May prove to be excellent investment
Robert K. Rooney, Canwest News Service
Published: Tuesday, April 28, 2009
With GM announcing Monday that it will end its storied Pontiac brand, many older Pontiacs could indeed become valued collectables. Even some of the newer models, such as the Solstice, could do well too.
Back in the early 1950s, Pontiacs weren't selling very well compared to the products of the other GM divisions. Buick, a mid-market brand, even made it to third in U.S. sales just behind the lower-priced Chevrolet and Ford. In the mid-1950s, however, a new general manager rescued Pontiac with a daring new focus for the brand.
That focus was performance and by 1962 Pontiacs had a reputation as serious performers on the racetrack. In 1961, Pontiacs won 30 of 52 NASCAR races and in 1962, 22 of 53 with a Pontiac driver taking the season championship.
The company's products also showed well in NHRA Super Stock drag races.
In the summer of 2007, Jim Wiens decided to rethink his investment strategy.
"I decided to cash in a mutual fund and have something that I could play with that might possibly appreciate," he says.
"I had a self-imposed budget. To get a nice Camaro or Mustang with a big block, it had to be a big block, was starting at $100,000. I didn't want to spend that much money."
With the cars that would have been his original choice out of his price range, Wiens began searching the Internet for alternatives.
"I was casting about for a car that I would consider to be cool and thought about an old Super Duty Pontiac," he remembers.
"My father had a '62 Pontiac when I was growing up and that's the car I learned to drive with."
One day he found a very nice-looking '62 Catalina Super Duty for sale in Anacortes, Wa.
The car was a clone, which is to say it had started its life in a different configuration and been converted to Super Duy specs.
The '62s, Wiens says, "were the rarest of the Super Duty Pontiacs. They only built, from what I've been able to gather, about 105 of them for '62 -- so a real one was out of the question."
An actual '62 Super Duty sold at auction not too long ago for $450,000, he says. After a trip to the coast to examine it, Wiens brought the Catalina home.
"The car turned out to be all I was hoping for and more, so I had to buy it," he says. "Part of it was the uniqueness of it. I had never even seen one before. They were never for sale in Canada."
Although he says, "It's not nearly as well-documented as I would like,"Wiens knows the car was built up in Bakersfield, Ca.
The Catalina is powered by a period-correct 421 cubic-inch V-8 with two four-barrel carburetors rated at 410 horsepower.
The car has a Borg Warner four-speed manual transmission and a fairly tall 3.42 rear-end gear. It has the stance of a drag car of the period as well as exhaust pipes rerouted to dump out the side.
As a concession to driveability, the car's builder installed power steering and '70s vintage power disk brakes--a feature which would have been left off a competition car.
"It's fun to drive, but it's 1962 technology," Wiens admits. "It doesn't drive like a new car. You don't just point it down the road like we do on our daily driver cars. It's some work to drive."
With what has happened in the stock market in the last year, as well as GM's move this week, Wiens' purchase looks like a pretty good decision.
"This thing is still more fun than looking at a boring quarterly statement," he smiles. |
