essentially a Pontiac V-8 shorn of one cylinder bank.

Still more curious was the fact that the Tempest shared its unitized body shell with two other GM compacts, the Buick Special and Oldsmobile F-85. All three of these “senior compacts” were almost identical in size and similar in appearance, but the Buick and the Oldsmobile had conventional FR layouts, live rear axles, and a lightweight aluminum V-8 engine (which was also optional on the Tempest).

Why would Pontiac build such an unusual car that looked so much like its nearest corporate relatives and yet was so unlike them mechanically? When the Tempest debuted, Pontiac officials spoke at length about the many advantages of its novel layout, but while these made for good copy, they were mostly rationalizations. As is often the case, the real story was both simpler and far more complicated.

The Import Problem and the Eisenhower Recession

As we’ve previously written, the U.S. auto industry had toyed with compact cars of various kinds for years, and there had been a brief flurry of them in the early fifties, beginning with the first Nash Rambler in 1950, followed by Kaiser’s Henry J, the Hudson Jet, and the Aero-Willys. This proliferation proved premature; American buyers who had clamored for smaller, more economical cars were less enthusiastic upon realizing that “smaller” did not necessarily mean meaningfully cheaper. By the end of 1955, only the Rambler survived, and the fledgling American Motors Corporation soon hedged its bets with a somewhat larger midsize Rambler model.

The situation soon shifted again, in surprisingly short order. The boom that followed the lifting of Korean War restrictions, which led to record new car sales for 1955, was not sustainable, and by mid-1957, the U.S. economy was slipping into recession. That downturn coincided with the introduction of some of the American auto industry’s biggest and glitziest new models to date, notable declines in build quality, and a new wave of pop sociology (perhaps best exemplified by Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders, first published that summer) warning that the advertising industry was using sophisticated psychological trickery to sell Americans an array of products they neither needed nor really even wanted — including ever larger and more expensive automobiles.

In this climate, a growing number of American buyers again looked to compact cars — not simply out of parsimony or sticker shock at new car prices, but as a reaction against the perceived excesses of Detroit and Madison Avenue. Some bought Ramblers, validating AMC chairman George Romney’s decision to consolidate around the Rambler brand and his oft-quoted derision of thirsty, overstuffed “Detroit dinosaurs.” Others turned to imported small cars, including a certain resilient German-made insect from Wolfsburg, whose U.S. sales began to take off around this time.

It would be another decade before most Big Three auto executives would be willing to publicly acknowledge that import buyers were anything other than “kooks,” much less that small imported cars represented any real commercial threat, but the trend was concerning. The imports’ collective market share doubled from 1956 to 1957, and would more than double again for 1958. Economic downturns were one thing; seeing middle-class buyers who in the normal order of things “should” have been driving a Pontiac or an Oldsmobile instead pass by in a new Volkswagen Beetle was something else.

How concerned the leaders of GM’s mid-price Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac divisions were about these trends is no longer entirely clear, but those divisions’ franchise holders were apparently quite alarmed — so much so that in late 1957, thousands of Buick and Pontiac dealers signed up to sell compact cars imported from GM’s British and German subsidiaries: the Vauxhall Victor and Opel Olympia Rekord. Clearly, something more substantial would have to be done, and quickly.

The Shared Body Problem

For what happened next to make sense, it’s important to understand that during this period, each of GM’s individual automotive divisions enjoyed substantial, though not unlimited, operational autonomy. The divisions didn’t manufacture all of their own components by any means, but they each had their own engineering, manufacturing, and assembly facilities, and each had ultimate responsibility for the direction of their own products and marketing. Senior management occasionally sought to dictate product or engineering decisions, but these attempts were usually met with resentment and recalcitrance.

To be sure, the automotive divisions routinely shared body shells, which reduced unit costs and allowed quicker amortization of the costly tooling needed to produce a steel car or truck body. However, GM had the most sophisticated shared-body program in the world, and the corporation typically allowed the divisions considerable budgetary leeway for individual styling. If there were occasional similarities in roofline or overall proportions, a Buick was still a Buick and a Pontiac was still a Pontiac, each with its own powertrains and various unique features. Moreover, the divisions regarded one another as competitors. The last thing any of them wanted was to have to offer the same corporate white-label product under different names, like cans of generic supermarket peas.

Yet, it appeared in 1957–1958 that this would be the price of responding to the import threat. Worse, at least from the perspective of the mid-price divisions, it was Chevrolet that forced the issue.

As we’ve previously discussed, the project that became the Chevrolet Corvair had been in development, in some secrecy, since 1955, an expression of the engineering fascinations of Edward N. Cole, then Chevrolet chief engineer and subsequently that division’s general manager. The start of the recession and the import boom gave Cole the leverage to “sell” his air-cooled, rear-engined car to senior management in the fall of 1957, in no small part because the project was already far enough along that it could be made ready for production in only two years.

The problem was that the Chevrolet compact would be a truly all-new car, sharing little with existing Chevrolet or GM products. That would make it more expensive to build, reducing profit margins and making it harder to keep prices competitive. Short of starting over with a more conventional design, which would have involved more delays, the obvious answer was to spread the development costs around by getting the other divisions to offer their own versions.

This prospect did not go over well. Outside of Chevrolet, there was little enthusiasm for the idea of an air-cooled rear engine. GM president Jack Gordon and chairman Harlow Curtice had reservations, and the general managers of Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac were all opposed to the idea. Since the public reaction was still to be determined, it was also commercially dicey, so there were limits to how far the corporation was prepared to force the issue.

However, the corporation was evidently very concerned about the tooling costs of the all-new compact body shell. Shared bodies were a basic tenet of the GM philosophy; the cost of tooling was enormous, and sharing as much of that expense as widely as possible was essential to profitability.

Eventually, there was a compromise: The compact program would include four cars, all sharing a new unitized Fisher Body shell. Chevrolet and Pontiac were to share the air-cooled rear engine, while the Oldsmobile and Buick cars, codenamed X-100, would have a more conventional front-engine/rear-drive layout, sharing an all-new aluminum V-8, developed by the Engineering Staff to be built by Buick. Despite the differences in powertrain layout, the corporation wanted as much mechanical commonality as possible, with engineering and manufacturing responsibilities to be divided among the divisions. Chevrolet would be first to market, with the others following a year later for 1961.

In a later era, or at another company, this plan would have been unremarkable, but at the time, it was a bitter pill for the mid-price divisions, who were not entirely convinced that the project was worth their time in the first place. Even if they accepted the need for a compact model, this was not the direction they would have gone if left to their own devices. The divisions weren’t keen on unit construction, for one — it limited styling flexibility and transmitted more noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) than body-on-frame construction — and they complained that the planned 108-inch (2,743-mm) wheelbase was too short. The corporation eventually conceded the latter point and authorized a stretched version of the new unitized shell with a 112-inch (2,845-mm) wheelbase, known as the Y-body, for Buick and Oldsmobile, though not Pontiac, at least at first.

Pontiac Takes an Inch

For Pontiac management, the compact project represented not only an unpalatable “top-down” management directive, but also a potentially serious existential threat.

Throughout its history, perhaps the most serious challenge Pontiac faced was differentiating itself from Chevrolet. Pontiac had other rivals, of course, including Oldsmobile and Buick as well as non-GM mid-price brands like Mercury and Dodge, but Chevrolet was the most persistent foe, and arguably the most dangerous, thanks to its larger dealer base and the economies of scale offered by its greater production volume. To keep Chevrolet from eating their lunch, Pontiac management and Pontiac dealers fought for every advantage, even symbolic distinctions like offering an extra inch of wheelbase over a comparable Chevrolet. Fortunately, in the late fifties, Pontiac still had an edge on Chevrolet in a number of areas, including its own larger engines with more horsepower, optional four-speed Hydra-Matic rather than the two-speed Chevrolet Powerglide, and subsequently the much-ballyhooed “Wide-Track” stance.

