The Muscle Car that started it all still knows how to turn heads. On a sunny afternoon in San Diego, this 1965 Pontiac GTO convertible stood gleaming, the kind of red that burns its way into memory.

If it looks, sounds, and accelerates like a Tri-Power, then it must be a Tri-Power, right? Not necessarily, as aircraft technician Ben Stegman's Mayfair Maize '65 GTO convertible proves. To retain a ...

The GTO wasn’t a car. It was a door kicked open. Pontiac detonated the muscle-car movement by ignoring GM’s “no big engines in mid-sizes” policy and stuffing a 389 into the polite little Tempest.

Escalation became a familiar term in the mid-Sixties. The word stood for stepping-up—expansion, enhancement, intensification. And it was popularly applied to everything from U.S. troop moves in ...