1963 Pontiac LeMans

The first attempt at compact cars by General Motors devolved into something of a goat rope. Initially, everyone was going to share the unibody shell of Chevrolet's Corvair, but none of the other divisions were keen on the idea of an air-cooled rear engine car. Buick and Olds, further, were skeptical of trying to offer a vehicle on the short 108" Corvair wheelbase, which would make it cramped and out of step with their plusher catalogs, to say nothing of how much harder NVH (noise, vibration, and harshness) would be to curb in a unit body car relative to a body-on-frame one.

So GM came up with a stretched 115"-wheelbase version for Buick & Oldsmobile, dubbed the Y-body, while Pontiac would try and shoehorn a front engine driveline into the Corvair envelope.

They did this by slicing the 389 cube V-8 in half to create a honking big 195cid slant four, mounting it in front, and then putting a transaxle derived from the Corvair's in the rear, with independent rear suspension, also cribbed from the rear-engine Chevy. The engine and transaxle were connected by a curved driveshaft only two thirds or three quarters of an inch in diameter, immediately dubbed the "rope drive" by the motoring press. Marisa Tomei's character explains all this to you in My Cousin Vinnie.

Most of that work, incidentally, was for nothing because at the eleventh hour GM headquarters relented and green-lighted Pontiac to use the longer Y-body platform.

The big four cylinder was the base motor, and optional was the Buick-designed alloy 215 V-8.

Initially there were no coupes when the Buick, Olds, and Pontiac compacts were launched for the '61 model year, only sedans and wagons, but, surprising everybody, the plusher, more powerful "Monza" model was the best-selling version of the Corvair, causing the other divisions to pile in with their own sporty two-doors. Pontiac's was called the LeMans. The coupe did have clean lines for the era.

1963 was the last year for the compact Y-bodies, as it was decided that for 1964 the Buick/Olds/Pontiac cars would move up to the midsize A-body used by the new Chevelle to fight against the midsize Ford Fairlane.

This LeMans (its own model for that year) had a new option for '63: The 326 V-8. It was essentially a de-bored 389 and weighed like a boat anchor, and it actually displaced 337 cubes but supposedly GM mandated that no compact car could boast a bigger motor than the Corvette's 327.

It was available in standard 2-barrel form, rated at 260 SAE gross horsepower, or a higher compression 4-barrel 326 H.O. variant with dual exhausts that made 280.  When Car Life tested a car with the 2-speed TempesTorque slushbox and the 2-barrel 326, they got a zero-to-sixty time of 9.5 seconds and a 17.0 second quarter at 81 mph, with a top speed of a buck fifteen. Price as tested was $2,953, or about $30,500 in 2024 currency.

There's an excellent, turbo-nerdy deep dive into the tale of the 1st Generation Tempest at Ate Up With Motor, by the way.

The car in the photos was snapped in September of 2021 using a Nikon 1 V2 and a 1 Nikkor 17.5mm f/1.8 lens.