As planned, the new compact — which didn’t yet have an official name, although the full-size clay models carried either “Ventura” or “Polaris” identification — would eliminate most of those distinctions. Pontiac would be chained to a Chevrolet “package” and a Chevrolet powertrain, with little to set the Pontiac version apart from its bowtie-wearing sibling except a few Pontiac styling cues and different trim. In the not-too-distant future, that would become the division’s primary modus operandi (and was already the norm for the Canadian market), but Pontiac management of the late fifties regarded the prospect with dismay. Although we now think of that period as the beginning of a Pontiac renaissance under recently minted general manager Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen and chief engineer E.M. (Pete) Estes, they were still trying to convince the public and a skeptical dealer base that the previously moribund division was finally back on track. The last thing the division or its dealers wanted was to have to shove a made-over Corvair clone down the unwilling throats of Pontiac franchise holders.

Upper management was not wholly unsympathetic to these concerns, but the price tag for the whole project was steadily escalating as the envisioned commonality between the four cars diminished. The corporation was simply not willing to put up any more money for Pontiac to differentiate its compact from the Corvair.

However, “no additional money” was not the same as “no.” Like the other automotive divisions, Pontiac had its own tooling and engineering budgets. Much of that money was already earmarked for the division’s full-size models, but there might be a little bit to spare for something else, if it was cheap enough and clever enough.

Pontiac Advanced Engineering

Along with their individual engineering departments, each of GM’s automotive divisions also had its own advanced engineering section, developing new concepts and new technologies not necessarily intended for any specific production model. The head of advanced engineering for Pontiac during this period was one John Z. DeLorean, who had arrived from Packard in September 1956.

One of the ideas DeLorean explored during the early part of his tenure in Pontiac advanced engineering was the front-engine/rear-transaxle layout. This was a rather trendy idea at the time; Chevrolet and Oldsmobile also studied the concept during this period, although their versions never made it to production.

The interest was probably sparked at least in part by the marvelous Lancia Aurelia. Introduced in 1950 to replace the Lancia Aprilia, the Aurelia was an exceptional car of a kind with no real parallel in the United States. It was by European standards a medium-size family sedan — although Americans would have regarded it as a compact, as it was 2 inches (51 mm) shorter than a 1950 Nash Rambler, albeit on a much longer wheelbase — with a pillarless four-door body (later joined by lovely two-door coupe and convertible variants) and an aluminum V-6 engine, mounted in front and driving a rear-mounted clutch and transaxle through a central driveshaft. Suspension was fully independent (though Lancia eventually switched to a De Dion axle), and static weight distribution with a full tank of fuel was almost precisely 50/50.

By the standards of its era, the Aurelia had superb handling and a firm but comfortable ride, abetted by a commendably robust monocoque structure. Despite modest engine displacement (initially just 1,754 cc (107.1 cu. in.)) and fairly hefty curb weight, the Aurelia also had respectable straight-line performance and decent fuel economy, though with list prices starting at about 1.8 million lire (equivalent to about $3,000 at early-fifties exchange rates, a lot of money in those days), it could hardly be called an economy car.

In any form, the Aurelia was an engineering tour de force, and undoubtedly an object of fascination for automotive designers and engineers around the world. We don’t know for certain that John DeLorean was among its admirers, but we would be very surprised if he were not.

As the Aurelia adeptly demonstrated, there are a variety of advantages to placing engine and transmission at opposite ends of a car. The most obvious is that it shifts a useful chunk of the car’s unladen mass off the front wheels (reducing steering effort and, at least in principle, the tendency to understeer) and onto the drive wheels (improving traction and allowing the rear brakes to do more of the work of stopping the car), without the extreme rear-heaviness that can make a rear-engined car disagreeably twitchy near the limits. Moving the transmission to the rear can also reduce the intrusion of the powertrain into occupants’ foot and knee room. Since the transmission must be fixed in place — which requires the use of independent rear suspension or a De Dion axle — rear unsprung weight is also reduced, improving ride quality and, potentially, handling.

There are also a number of downsides. While a rear-mounted transmission or transaxle may intrude less into cabin space than a conventional RWD drivetrain, it does reduce the rear volume that might otherwise be available for cargo. With a manual transmission, if the clutch is in front, matching revs is more difficult, and the load on the synchronizers is greater because of the added inertia of the driveshaft; if the clutch is at the rear, it must be able to absorb the extra inertia of the driveshaft. Maintaining the correct geometry between engine and transmission can also be challenging, not least during assembly. Additionally, this arrangement is more costly than a conventional live axle layout, and an ill-sorted rear suspension can result in treacherous handling behavior.

DeLorean was certainly aware of these pros and cons, many of which were discussed in a paper he wrote for the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1960. However, as the X-100 project unfolded, he realized that the front-engine/rear-transaxle layout offered something far more compelling: a way to make the Pontiac compact — eventually named “Tempest,” a name Pontiac had applied to its V-8 engines beginning in 1958 — something other than a badge-engineered Corvair.

On paper, the idea was quite simple: Pontiac could keep the Corvair body shell, transaxle, and other mechanical components, but mate them with a conventional front-mounted, water-cooled engine. In that way, the corporation’s desire for commonality would be satisfied, more or less, but a Pontiac salesman would still be able to demonstrate the difference between the Tempest and its Chevrolet cousin by simply popping the hood. All Pontiac would need to pull it off was an engine and a way to connect it to the Corvair transaxle.

From V-8 to Slant Four

At that point in the development process, Pontiac did not have an engine suitable for this application. The division had retired its elderly 239 cu. in. (3,920 cc) six at the end of the 1954 model year. The Pontiac V-8, which for 1959 was expanded to 389 cu. in. (6,372 cc) displacement, was far too much engine for a compact economy car — or for a transaxle designed for a 140 cu. in. (2,287 cc) flat six. There was the new aluminum V-8, but while Pontiac would reluctantly offer that engine as an option, it was too expensive to make standard equipment, something that would also become a problem for Oldsmobile and Buick. As we’ve previously discussed in our article on the 1961–1963 Buick Special/Skylark, Buick eventually solved that problem by creating a cast iron V-6 based on the architecture of the aluminum V-8, but that engine hadn’t even been conceived at this stage, and wouldn’t be available until the 1962 model year. The same was true of the inline six and four Chevrolet would offer for the Chevy II/Nova, a conventionally engineered compact that would supplement (and, as it happened, eventually supplant) the rear-engined Corvair.

Here again DeLorean had an answer: make a four-cylinder engine out of the Pontiac V-8. If this idea seemed somewhat ridiculous, early experiments demonstrated that it could work. Pontiac powertrain engineer Malcolm McKellar found that even with four cylinders disabled, the big V-8 had ample torque and adequate power. By amputating the left cylinder bank, Pontiac would have a 194.5 cu. in. (3,186 cc) slant four that could be built on the existing engine production lines.

