- This gorgeous green Firebird was a witness to the end of the age of the muscle car.
- With collector-grade mileage and in nearly flawless condition, it’s a time capsule—and a match for the hero car of a forgotten John Wayne movie filmed during the actor’s own twilight era.
- The Bring a Trailer online auction ends on April 17.
In the 1973 movie McQ, a 66-year-old John Wayne slouches onscreen with little of his former authoritative charisma. The laconic hero of many a western was ill suited to a hard-boiled detective flick, particularly one that seemed made to cash in on the success of Dirty Harry, released two years earlier. But the old Duke still had grit. And when he climbed behind the wheel of a dark green ’73 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, no more fitting ride could have been picked.
Up for auction today at Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos) is a Brewster Green 1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am 455 with the desirable four-speed manual transmission. Yes, this isn’t the most famous screaming fire chicken of the breed; that’d be the Bandit’s preferred ride. But as the last hurrah before the first of the 1970s fuel crises hit, it’s a heck of a good-looking bookend to the age of muscle.
This particular one is collector grade, painted its factory color, and showing 250 miles though true mileage unknown. Fitted with 15-inch Rally II style wheels, it has been thoroughly gone over by Restore a Muscle Car (RAMC) of Nebraska, a specialist shop that has handled plenty of Pontiacs, Bandit-style 1977 models among them.
There’s a brutish elegance to this era of Firebird. An SD-455 was tested by Car and Driver in May 1973 and was declared, with a certain amount of sadness, “the last of the fast cars.” This 455 couldn’t match the Super Duty’s performance when stock, as its L75 7.4-liter engine was rated at just 250 horsepower when new.
Still, the grunt was there, some 370 pound-feet of it. Besides which, uncorking that big V-8 wasn’t out of reach for your average shade-tree hot-rodder. If Steve McQueen could pull the badges off his Bullitt Mustang and hop it up, then the same could be easily done by any one of the 1420 people who ordered a manual-transmission Firebird 455 in 1973.
The writing for big-displacement engines was on the wall by 1973, not just on the street but in Trans-Am racing itself. Suddenly the Porsches were beating the Camaros and Corvettes, and the little German cars were doing it with far less power and displacement. When OPEC’s oil embargo hit, that was pretty much it.
Little Hondas were all over the road, and the dinosaur V-8s were done (for a while). But you want to know a little secret? One of Soichiro Honda’s favorite cars was his own Pontiac Firebird. He called it “Yakitori,” Japanese for chicken on a skewer.
So you’d know even he would love this big, handsome green beast. Sure, it’s a relic from a time that ended. But imagine cruising down the road in the golden hour just before sunset, with that shaker hood rumbling along with the V-8, and the appeal of the past is hard to resist.
The auction ends April 17.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels.