March 24, 2026:
And to think, Popular Mechanics magazine couldn’t last twelve (12) months back in 1989… man, those guys must have been a bunch of real wimps! LOL
This section will not supersede the origin story for TheBigRedCar, but I’ve never been timely or knowledgeable enough to support a live blog so we’ll take this historical approach instead. Here we’ll eventually talk about things that happened back in the day with my GTA, and maybe some things that happened just yesterday… or maybe things that YOU bring up about YOUR GTA, but we’ll always try to keep it interesting!
Where to begin? How about a little car history?
The early 1980s… ah, the memories. Many of you weren’t born yet, so you’ll have to take my word for it. It was a privilege to grow up in times like those.
I got my license when I was 16 and in 1982 got a 1954 Mercury Monterey 4-door sedan to drive and call my very own. And it was a cool car, really, it was. Nobody else in school had one like it that’s for sure, and really wasn’t that the be-all, end-all in those days? Even if it did have a KRACO cassette stereo in the dash and an OTASCO lawn battery in the trunk to run it.
I had to charge that battery every Friday afternoon for the weekends but as Jeff Foxworthy used to say….”we’ve got TUNES”! The box speakers up in the rear window… c’mon, you remember the setup! Loverboy’s “Get Lucky” never sounded so good to this very day! Must have been all the glass area for reverb…
I sold the car to an area man in the mid-2000s who had a running Ford Granada 302 V8/C6 powerteam that he said he was going to put under it. I always wondered what he did with it. The Merc served me well, including getting a good friend and I home from high school during a generational flood without missing a beat. Despite the flood waters swirling around at the base of the side windows…
I graduated to a semi-modern car when I started driving my mom’s 1978 Lincoln Mark V occasionally in tandem with the Merc. It would run pretty fast with that 460 ci V8, you could ensure easy exit from any rock concert by simply angling those incredibly long front fenders out into a line of traffic, and it was cool to a degree to actually experience what it must have been like to helm the R.M.S. Titanic out on the open sea. I will say that if you’ve never driven or ridden in one of those era cars on the open road… well, you’ve really missed a traveling experience. It was really like taking your living room sofas on vacation with you. Nothing could soak up the miles like a Lincoln of that era, or any other maker’s large sedans.
The first cool car I remember looking at new was a red 1982 Corvette. Big honking (I thought at the time) Cross-Fire-Injection 350 V8, red leather, Eagle GT tires. and a $20,000 price tag. GASP! $20,000… for a car? For real? Alas, a fellow whose sister was in my class got it for HS graduation… and at last I knew of their family still owned it.
Two cars down the row, though, was the real apple of my eye: a brand-spanking-new, loud and proud 1982 Camaro Z28 Indy Pace Car. This little beauty was only $14,000… or maybe it was $16,000…. it didn’t really matter; might as well have been $1,000,000.
But I loved those cars then and would still have one in a heartbeat today if the opportunity arose. Loud, flashy, and looking bullet-fast for the day. My wife says that to this day if there is a choice in vehicles, I’ll always take the flashy one. Some friends might disagree, but I’m not so sure that’s true…
The 1982 Trans Am was to me then, in a word…. a horrible mistake. Well, that was three words. Sorry. I was like “how in the HELL did we get from Smokey and the Bandit…. to this?” There was just no style, no sizzle, no BIRD; “aero” was a new automotive concept on the horizon for US cars in those days.
And I didn’t get it at all. A Trans Am was supposed to look ballsy, not like it was trying to slip through a crowd and not be seen.
No, thank you, I’ll pass. BTW, where’d that Camaro Z28 go?
I did actually get to test drive a slightly used (10k-mile) ’82 Z28 with my Dad, and naturally I thought it was the hottest thing on the road. I think my Dad was just glad that we had managed to get out of the 1980 Corvette we had just driven previously still in one piece. That car was a piece of junk, and its hesitating 350 V8 almost got us killed in the middle of Race Street in Searcy, Arkansas.
Looking back though to the Z28, I’m not sure all 165 of those cross-fire-injected horses were showing up when I was punching that gas pedal. But I can still look down and in my mind’s eye see that funky round console clock as my arm rested on the console center pad. Man, I thought wanted that car… even told me Dad I’d steal it if I found it sitting with the keys in the ignition. I don’t think he was ever more disappointed in me than he was that day…
First Trans Am was a cousin’s 1981 Turbo T/A. Still vividly remember the first time I saw it in December of ‘83 over Christmas HS break; my parents told me there was no way they could afford the afore-mentioned Z28.… but they COULD afford this car.
Z28? What Z28? Nope, don’t remember ever even thinking about a Chevrolet anything.