It’s easy to second-guess this choice or to point to other alternatives that might have worked better, like a 90-degree V-4 or a de-bored, short-stroke 90-degree V-6. However, Pontiac’s overriding priority was to minimize the tooling investment, and the four-cylinder engine proved the most expedient way to do that. Although the four would need a new crankshaft (still with five main bearings), unique camshaft, and new intake and exhaust manifolds, Pontiac also wanted to share as many existing V-8 components as possible. The resulting “Trophy 4,” as Pontiac eventually dubbed the four-cylinder engine, was bigger and heavier than it needed to be, weighing almost as much as a Chevrolet V-8 of much greater displacement, but it was able to share about 120 parts with the V-8, and its development and tooling were a fraction of the usual cost of launching a new engine.

Cheap, the Trophy 4 was; smooth or refined, it most certainly was not. Any inline four-cylinder engine has a second-order vibration, caused by the unbalanced motion of the reciprocating masses. Even in a relatively small-displacement four, the result is a vertical shaking force of considerable magnitude, which becomes more severe as displacement increases. In a 90-degree V-8 engine, the second-order vibration of one cylinder bank can be balanced against the other through the use of a cross-plane crankshaft and counterweights, but that’s not possible with a slant four, and the bank angle means the second-order vibration has both vertical and horizontal components. With its large displacement and substantial reciprocating mass, the Trophy 4 shook like a paint mixer, and its torsional vibration was strong enough to shred the timing chain it had inherited from the V-8, a problem not fixed until after regular production had already begun.

Today, most passenger car fours displacing more than about 2.2 liters (134 cu. in.) deal with second-order vibration by adding twin counter-rotating balance shafts, but that technology was still underdeveloped in the late fifties and early sixties. (Frederick Lanchester patented the concept back in 1912, but modern balance shaft technology owes a great deal to Mitsubishi, which greatly advanced the state of the art with its “Silent Shaft” fours in the mid-seventies.) In any case, Pontiac didn’t consider balance shafts a possibility for the Tempest due to budget constraints. There was simply no extra money to develop balance shafts, or to modify the block to accommodate them.

Pontiac decided instead to focus instead on isolating the engine, and indeed the entire powertrain, from the body structure, resulting in the Tempest’s most unusual feature, and the one that would earn it its most lasting nickname.

The Rope Drive

Like the other Y-body compacts, the 1961 Pontiac Tempest would use unitized construction, but the suspension and powertrain were carried on detachable front and rear crossmembers. This appears to have been a matter of production convenience rather than an effort to isolate the body structure from noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH). While the rear crossmember incorporated rubber cushions at the mounting bolts, the front crossmember was simply bolted to the body, relying on the rubber insulators in the spring seats and control arm mounting shafts to control NVH. (Author’s note: This paragraph originally stated that the rear crossmember was also bolted directly to the body shell, but an examination of the shop manuals revealed that that wasn’t true; there were rubber cushions around the rear cross member mounting bolts.)

The Trophy 4 engine was supported on the front crossmember by two rubber-isolated engine mounts, one on either side of the block. It was mounted in approximately the same fore-aft position as the V-8 in bigger Pontiac models, albeit offset about 1.4 inches (36 mm) to the left. On cars with manual transmission, the clutch was mounted behind the engine in conventional fashion rather than with the transaxle, probably to simplify the clutch linkage. With automatic, the torque converter was rear-mounted at the back of the transaxle. (Because of this variation, manual transmission cars used shorter driveshafts than did cars with automatic, bolting to the end of a short clutch shaft rather than directly to the engine flywheel.) In back, the transaxle was carried on a differential support arm, attached to the rear crossmember through two more rubber-isolated mounts.

Between the engine and the transaxle was the driveshaft, which rode on two rubber-isolated ball bearing assemblies within a 76.2-inch (1,935-mm) stamped steel torque tube. The driveshaft itself was forged steel, machined, heat-treated, subjected to magnetic particle inspection, and shot-peened to ensure that it was as smooth and straight as possible; it also had a thin protective coating to prevent corrosion and surface wear. Because it only needed to transmit engine torque, not multiplied by the transmission gears (or the torque converter, on automatic transmission cars), the driveshaft could be quite thin. Diameter was 0.75 inches (19.1 mm) on cars with manual transmission, a mere 0.65 inches (16.5 mm) on cars with automatic. Being so thin, the shaft was also flexible, particularly in torsion, able to twist by up to about 30 degrees in either direction.

This flexibility was further demonstrated by the shaft’s unusual designed-in curvature. The driveshaft formed a gentle downward arc, which put the middle of the shaft around 3 inches (75 mm) lower than either end. Contrary to some early press coverage, this had nothing to do with the torque tube bearings. Rather, the curvature was created by the bending moment applied at both ends of the driveshaft by the shaft’s rigid connections to the engine and transaxle, both of which tilted downward by a total of about 11 degrees. This curvature led wags to dub the driveshaft the “rope shaft” or “rope drive.”

Curving the driveshaft in this way was another of DeLorean’s inspirations, an elegant if peculiar solution to a practical problem. Pontiac had found that with a straight driveshaft of such length and small diameter, the shaft would develop strong, destructive vibrations at a critical speed within the normal range of operating speeds. Bending the shaft into an arc shifted the resonant frequency out of the normal operating range, which eliminated the problem (although the driveshaft could still rattle on its bearings under certain conditions). A similar resonant frequency problem with the torque tube was addressed by varying the tube’s cross-sectional area, putting its critical speed below normal engine idle speed and giving the tube a constant bending stiffness throughout its length.

As a bonus, the driveshaft’s curvature also made it possible to minimize the height of the torque tube, reducing its intrusion into cabin space. To achieve a similar result, the Y-body Oldsmobile F-85 and Buick Special needed a costly two-piece driveshaft, with a constant velocity joint in the middle as well as a universal joint at each end.

The torque tube was something of an afterthought. It was not included on early test mules, and was initially added simply to help maintain the correct alignment of the driveshaft relative to the engine and transaxle. However, it emerged as an important part of the concept. Interconnecting the front and rear crossmembers proved to be an invaluable aid to production and assembly, and the torque tube also helped to mask the bad manners of the Trophy 4 engine.

By rigidly connecting the engine and transaxle, the torque tube limited the engine’s range of motion, preventing the big four from moving laterally or fore and aft. Some of the engine’s torsional vibration, meanwhile, was absorbed by the twisting of the driveshaft within the torque tube. That left only the vertical shaking forces caused by the engine’s secondary vibration and by torque reaction from the drive wheels, which were absorbed by the four soft rubber powertrain mounts. (The engine mounts were so soft that Pontiac had to add metal limiters to keep the engine from shifting too far out of its appointed space.) No one would ever accuse the Trophy 4 of silken refinement, but this arrangement proved remarkably effective. There was still a lot of commotion under the hood, but it was largely unnoticeable inside the car, at least so long as the engine and engine mounts were in reasonably good health.

Transaxles and TempesTorque

Although its transaxles had some commonality with the ones used on the Chevrolet Corvair, the manually shifted Tempest parted ways with the Corvair in several respects. In Corvairs with manual transmission, the clutch was mounted behind the differential, sending power forward with a clutch shaft that ran through the center of the hollow pinion shaft and main shaft to a clutch gear at the front of the gearbox. Power then flowed back through the transmission main shaft back to the differential pinion shaft. Since the Tempest mounted its clutch in front, this convoluted power flow was unnecessary; the trailing end of the propeller shaft was simply splined to the clutch gear of the three-speed gearbox, whose main shaft was splined in turn to the differential pinion shaft. The Tempest three-speed also had closer ratios than the Corvair three-speed (the same ratios as the Saginaw three-speed that would become standard on the 1962 Chevrolet II), although first gear was still unsynchronized. The all-synchro Corvair four-speed would be offered later, but wouldn’t be available at launch.

