1976 Pontiac Trans Am

Coupe

8 - Cyl.

Manual

2W87W6N575792

Other

Gasoline

Up for auction is one special rare bird… Please read the article I copied from the internet as I thought it captures exactly what I would want to say about the brand, car, and image. This particular car was delivered to Lynch Pontiac in Manchester, CT around 1975-1976. It just so happened that at the time the car came in, the owner of the dealership’s owners daughter (that’s right, daughter with a 455 4-speed) fell in love with it and it was put into service under the dealership’s name. She drove the car for 13 years with just over 81,000 miles (until 1989) and to say it was well taken care of would be an understatement. Wouldn’t you take above average care of a car that your daughter was driving? She got tired of the heavy clutch after some time so the car was dolled up and parked out front for everyone in town to marvel at and just one lucky person to throw his hat in! This beauty has a 4-speed 455 engine with a Muncie stonecrusher transmission and a Dana 60 rear end. My best friend was living in town at the time and wanted the car more than air! He went at it six ways to Sunday and the only way it would work with the low funds he had and the lack of funds for insurance was to have his mother sign on the dotted line. Determination is much underrated at that age! He loved this car and still does. He has kept this car through good times and bad. Through his moves to numerous states all the while shifting the car from place to place to make sure it was at the very least under cover. I have been a part of this car’s life as well as I must have pushed this car into and out of five or six places it was stored in over the years. I even took the last ride the car had over the road from Sturbridge, MA to West Winfield, NY. That was in 1991 and I will not forget the blast we had. It stayed there in his father’s barn for 8 years until he got started in life and put a roof over his head with a real garage. The first order of business for him was to get the car back with him. So it was trailered from NY to New Britain where it sat in his garage for just over 5 years. He was making his way finding and making money all the while to eventually restore the T/A. The bigger house came first but at the worst time. He bought at the wrong time before the bubble, the economy fell flat on its ass and it was time for him to restructure. He decided to let it go. He has moved to Arizona now and the car was moved once again from CT to my house here in Worcester, MA. I now am the care taker and awaiting the next buyer to take this car to where it deserves to be. This is kind of a torch passing if you will. OK - condition…the car has had a very easy life. It suffered the most deterioration while in NY as it was in a barn not a garage. That just killed him but he didn’t have many choices back then. It does have some rust here and there, nothing bad but it is there. A couple things I know and or noticed is the driver’s door needs to be opened from the inside, There is a broken manifold bolt the in turn has a leak, and the damage in the pictures from the bad loading job on a trailer with no sides. Everything is there and the way it left the factory just worn, not by abuse just time. The spare is there, jack is there, the tires even after all the years pumped up and held air! Time has made the plastics dry, paint fade, and rubbers crack and so on. The car is really remarkable in the fact that the history is known and that the car has had no repaints. The paint on the car, the rug on the floor, the vinyl covering the seats… everything is original. The only none original items are consumables (tires, battery, oils, belts…) everything is there as it was back in 1976. When the car was put into storage after the sale of the house in CT he rented a cheap front wheel moving dolly and tried to move it himself. He over shot the dolly and that is the damage you see on the car passenger’s side. It is a shame as the car was never hit and was so beautiful prior, but hey mistakes happen. When I moved it from CT to MA I put it over at a friend’s garage. We cleaned the car up and took everything we could out to give it a thorough cleaning, even the interior (which is why the seats are taken out). The car was vacuumed, washed, and I tried buffing but I am no expert and did not see the results I was looking for so that idea was abandoned. We then installed a new battery and checked all the fluids. Everything looked good and so we crossed out fingers, shot some starting fluid in the carburetor and turned the key. The motor fired up after a