Talk about taking your breath away: black paint, one-year red trim and decals, red S/E striping, alloy Turbo-Flow rims. I can still see it in my uncle’s garage; man, I spent all week OUT THERE. My parents purchased it for $7,500. Man, I just knew I had died and gone to heaven….
It worked out that I had the choice between that car and a used 1984 (IIRC) Chrysler K-car Mark Cross Turbo convertible. Had to be careful there… LOL Even with the ‘81 Trans Am being on its third model year, I still think I made the better choice even today. LOL
College came in the Fall of ‘84 and was going… but by the spring of ‘86 with an admittedly juvenile driver (those hood lights are so COOL) the Turbo T/A was showing its age a little bit. New turbocharger, new A/C system, new ECM, 2,000-mile oil changes, partial paint work, etc… it really was starting to cost some $$$ just to keep the Turbo 4.9L on the road. Let’s just say that the local Goodyear Auto Service Center didn’t look forward to my visits…
We’ll take the opportunity to jump ahead a little here in the narrative, if you will. This section was always meant to be a long walk, not a sprint.
While I’ve always made it clear that the Trans Am GTA was always my “dream car”, we all have favorite cars or trucks that we’ve owned throughout our lives that still stand out, right? One that we’d really like to have back in the garage, regardless of the cost or condition; it’s constantly there hovering just below your mind’s eye… you just can’t seem to shake that memory loose.
That vehicle we all call “The One That Got Away”, right?
For those of you who know of me and my GTA history, you will no doubt be shocked to learn that it is NOT “Hector Gonzalez”, the GTA Notchback that we owned from 1998-2015. That was a carefully considered decision made not from desperation but from necessary family circumstances of having a driving-age daughter and needing storage space, and nothing more. Not a huge deal in the overall scheme of car things in our life.
Besides, if you frequent the GTA SP Facebook page you’ll see that current owner Jeff Frink is taking care of Mr. G just fine. He’s never looked better.
So… what was “the one that got away”? Well, we have to go back and pre-date Hector by a good bit, actually.
1995… TBRC was still wearing its Ronal R9s, much to my consternation.
So, it was a LONG time ago. Before a lot of you out there were even born, no doubt…
On a whim one day, I purchased a rather beat-up 1980 Turbo Trans Am to play around with. Just happened upon it one day sitting in front of a local gas station, looking all pitiful. And you know who fell for that big con-job, right?
Guess the memory of the “flame-broiled” ‘81 Turbo from 1988 never really left me; anyway, the $1000 purchase price wasn’t enough to dissuade me from buying it, much to my wife’s chagrin. You can imagine the shape it was in to be $1000 in those days… and it was even worse than that. Needless to say, the car required plenty of used or replacement parts; just look at these images and whatever you mentally conjure up, it was worse.
One of the places I picked up parts as the need arose was a parts place in Searcy, AR, about 50 miles from my home; I won’t name the guy fully because he’s still in business in another city closer to Little Rock, but his first name was Mike. I was a regular enough of a visitor that we were on a first-name basis. So as I was there picking up some carpet he had ordered for me to go into the ‘80 Trans Am one day out of the blue, he said “come out here on the lot… there’s something I need to show you”.
So we venture out to his side lot where he has a lot of parts cars sitting and also some cars that were for sale; as we were walking down the aisle of probably twenty (20) or so vehicles getting to the parts car line, I could see a 79-81 Firebird sitting on the very end as the nose cone was plainly visible. I spoke up: “man, I don’t need a parts car to sit around the yard” to which he replied “well, when I got it I thought about you…”
Well, you know how you get a feeling that comes over you, like a cold wind rustling or something similar? It hit me full force and suddenly I was absolutely certain… and petrified… of what he might show me.
A few more steps and I could see that the car in question was mostly code 24U Atlantis Blue which immediately told me it was a 1979 model. No turbo T/As in 1979, hmm. That’s about the time the sweat beads started forming and a reality hit me, and I started telling myself “oh Lord, please don’t let the shaker say T/A 6.6, please don’t, please don’t, no T/A 6.6, no-no-no-no, please… show me that 6.6 LITRE decal if anything in this world is holy”.
Everybody familiar with the Trans Am story knew what T/A 6.6 meant: W72 400 Pontiac V8, T-10 4-speed manual, 220 hp, last year, limited production, blah, blah, blah. That info was like a sermon you remembered as a kid; it was ingrained in your psyche. Took a few more guarded steps (Mike even asked me if there was anything wrong) and was presented with my worst nightmare as a Pontiac Trans Am owner.
I was like “damn, that’s a shame to have to part one of these cars out… those things are rare, right?” That’s when he said:
“It’s not a parts car…”
Check back soon for more…