The automatic transaxle, which Pontiac dubbed “TempesTorque,” was more closely based on the Corvair Powerglide, even mounting its torque converter behind the differential, as on the automatic Corvair. In a Corvair Powerglide, two hollow shafts passed through the hollow differential pinion shaft: a central pump shaft that allowed the torque converter impeller to drive the transmission’s front oil pump and a hollow turbine shaft that allowed the torque converter turbine to drive the transmission’s input sun gear. TempesTorque added an internally splined coupling to the leading end of the pump shaft, allowing the flexible driveshaft to drive the pump shaft and thus the impeller of the torque converter. This was circuitous, but it allowed a transmission intended for a rear-mounted engine to take its power input from the opposite end with minimal design changes.

Pontiac used a different torque converter than the Corvair unit, providing a stall ratio of 2.0:1 rather than 2.7:1, and added a nuance not shared with the Corvair: a split-torque high gear. The clutch hub of the TempesTorque transmission’s direct drive clutch was splined to the pump shaft, and thus always rotated at engine speed, without any hydraulic slippage. When the clutch engaged with the 1–2 shift, the low sun gear would also turn at engine speed, while the input sun gear turned at turbine speed. This had the effect of “demultiplying” slippage in the torque converter by about 45 percent in high gear, a partial mechanical lockup that improved fuel economy and engine response in top-gear cruising. (You’ll find a further discussion of this principle in our article on split-torque transmissions and lock-up clutches.)

One unfortunate similarity between TempesTorque and the Corvair Powerglide was that it had no “Park” position, leaving the selector with only four positions: RNDL. This was a cost-saving measure, but it would later become a source of customer complaints, since the mechanical parking brake’s ability to hold the car on a steep grade left something to be desired. (A parking pawl was belatedly added to the Tempest automatic for 1963.)

While Chevrolet originally hoped to make Powerglide standard on the Corvair, we haven’t seen any indication that Pontiac contemplated a similar strategy for the Tempest. However, such a move would have made sense — the automatic imposed surprisingly little penalty in performance and fuel economy. The torque converter further ameliorated the effects of engine vibration, and also masked the twisting of the driveshaft, which was noticeable and occasionally disconcerting with a manual gearbox and conventional clutch.

The Y-Body Tempest

By mid-1959, GM corporate management had accepted the new direction for the Pontiac compact. The corporation also authorized Pontiac to adopt the longer Y-body shell. We assume that with Pontiac no longer sharing the Corvair mechanical package, the priority had shifted to recouping the tooling costs of the bigger body, since it was likely that the cheaper Corvair, then nearing the start of regular production, would handily outsell its B-O-P cousins (as indeed it did).

This meant that Pontiac’s focus now shifted from differentiating their compact from the Corvair to differentiating the Tempest from the Buick and Oldsmobile Y-bodies, the Buick Special and Oldsmobile F-85. Pontiac arrived quite late to that particular party, and had to contend with a stylistically inflexible unitized body shell whose basic dimensions had been largely dictated by Buick and whose styling had been tailored to suit Oldsmobile.

Fortunately, Pontiac had a readily identifiable styling feature that could be made to work within the limited tooling budget: the “hairpin” split grille, developed by previous Pontiac styling chief Joe Schemansky for the 1959 Pontiac line. Although the 1960 Pontiac line, mostly done when Humbert arrived, had gone a different direction, Humbert revived the theme for the 1961 models, correctly recognizing that it gave Pontiac an immediately recognizable “face.” The Tempest eventually adopted a variation on the 1959 theme, which reduced but could not wholly eliminate the inevitable resemblance to the Special and F-85.

To the likely dismay of the sales executives and accountants, the biggest tooling change Pontiac made to the Y-body shell was one most customers would never see: a new floorpan to accommodate the torque tube. This didn’t even provide a completely flat floor, which might have given the Tempest a unique selling point. It did at least lower the driveshaft hump to roughly ankle height, and the floor was flat in the area around the front passenger’s feet, which helped to justify subsequent advertising claims of six-passenger capacity — or would have, had Pontiac not decided that every Tempest with manual transmission should have a floor-mounted shifter. (As on the Corvair, the selector for the automatic was neatly integrated into the dashboard, again making us wonder if Pontiac originally intended to make TempesTorque standard equipment on the Tempest.)

Floor shifter or no, the Tempest’s potential sportiness was undercut by the decision to launch with only four-door sedan and four-door Safari wagon body styles — not exactly a pulse-quickening lineup — and bench seats. The Tempest wasn’t a bad-looking car, but as yet, there wasn’t much of the design pizzazz that would become a Pontiac hallmark throughout the sixties.

Introducing the Pontiac Tempest

Although developing the Tempest and getting it ready for production in time was an enormous amount of work, the Pontiac engineers and designers who worked on the project were enthusiastic about it. The Tempest was one of the most technologically interesting models Pontiac had ever offered, and even the challenges it presented were colored with the excitement of doing something new and novel. We assume it was a matter of divisional pride as well; through their efforts, and thanks in no small part to the ingenuity of John DeLorean, they had succeeded in transforming an unwanted corporate hand-me-down into a unique Pontiac product.

When the Tempest made its press debut in early 1960, automotive editors were also very excited about it. Above all, the new Tempest seemed like Progress, a sign, along with the Corvair, that Detroit could offer more than senseless bulk and glitz. The Tempest was sensibly sized and seemed to give away little in technical sophistication to high-end European cars. It was the Motor Trend Car of the Year for 1961, and some reviewers optimistically declared that other automakers would rush to imitate it.

Convincing the public was another matter. The average compact car buyer knew nothing about transaxles, and the practical advantages of the front-engine/rear-transaxle layout were not always obvious. Yes, the Tempest nominally offered seating for six, but so did most domestic cars in this class, and the manual transmission’s floor shifter might require some tense negotiations with the front middle passenger. Yes, the drivetrain tunnel was lower than usual for a front-engine/rear-wheel-drive car, but the Tempest couldn’t boast a completely flat floor like the Corvair’s. Most gallingly, a four-cylinder Tempest was not substantially less nose-heavy than a Buick Special or Oldsmobile F-85, because the Trophy 4 engine weighed so much more than the aluminum V-8. (The Trophy 4 alone weighed more than the Oldsmobile Rockette V-8 and 61-5 Hydra-Matic transmission put together, and the Buick engine and transmissions were lighter still.)

In its favor, the Trophy 4 engine gave the Tempest peppy acceleration. Even in standard form, with an 8.6:1 compression ratio and a single-barrel carburetor, its gross output was 110 hp (about 82 kW) and a stout 190 lb-ft (258 N-m) of torque, comfortably ahead of the Corvair, Falcon, and Comet. With either transmission, buyers could specify a higher 10.25:1 compression ratio, adding a further 10 hp and 12 lb-ft of torque (about 7 kW and 16 N-m), and cars with the high-compression engine and TempesTorque got a hotter cam that added 20 hp and 5 lb-ft (about 15 kW and 7 N-m). Most interesting from a performance standpoint was the optional high-compression four-barrel version, available only with TempesTorque, which offered 155 hp and 215 lb-ft of torque (equivalent to about 116 kW and 292 N-m). That was enough to make the Tempest a fairly hot number for 1961, and unlike the rare Chrysler Hyper-Pak Slant Six, the Trophy 4 still wasn’t especially high-strung in this form.