couple spins. I couldn’t believe it! It has sat for at least 12 years and just like that it fired. As soon as it caught I shut it down. I just wanted to make sure nothing was catastrophically wrong and that I can say it does run. The car then was covered and parked. IT IS READY FOR SALE! It pains me to sell my buddy’s beloved car but it needs a good home. There are LOTS of pics down below so you can see all the details of the condition. In my opinion it could or can be cleaned up and put back to road worthy with little effort. It will not be a show queen but a good driver. I would much rather it be restored to some unbelievable condition but that’s just me. It could use quite a lot of money and time to do the latter but these cars keep climbing and price and for the right guy with the right skills this is a great starting point. I wish you luck and enjoy bidding on a great car with a great story. I have a lot of original paperwork as well as some maintenance receipts, owner’s manual; most have been munched on by mice over the years but they are all there. ------------ *1976 Trans Am* (from the Business Week article in December 2005) Pontiac marked the Bicentennial with the last of the true muscle cars -- complete with a 455-cubic-inch engine The American Bicentennial was a great year for the country, but a dismal one for performance cars. Passage in 1970 of the federal Clean Air Act and the industry-wide adoption of catalytic converters beginning with the 1975 model year had ended the reign of big-engined muscle cars as effectively as the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. But Pontiac was at least trying. GM's "performance division" - which arguably kicked off the whole muscle-car fandango with the launch in 1964 of the first GTO - hadn't totally given up on performance. The real thing, too, not just decals and a faux muscle car strut. The '76 Trans Am 455 four-speed was clear proof of that. Someone still gave a damn about cars with a pulse. Granted, its 200 horsepower was nothing special compared with the Super Duty, Ram Air, and High Output 400s and 455s that preceded it. But it had one critical thing going for it that few other engines or cars still had that Bicentennial year: It was B-I-G, all 455 cubic inches' worth. By 1976, the biggest engine you could get in a Camaro was a small-block 350. The Mustang II was just pathetic. No more 'Cudas; no more 383 Super Bees. This was just a depressing vista of rich, Corinthian leather, fake wood paneling, and sill stripe and decal jobs. Only Pontiac still offered a legit player. And the huge engine in the Trans Am didn't have any unique high-performance parts, not even a low-restriction air cleaner. It was, in fact, identical to the low-rpm boilerplate 455s used to lug around Catalina station wagons, with 7.6:1 compression, small valve heads, and a powerband that ran out of steam at 4500 rpm. *Big-block steam* But what made the whole thing special was the package that Pontiac made of it and all the potential locked up inside it. First, it wasn't just an engine. When you ordered the code L75 455 (in place of the standard 185-hp L78 400 V-8), you also got a much more aggressive 3.23 ratio Posi-traction-equipped rear axle (in place of the standard 2.41), up rated brakes (with sintered metallic shoes/pads lifted from Pontiac's police-duty equipment package) and a lower-back pressure transverse-mounted muffler ending in twin chrome "splitter" tips. You also got the famously fun M-21 close-ratio four-speed manual transmission with Hurst shifter (if you wanted an automatic, you wanted another car). Stock, the combo was good for mid-high 15-second quarter mile times and 0-60 clocking in the seven-second range - excellent performance in an otherwise bleak landscape for the enthusiast car buyer. Fiddling with the Rochester Quadra-jet four-barrel carburetor (which was set lean for emissions reasons), dialing up a more aggressive spark curve and ditching the stock single-cat exhaust system in favor of headers and dual exhaust would make the car downright respectable. In 1976, you ruled the roost if your car had those bad-boy "455" call-outs on its shaker scoop - especially if you'd removed the government-required block-off plate to let gobs of fresh air feed the mighty engine unrestricted. Trans Am’s in general got a huge boost around this time as well from the now-iconic Burt Reynolds/Sally Fields burnout-fest, Smokey and the Bandit, which starred a black-and-gold Trans Am laying rubber and flummoxing cops in a dozen counties. Originally, the movie was to have featured a '76 Trans Am, which was the debut year for the