With the base low-compression engine, manual shift, and standard 3.55:1 axle ratio, the Tempest could do 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) in less than 15 seconds — decent for this class — with a top speed of about 92 mph (148 km/h). Adding the high-compression four-speed engine and the optional 3.73:1 axle brought 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) times below the 12-second mark and allowed a top speed of around 100 mph (160 km/h), brisk for an American family car of the period.

Tempest buyers could also order the same 215 cu. in. (3,528 cc) aluminum V-8 that was standard in the Buick Special, although few customers did so. Initially offered only with a two-barrel carburetor, the V-8 was no more powerful than the four-barrel Trophy 4 and a good deal more expensive (listing for $216 extra), although it was much smoother than the Pontiac 4 and about 35 percent lighter, providing better weight distribution. Pontiac had no great enthusiasm for the aluminum V-8, which was offered mostly at the insistence of corporate management, and proved troublesome as well as expensive. Only 2,004 V-8 Tempests were sold for 1961.

Neither engine was especially thrifty. Although the Tempest had respectable fuel economy for an American compact of its era, even the base four was almost as thirsty as a V-8 F-85 or Special. This shouldn’t have come as a great surprise, considering that a four-cylinder Tempest was heavier than its Oldsmobile or Buick cousins, gave away only about 21 cu. in. (342 cc) to the aluminum V-8, and had considerably more displacement than many (slower) six-cylinder rivals. However, Tempest buyers assumed that a four-cylinder engine would be more parsimonious, and were annoyed to find that it wasn’t.

There were greater disappointments in store for buyers who DID know what a transaxle was and anticipated dynamics resembling a Lancia or other high-end European car. The Tempest’s suspension tuning was typical Detroit, viz., soft and under-damped in the interests of a compliant ride. (Stiffer springs and shocks were theoretically available, but Pontiac didn’t promote them, and they didn’t appear on the standard lists of factory or dealer-installed options for 1961.) As for steering, your choices were light and very slow with unassisted steering, or a bit quicker and really light with power assist. Either way, crisp steering response was not on the menu.

That was perhaps just as well, because the Tempest could be a handful when pushed, betraying its kinship with the cheaper Corvair and some of the compromises Pontiac had had to accept to bring the Y-body compact to market.

The Swing-Axle Follies

When the Tempest debuted, keen observers noted that its rear suspension looked suspiciously like that of the Corvair, despite protestations to the contrary by Pontiac officials. In fact, it was substantially the same suspension: swing axles with semi-trailing lower control arms to carry the rear coils and shock absorbers (which acted against the rear crossmember) and transmit acceleration and braking forces to the body. The Tempest’s front suspension was also Corvair-like, with coil springs and upper and lower control arms, the latter located by a short compression strut between the lower arm and the front crossmember. Like the Corvair, there was initially no anti-roll bar, although one would be added later in production.

As with almost every aspect of the Tempest, the Corvair suspension was specified for cost reasons. Pontiac was aware of its shortcomings — DeLorean actually designed and patented both low-pivot and simulated low-pivot suspensions that would have addressed some of those limitations (U.S. Patent Nos. 2,968,358 and 3,011,578) — but there just wasn’t room in the limited budget for anything else.

Some readers are no doubt familiar with the characteristics of swing axles, but a brief recap seems in order. In a swing-axle suspension, the differential is fixed (in this case, to the rear crossmember), with each axle halfshaft pivoting on a universal joint to allow the halfshaft to transmit power while also acting as a locating arm for the wheel. This has several advantages: A swing-axle suspension has significantly less unsprung weight than a live axle and allows each rear wheel to react independently to bumps, both factors that improve ride quality. However, a swing-axle rear suspension also has a high static roll center (13.6 inches (354.4 mm) above ground level in the case of the Corvair, 14.5 inches (368 mm) on the early Tempest), which increases the tendency to oversteer, and a short swing arm length, which means that each rear wheel undergoes significant camber changes as it moves up and down through its arc of travel. At certain angles, the axle halfshaft can also act as a lever, forcing the differential upward in an effect known as jacking. This can result in a type of extreme camber loss known as tuck-under, which means what it sounds like it means. On both the Corvair and Tempest, these issues were compounded by rear alignment that gave the rear wheels a bit of static positive camber (wheels tilted outward at the top) when unladen. The expectation was that the weight of rear passengers and cargo would compress the rear springs and give zero camber or slight negative camber, but in a lightly loaded car, the positive camber setting served to further reduce the bite of the rear tires.

The Tempest had at least two theoretical advantages over a Corvair with the same suspension: greater width (in particular a 2.8-inch (71-mm) wider track) and significantly less weight over and behind the rear wheels. However, with the same basic geometry as the Corvair, its foibles were similar.

Driven conservatively, the Tempest was docile enough, and its relatively neutral balance could make it feel poised and agile, belying the exaggerated camber angles the wheels assumed in even moderately brisk cornering. As with the Corvair, the problem was not that the Tempest would oversteer, but that the point of departure could arrive with little warning. The more candid contemporary road tests found the Tempest’s cornering limits surprisingly low and warned that catching the tail if it broke loose was not easy, a consequence of the slow steering. In December 1961, Mercedes-Benz engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut, a driver of great skill, managed to spin and roll (or nearly roll; accounts vary) a Tempest during a demonstration at a press preview for the new Mercedes 300SE in Daytona Beach, Florida, bending a wheel in the process. The Y-body Special and F-85, with their conventional four-link live axles, couldn’t be called agile, but they were far less likely to swap ends.

Another area where the Tempest could provide unwelcome excitement was brakes. All of the Y-body cars had 9-inch (229-mm) drum brakes, but the Tempest’s had 12 percent less swept area than the Y-body Special and F-85 despite its significantly greater curb weight. The brakes faded heavily in hard use and lining life was unimpressive. The parking brakes’ ability to hold the Tempest on a steep grade also left much to be desired, which could give owners of cars with TempesTorque an unhappy reminder that the automatic had no parking pawl.

The Y-Bodies Change Course

The upshot was that for all its cleverness and engineering novelty, the Tempest was not a particularly outstanding entry in the now-crowded domestic compact field, even among its GM Y-body “senior compact” siblings. It was far from the worst of the bunch — it was much quicker than a Falcon or Comet, less eccentrically styled than the Valiant or Lancer, and cheaper than the F-85 or Special. It also had good snow traction and a more usable rear seat than a four-door Corvair. However, the handling limitations of the rear suspension and the uncertainties of the unconventional powertrain kept the Tempest from being seen as a safe choice. Consequently, while the Tempest was the bestseller of the B-O-P senior compacts and the only one whose sales reached six figures in 1961, it wasn’t by much: 1961 production totaled 100,783 units, a disappointing figure by GM standards.

By early 1961, even before the end of the model year, the sense of urgency that had driven the development of the X-100 project had largely faded. Although U.S. auto sales declined about 10 percent from 1960 to 1961, the arrival of the Corvair, Falcon, Valiant, and Studebaker Lark the year before had at least temporarily satisfied most of the American market’s appetite for compact cars. The market penetration of imported cars that had caused so much alarm two or three years earlier was now on the decline, giving U.S. automakers the confidence to resume ignoring the imports for a while longer.

This left the GM mid-price divisions with second thoughts about the entire senior compact program. Although bigger than the Corvair, the Y-body was still smaller than Oldsmobile or Buick were comfortable with; Pontiac proposed further enlarging the body shell as part of the 1963 facelift. None of the divisions was very happy with the NVH characteristics of the unit body, particularly in the area of road noise, which all three cars suffered at higher speeds. Mechanical commonality was considerably less than originally anticipated, which drove up unit costs, and the aluminum V-8 was proving an enormous headache from a manufacturing and service standpoint as well as being inherently expensive to build. Buick had already embarked on a crash program to create a cast iron V-6 from the V-8 design, using the latest “thinwall” casting techniques to keep the weight down, while Pontiac was looking at creating a de-bored and lightened version of its own V-8 to replace the costlier aluminum Buick engine.

Oldsmobile general manager Jack Wolfram and Buick general manager Ed Rollert wondered aloud if it made sense for their divisions to stay in the compact market. The Y-bodies weren’t doing much for the bottom line, and the sales force didn’t seem to know what to do with them. As for Pontiac, the Tempest was bringing in a respectable number of first-time buyers, but its production costs (particularly for the driveshaft, whose machining was costly and which had to be made in several variations that weren’t interchangeable) kept it from being a very profitable venture.

Moreover, by the time the senior compacts entered production, the expectations of the market had shifted. The name of the game was now “Monza,” as in Corvair Monza, the unexpectedly popular sporty version of the Corvair. Introduced late in the 1960 model year, the Monza had become an immediate hit, with its plush trim, bucket seats, and (optional) hotter image transforming the Corvair from bare-bones econobox to low-priced sporty car. For 1961, it gained the option of a fully synchronized four-speed gearbox, and Chevrolet extended the Monza trim series to include four-doors as well as coupes.

The success of the Monza had clearly caught Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick off-guard — even more than it had Chevrolet, which was struggling to keep up with demand. Jack Humbert’s Pontiac design studio had created full-size clays of a Tempest coupe as early as July 1959, but with only four-door sedans and wagons in the initial lineup, the expectation had obviously been that most buyers would be looking for economical family cars to bridge the gap between smaller imports and “Detroit dinosaurs.” A floor shifter and the four-barrel engine might make for an entertaining combination in a Tempest Safari wagon, but it was no Monza.

It took until the New York International Automobile Show in April 1961 for the mid-price divisions to debut their first two-door Y-bodies. In a fit of better-late-than-never overkill, there were actually two different versions of the new body style: a standard coupe with a wide, slightly wrapped backlight and what Pontiac called a “Sports Coupe,” with a smaller rear window and more sharply creased sail panels for what Pontiac dubbed “town-car styling.” The latter, evidently deemed the more elegant or upscale of the two rooflines, was used for the now inevitable B-O-P Monza-fighter: the Oldsmobile F-85 Cutlass, the Buick Skylark, and the Pontiac Tempest Custom Coupe.

At the New York show, Pontiac had shown off an upscale Tempest coupe called Le Mans, although unlike the Cutlass and Skylark, it had an extra dose of unrepresentative auto show frosting, including wire wheels, a padded vinyl top, a tachometer mounted on a short under-dash console, and a modified Trophy 4 engine with a GMC supercharger. As far as we’ve been able to verify, Pontiac didn’t apply the Le Mans name to the production Tempest until the start of the 1962 model year, but the late ’61 Custom Coupe had the Sports Coupe roofline and the requisite bucket seats, which were also offered on Custom sedans and Safari wagons. The base coupe had the other roofline and none of the fancy trim, but it assumed the role of price leader, with a list price starting $54 below the sedan and a significant $184 less than the Custom Coupe.

Because of their late introduction, the coupes accounted for only about 15 percent of 1961 Tempest production, with sales split almost equally between the base and Custom trim series. However, the two-door models would be an essential part of the Tempest’s future.

1962 Pontiac Tempest and Tempest Le Mans

The 1962 model year was arguably the least eventful for the Y-body Tempest, but also the bestselling iteration of the Y-body’s three-year run, which says something about the market for these cars. There was a modest facelift, along with a few new options, a new convertible body style, and a new Le Mans sub-series in the Custom line. These were worthwhile additions, with the arguable exception of the facelift, but there was nothing so headline-worthy as the Y-body Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire or the new Corvair Monza Spyder, which in early 1962 became the world’s first mass-market production cars with turbocharged gasoline engines.

Nonetheless, there was a bit more power for the Trophy 4 engine in both its most basic low-compression form, which now made 115 gross horsepower (equivalent to about 87 kW) with automatic, and the four-barrel version, which was up to 166 gross horsepower and 215 lb-ft of torque (equivalent to about 124 kW and 292 N-m), and was newly available with manual transmission as well as TempesTorque. The aluminum V-8 was now offered only in the same high-compression four-barrel form used in the Skylark and Cutlass, rated at 185 hp and 230 lb-ft of torque (equivalent to about 138 kW and 312 N-m). A costly $261.36 option, it was still rarely ordered. (The aluminum V-8 went into only 1,658 1962 Tempests, 1.2 percent of production.)

Four-cylinder Tempests were newly available with a four-speed manual gearbox, the same one that had become optional on the Corvair the year before. Its widely spaced gearing wasn’t ideal for the torquey Trophy 4 engine, but unlike the three-speed, it had a synchronized low gear, and third was a useful passing gear. The four-speed was also noticeably quieter than the three-speed gearbox. Taller (lower numerical) axle ratios were now specified across the board, a change made late in the 1961 model year, perhaps in response to buyer complaints about fuel economy. Standard ratio was now 3.08:1 for cars with automatic (except with the four-barrel Trophy 4 or with air conditioning), with a 3.31:1 axle specified with either manual gearbox or A/C. The 3.55:1 axle remained standard with the four-barrel Trophy 4, and ratios up to 3.90:1 were available by special order.

A front anti-roll bar was now standard, although it did little to change the Tempest’s handling dynamics. The point of the anti-roll bar was to increase understeer so that the front tires would run out of grip before the tail got out of line, but it couldn’t do anything about the rear suspension’s sometimes-abrupt camber loss. Heavy-duty springs and shocks might have helped a bit, but they remained rare and hard to obtain on a new Tempest, at least from the factory.

Far more important, at least from a marketing perspective, was the Tempest Le Mans, the now-obligatory Monza fighter (or Skylark and Cutlass fighter), with bucket seats, full carpeting, and special trim. The Le Mans was strictly a trim package, with the same powertrains, suspension tuning, and limited instrumentation as the standard Tempest. Pontiac advertising actually noted, perhaps apologetically, that no tachometer was available, although you could order a dashboard-mounted electric clock.

If the Le Mans was only cosmetically sporty, it was nonetheless sending the right message. Although a Le Mans coupe cost a not-inconsiderable $218 more than a base Tempest coupe, it was the most popular Tempest variation for 1962, selling almost 40,000 units. The Le Mans convertible accounted for 15,559 more. This was enough to bring total 1962 Tempest sales to a healthier 143,193, of which 58 percent were two-door models.

The Tempest was no longer the bestselling Y-body (the Buick Special/Skylark beat it by more than 10,000 units for 1962), but it had returned respectable sales in a good year for the Pontiac division, whose market share grew 1.25 percentage points from its already-decent 1961 sales. Better still, the popularity of the Le Mans undoubtedly bolstered the profit margins of the Tempest line, which hadn’t been any too encouraging in its first year.

The big winner during this period was John DeLorean. When Bunkie Knudsen departed to become general manager of Chevrolet in November 1961, DeLorean was promoted to Pontiac chief engineer, with Pete Estes succeeding Knudsen as general manager.