menacing black-and-gold paint scheme, based on the John Player race cars of the time. It was a striking car, with German-style lettering for the engine callouts on the shaker scoop and "Trans Am" on the fenders providing the finish touches of malevolence. Standard equipment in these cars, which were technically 50th Anniversary Limited edition models, was the L-78 400 V-8. But the Mack Daddy 455 was the hot ticket option. T-tops (designed by Hurst) appeared this year as well and first became available in these '76 LE anniversary cars. However, production delays resulted in the movie being shot with a '77 model - and by then, major changes had taken place. The 455 was gone, replaced by a new "T/A 6.6-liter" 400 that offered about the same horsepower but nowhere near the street cred of the big bruiser. (Many scenes in the movie were done with a 455-equipped car that had been modified to "bark the tires" on a hard one-two up shift in a way the standard car just couldn't manage.) The '77s also marked the debut of a significant body restyle that included a new quad-headlight front end, flat hood, and smaller, less belligerent-looking hood scoop. The bicentennial year was the last hurrah, and not just for the 455. Also gone were the unusual "polycast" 15x7 honeycomb wheels that had first appeared in 1971. These looked like alloys but were in fact steel with a flexible urethane composite material injection-molded to the rim to give the appearance of an alloy, albeit with the strength of steel. Unfortunately, the polycast rims were also heavy; they were dropped in favor of aluminum "snowflake" wheels for 1977, making '76 the last year for these. The shovel-nose, single-headlight front-end treatment was retired, too, and wild colors like Carousel Red (identical to the hue used on the '69 GTO Judge) and Goldenrod Yellow were discontinued. But the absence of the option-code L75 455 V-8 was most the most obvious change. It marked the turning of the final page of the final chapter of the original muscle-car era. Never again would an American automaker offer such an enormous engine in a compact-sized car. It shall not pass this way again. VIN DECODER **Model Years 1972-1980 ------------------------------ #1-----------------------Make-GM-2=Pontiac #2-----------------------Series-S=Base Model W=Trans Am T=Espirit -U=Formula V=Trans Am -X=10 Anniversary TA, X=Turbo Indy TA #3 & #4------------------Body Style-87=Sports Coupe #5------------------------Engine-D= 250 M=350 N=350 R=400 T= 400 X=455 R=350 P=350 Y= 301 P=400 Y=455 H=350 S= 400 W=455 J=350 C=231 K= 403 Z=400 A=231 L=350 U= 305 A=213 G=305 W=301 H= 301 H=305 S=265 T=301 #6-------------------------Year-2=1972. 3=1973, 4=1974, 5=1975, 6=1976 -7=1977, 8=1978, 9=1979. A=1980 #7------------------------Assembly Plant-L=Van Nuys, N=Norwood #8 - #13-------------------Sequential Production Number On Nov-20-11 at 09:59:06 PST, seller added the following information: Note: This car will be sold with a bill of sale only. In the state of CT (and some other states), titles are not required for any vehicle manufactured prior to 1981. On Nov-24-11 at 15:27:17 PST, seller added the following information: I have been getting way more questions than I would have expected about one subject…RUST...especially underneath the car. I can understand the concern -- but like I stated in the questions section, I am no expert, and you would only be getting my opinion. I have seen plenty of cars that I thought were junk only to have someone say that the car was not bad, and I just the opposite, some cars I thought were nice I was told that the car was junk. What I am trying to say is that everyone has an opinion and it really needs to be looked at and decided what it is worth to each individual bidder. If it is too extensive work-wise then bid less, and vice-versa, that way everyone is happy. I am by no means trying to misrepresent this car nor am I trying to oversell it. I set the reserve at 3k and would have been more than happy with anything over that. This is not game-changing money and I feel that this is a nice car for the right person with the skill sets to rebuild, restore, use for parts, whatever… To help out the out of state bidders that can’t come see the car for themselves I have taken more pictures of the underside and around the wheels. This seems to be the areas that are most asked about and or of concern. I hope this helps and gives you a better understanding on what level this car is worth to you. Again, I am just passing the torch so to speak and not trying to get rich here. I want the new owner to be happy with the car. Thanks and good luck!