A Cast Iron V-8 and a New Suspension

Even before the end of the 1962 model year, the fate of the Y-body Tempest had been sealed. Ed Cole, who had been promoted to group vice president of the Car and Truck Group in 1961, decided that all three Y-body senior compacts would be replaced for 1964 by somewhat bigger intermediate models sharing the A-body shell of a new midsize Chevrolet, aimed at the recently introduced midsize Ford Fairlane. The Y-body cars were already on the large side for the compact class, even by Detroit standards, and the fact that the plusher models were decisively outselling the plainer versions suggested that buyers wouldn’t be deterred by a healthy dose of longer-lower-wider. Thus, the 1963 model year would be the swan song for the rope-drive Tempest and its Y-body siblings.

Nonetheless, the last rope-drive Tempest received some substantial changes before its final curtain call, including new styling, a new engine option, and a revised suspension.

The styling revision brought with it new and larger exterior dimensions. Overall length grew 5 inches (127 mm), mostly in the tail, while overall width increased by 2 inches (51 mm), eliminating the previous concave body side sculpting save for a vestigial simulated extractor vent behind each front wheel. Track width also increased a bit both front and rear. The new nose now bore a greater family resemblance to full-size 1963 Pontiac models, albeit retaining horizontal rather than stacked quad headlights. The Le Mans, newly promoted to full trim series, had a different grille and different taillights to set it apart from lesser Tempest models. Inevitably, the larger dimensions added about 50 lb (27 kg) to curb weight, although more precise casting techniques trimmed about 30 lb (14 kg) from the Trophy 4 engine, so the net increase on four-cylinder cars was only 20 to 25 lb (9 to 11 kg).

Inside, the dashboard had a new instrument panel with four round binnacles and an optional tachometer. The Le Mans could have a floor console along with its bucket seats, for the full sporty car effect.

While the Trophy 4 engine remained standard, the aluminum V-8 was dropped, replaced by a new cast iron Pontiac V-8. Essentially a de-bored 389, it displaced 337 cu. in. (5,521 cc), although Pontiac advertised it as 326 cu. in., probably for reasons of corporate policy. (Pontiac may also have wanted to avoid confusion with the earlier 336 cu. in. (5,508 cc) V-8 previously used in some GMC trucks, which didn’t have the same bore and stroke dimensions.) The “326” was even heavier than the Trophy 4, although improved casting techniques made it a bit lighter than it otherwise would have been.

The cast iron V-8 was cheaper than the aluminum Buick engine and much more powerful, offering 260 gross horsepower with the standard two-barrel carburetor or 280 hp with the optional four-barrel H.O. engine (equivalent to around 194 kW and 209 kW respectively). However, it exceeded the torque capacity of the four-speed gearbox and appears to have strained the standard close-ratio three-speed; contemporary road tests suggest that too much enthusiasm could break the second gear synchro rings. The better part of valor with the V-8 was probably TempesTorque, which had been beefed up, deleting the previous split torque feature, adopting slightly closer gear ratios, and adding a much-needed parking pawl. All powertrain combinations except four-cylinder automatics now used driveshafts of 0.75-inch (19.1-mm) diameter, although there were still several different driveshaft lengths depending on engine and transmission.

Behind the gearbox, the rear suspension’s previous semi-trailing lower control arms were gone, replaced by a new L-shaped lower control arm with a relocated shock absorber, behind the axle halfshaft. The new control arm’s pivot points were more widely separated than before, with the inner pivot more or less parallel to the halfshaft and the leading pivot more or less perpendicular to it, so that camber changes would not also change the toe angle of the rear wheels, as had been the case with the original layout. (The new control arms also simplified routine toe adjustments, which previously required shimming the differential mounts.) Contrary to some accounts, the 1963 Tempest suspension still did NOT use double-jointed halfshafts (there remained only one inboard universal joint on each axle), but the changes provided some improvements in cornering stability.

V-8 cars had stiffer springs (by about 9 percent) and firmer shocks, and heavy-duty suspension components were now more readily available — and surprisingly cheap if ordered with a new car. Another new option was faster unassisted steering, in essence the quicker ratio of the power steering setup without the hydraulic assistance. Finned drum brakes (conventional cast iron ones, not the integral aluminum wheel/drums available on full-size models) became available after introduction, and if you made enough of a fuss, sintered metallic linings were now on the options list.

Tempest Fugit

It would be tempting to say the 1963 Tempest was the car the rope-drive Y-body should have been from the start: more attractively styled (although there was now something slightly awkward about its proportions, a bit too narrow for its length), more powerful, and sportier inside and out. It could now be fully accessorized in the expected Pontiac manner, potentially raising the list price of a fully loaded V-8 Tempest Le Mans to more than $3,500 — not an economy car price tag in 1963.

A Tempest with the cast iron “326” had brisk performance. Even with the two-barrel V-8, TempesTorque, and 3.08:1 axle, a Tempest V-8 could reach 60 mph (97 km/h) in well under 10 seconds, with a top speed approaching 110 mph (176 km/h). Manual-shift cars were quicker still, and a Tempest with the H.O. engine was hot stuff: Car Life, not generally a magazine noted for fanciful road test results, tested a Tempest H.O. with the three-speed gearbox and 3.90 axle and found it capable of 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) in less than 7 seconds, with the standing quarter mile (0–400 meters) coming up in 17 seconds flat. Fuel economy and weight distribution suffered, of course, but that didn’t stop about one-third of Tempest buyers from specifying the V-8, making it far more common than the aluminum V-8 had ever been under Tempest hoods.

Pontiac also built a handful of lightweight ’63 Tempests for drag racing duty, armed with the division’s 421 cu. in. (6,902 cc) V-8 in its most white-hot Super Duty form. With a low-rise intake manifold and two four-barrel carburetors, the hottest 421 claimed 405 hp and 425 lb-ft of torque (strictly nominal figures, but equivalent to around 302 kW and 578 N-m) and drove an experimental four-speed Powershift transaxle with a 3.90 final drive ratio. Only 14 of the lightweight cars were built (including two prototypes) before senior management forcefully reasserted GM’s corporate prohibition on factory racing efforts in January 1963, ending the Super Duty program for good.

Handling was not a priority for the Super Duty cars, but those who tried the 1963 Tempest in its more mundane production form found that the revised suspension did not, alas, resolve the by now well-documented handling issues. A 1963 Tempest was somewhat more stable than the 1961 or 1962 cars, but the same basic problems remained: too much positive camber when lightly loaded, too much camber change, and jacking and tuck-under at the limit. V-8 cars were noticeably more composed, both because the extra weight on the nose shifted the balance toward understeer and because their firmer springs and damping reduced the practical range of wheel motion. An investigation by Hot Rod writer OCee Ritch, published in the 1963 Pontiac Performance Handbook, suggested that the most complete solution for the handling problems would be de-cambering: lowering the rear suspension to induce some negative camber. Since the factory made no provision for that, essaying such a solution was left to the courage and mechanical aptitude of the individual owner. Another possibility Ritch proposed was adding an EMPI Camber Compensator or its equivalent (a transverse leaf spring that acted to keep the lower control arms relatively level with one another). This too was absent from the Tempest option list, although a similar item would be added to the Corvair for 1964.

By this point, it was clear even to observers unaware of GM’s internal discussions that the Tempest had reached a crossroads. If it was to continue with independent rear suspension, it really needed a better-sorted one, the most obvious possibility being a three-link arrangement like that of the new Corvette Sting Ray (trailing arms, double-jointed halfshafts, lower control arms). However, that would be even more expensive than the existing arrangement, an ongoing sore point for the whole Y-body line.

Moreover, independent rear suspension was really only necessary if the Tempest retained the rear transaxle, and Pontiac saw little upside in doing so. The weight distribution benefits had not turned out to be particularly compelling, especially with a heavy cast iron engine up front, and the cost of the flexible driveshaft was high; the machining and finishing was reportedly more expensive than a conventional propeller shaft with universal joints. The existing Corvair-derived transaxles set definite limits on how much power and torque Pontiac could offer, which wasn’t in keeping with the division’s increasingly performance-focused image. As for ride quality, reduced rear unsprung weight was useful, but the quickest, cheapest route to a soft ride was still lower spring rates and more sprung weight.

Beyond that, the Tempest’s mission objectives had evolved. The Tempest had never really made it as an economy car — there were too many thriftier alternatives for less money — and it was never going to be a Detroit Lancia, but it was appealing as a junior Pontiac with a bit of sporty flair. (The high-end Le Mans series accounted for nearly half of the Tempest’s 1963 sales.) The rope drive, rear transaxle, and swing axles no longer served that end.

Of course, Pontiac could have invested more in developing those features, but the Tempest didn’t sell nearly well enough for the corporation to consider such an investment worthwhile. 1963 sales totaled 131,490, bringing the three-year total for the Y-body Tempest to 375,466 units. By most standards, that was quite respectable, and the tooling costs of the Y-body shell itself were also spread across the 389,379 Buick Specials and Skylarks and 299,307 Oldsmobile F-85s and Cutlasses sold in the same period. However, by GM standards, these were mediocre figures for cars that were more expensive to manufacture than they should have been, with too much of that money spent on features customers wouldn’t see or care about. The future would have to be cheaper, less ambitious, and far more conventional.

The Tempest Goes from Y to A

If you’re reading this article, you probably already know what happened next: For 1964, the Y-body senior compacts were replaced by new intermediate models, sharing the A-body shell and 115-inch (2,921-mm) wheelbase of the new midsize Chevrolet Chevelle/Malibu. Unit construction was abandoned in favor of a semi-unitized body on a perimeter frame, and all models now had completely orthodox powertrains, with front-mounted engines and transmissions driving conventional propeller shafts and live rear axles on coil springs, located by trailing arms. In most respects, the new models were scaled-down versions of the divisions’ contemporary full-size cars.

The new Tempest was slightly narrower than the 1963 car, but 8.7 inches (221 mm) longer and about 150 lb (68 kg) heavier. A cast iron V-8 was again optional, this time displacing an actual 326 cu. in. (5,340 cc), but the Trophy 4 was gone, a casualty of the switch to a conventional drivetrain. The flexible driveshaft, rigid torque tube, and four-point powertrain mounts had done much to keep the big four’s shakes within acceptable bounds; without those features, the Trophy 4 was judged too rough. In its place was a new 215 cu. in. (3,529 cc) cast iron inline six, quietly sourced from Chevrolet. The six was both 30 lb (14 kg) lighter and significantly smoother than the Trophy 4, but most buyers opted for the V-8.

Before long, of course, there would be the Pontiac GTO, initially an option package. The GTO quickly came to define the Pontiac A-body line. If it wasn’t especially innovative in an engineering sense, it was exciting, and it did wonders for Pontiac’s image in ways the rope-drive Tempest never had. From 1966 to 1969, there would also be the overhead cam six, another novel engineering development overshadowed by the allure of cheap horsepower.

This retrenchment paid off handsomely in sales. 1964 Tempest sales were up more than 86% from 1963. By 1966, GTO sales alone came close to total Tempest sales of just five years earlier. It couldn’t last, but while it did, the success of the GTO helped to make Pontiac No. 3 in the U.S. industry and one of the most successful automotive marques in the world.

Rope Drive in Retrospect

In the early seventies, as the GTO era was winding down, Alfa Romeo introduced the Alfetta and Porsche began development of Projects 928 and EA425, which resulted in 1976 in the Porsche 924 and a year later the Porsche 928. Each had a front engine and rear transaxle. Like the old Tempest, the Porsche 928 had a V-8 engine, and the subsequent Porsche 944 and 968 (eventual successors to the 924) had a big four-cylinder engine derived from that V-8. All went on to long if not unqualifiedly successful careers.

Some pundits with long memories asserted that these cars vindicated the rope-drive Tempest concept, which we think was missing the point. The front-engine/rear-transaxle concept hadn’t originated with Pontiac and was never in need of vindication; there was nothing wrong with that layout, or with the Tempest’s flexible driveshaft, which worked well enough in service. The Tempest’s most serious shortcomings were in its rough, heavy four-cylinder engine and twitchy swing axle suspension, which were the more or less inevitable consequences of applying a layout usually found in high-end GT cars to a cheap family sedan contrived from hand-me-down pieces. As with the original Oldsmobile Toronado, the Tempest’s technology was sound enough; it was just applied in a context where it didn’t make much sense.

Could Pontiac have turned the rope-drive Tempest into a bona fide big GT like the Porsche 928 or a real high-end sports sedan like the Lancia Aurelia or Flaminia? Perhaps, but Pontiac was about as likely to build such a car as they were to sell hot air balloons. In a corporation that considered anything selling fewer than 100,000 units a year a niche product and anything under 200,000 units a year a sales disappointment, it was hard to generate sustained enthusiasm for novel features that didn’t move the metal. Sporty bucket seats and floor consoles were one thing — they had showroom appeal and sold at a handsome markup — and there was almost always a market for extra horsepower, but anything more involved than that was easily dismissed as too much of a risk.

Ultimately, what stands out most about the original Pontiac Tempest is the ingenuity of its conception. If the results were flawed, the idea was singularly audacious; ideas like, “Let’s bend the driveshaft into an arc to reduce vibration and get rid of the universal joints,” were definitely not how Detroit usually handled problems resulting from limited development and tooling budgets. Obviously, the rope-drive Tempest was an engineering kludge on every level, but that was the object of the exercise. Had the Tempest been anything other than a kludge, it would never have made it past the prototype stage, and Pontiac would almost certainly have grudgingly proceeded with the made-over Corvair the corporation originally wanted the division to build in the first place.

That too would likely have been short-lived, stumbling along for a few years of probably indifferent sales before being supplanted by the A-body Tempest. It might have paid off for Corvair buyers (would greater economies of scale have resulted in earlier fixes for the suspension limitations of the early Corvair?), but so far as Pontiac was concerned, the outcome would have probably been about the same. Or perhaps worse. After all, Pontiac did manage to sell 375,000 rope-drive Tempests, which was hardly bad; in the seventies, it took five and a half years for Pontiac to top that figure with the X-body Ventura, a barely disguised clone of the Chevrolet Nova.

Today, the rope-drive Tempest has the peculiar distinction of being arguably the most interesting product of Pontiac’s sixties Golden Age and also one of the most obscure. We don’t imagine the novel powertrain has done survival rates any favors (finding a replacement driveshaft or other unique parts seems like it would be a real project at this late date), but the Y-body Tempest also languishes in the shadow of its far more numerous A-body successors, whose reputation has been lifted by their kinship with the glamorous and muscular GTO.

The 1961–1963 Tempest was neither a jock nor a beauty queen, and we can’t in all candor describe it as an honor student, but it remains a thoroughly fascinating oddball, and a welcome reminder that “cheap” doesn’t necessarily mean “dull.”

AUTHOR’S NOTES

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Please note that all exchange rate equivalencies and inflation estimates cited in this article are approximate and are provided solely for the reader’s general reference — this is an automotive history, not a treatise on currency trading or the value of money, and nothing in this article should be taken as financial advice of any kind!

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