1973 Grand Am Pontiac Grand National sedan racer
ILLUSTRATION BY KENNY YOUNGBLOOD
1973 Grand Am NASCAR: Team Associates Nascar
Grand Am racer
Herb Adams was known as one of the extreme engineers at Pontiac,
as an independent contractor, who successfully pursued racing
applications, performance upgrades and modifications for various
Pontiacs throughout the 1970's. Some of these engineering pursuits
became original equipment on Pontiacs, such as the original WS6
Performance Handling Package option on the 1978 and 1979 Pontiac
T/A's. Illustration by Kenny Youngblood.
According to the October 1996 Collectible Automobile
article by Michael Lamm:
From the article text
- "Now, with the Grand Am, they had their sights
on the big time, notably NASCAR. They qualified and ran
at Riverside in January 1973, starting and finishing 14th
with no brakes at the end of that race. They then tried
Daytona after jumping through a an inordinate number of
NASCAR inspection and qualification hoops, only to have
their car blow a head gasket after qualifying at 169 mph;
its 366-cid V-8 had too much compression. With that, and
no major sponsors in sight, the team retired its gloss
black Grand Am #69."
From the image text - "A
group of competition-oriented Pontiac engineers known
as Team Associates
wanted to turn the new Grand Am into a NASCAR racer. They
nearly made it too; qualifying the car for Daytona at
169 mph before the special 366-cid engine blew a cylinder
head gasket. This phantom drawing shows the Grand Am was
outfitted for stock car racing." Illustration
by Kenny Youngblood.
THE [BILL] FRANCE CONNECTION: The strange, troubled Odyssey
of the most beautiful
Pontiac race car ever built / By Eric Dahlquist
Maybe the most sanitary Pontiac Grand National sedan ever, was
built by Team Associates. Herb
Adams is team manager and is the driving force behind this
and the two previous (Pontiac race) cars. Tom Nell, a graduate
of Pontiac’s long-ago NASCAR effort in the early ‘60’s,
directs the Grand Am’s engine and drive train sections,
and is co-owner of the car. The other two main characters
in the enterprise are Ted Lambris (basic body and fuel system)
and Harry Quackenboss (chassis). Driver is Jerry Thompson
(from the) devastating Owens-Corning Thompson-DeLorenzo Corvettes
(SCCA race) teams.
*Reprint of the text as written and most images from the May
1973 Motor Trend article by Eric Dahlquist about the
Team Associates Pontiac Grand Am Grand National stock car
(above/below):
Willow Springs Raceway is a 21/2-mile asphalt road course that
came to national prominence during the 1950s and early ‘60s
for hotly contested Sports Car Club of America races.
The track is narrow, very tight and filled with tricky turns that
wind over low hills. It is more suite to Triumph TR-3s and MGs than
anything like a NASCAR Grand National stock car.
And yet, in early January 1973, there I was at the top of turn
four, a reverse camber hook that wraps around the brow of the highest
hill like a half-coiled bull whip, in what is probably the most
beautiful Pontiac stock car ever built. Incredibly, despite a fairly
high steering effort, the Grand Am felt as manageable at Willow
as any of your 303 Trans-Am Firebirds or 5-liter Z-28 Camaros. Absent
was the twitchy, always-on-the-ragged-edge feel of the typical,
neutral-to-over-steering racing machine. This car was easy to handle
in the way the classic Mercedes racers of the Uhelenhaut era were.
Which isn't surprising because the Pontiac, like the Mercedes,
was conceived and built by a team of skilled automotive engineers
whose primary occupation in life is to design the passenger cars
you and I drive. Therefore, they never lose-even in their racing
cars, the magic equation of successfully accommodating a wide driver
range. The significant difference between this Pontiac and those
Mercedes is, of course, that where Mercedes were the result of a
flat-out factory effort, the Pontiac is a pure and simple private
project of Herb Adams and Team Associates, an aggregation comprised
partly of Pontiac engineers who want to be in racing even if General
Motors doesn't.
On that January day as I ease the Grand Am through the decreasing
radius of turn nine leading to the straightaway, and began to pick
up speed, I could see the tiny knot of people standing by the edge
of the track at the start/finish line near Willow Springs’
weathered timing stand. They rushed up to the left side window,
and were gone in an eyeblink as I rocketed for turn one again, I
thought about Herb Adams standing back there with the others-he
was one to the two guys who owned this car and if I crashed it,
there was no going back to the garage to fetch another duplicate.
Adams and his friends had made a memorable debut in professional
racing some three years ago in the SCCA’s 1971 Trans Am season
opener at Lime Rock, Conn. With a vintage, seemingly off-street
’64
GTO sedan, driver Bob Tullius proceeded to pass
everything on the rain-slick track except Mark Donahue in the American
Motors/Penske Javelin. A year later with a genuine ponycar (Firebird)
at Mid-Ohio Raceway, the Adams aggregation gave Pontiac its first
big-time competition victory since General Motors withdrew from
racing nine years earlier. By season end, Pontiac was No. 2 in Trans
Am points and it hadn’t cost the Division a dime.
Even though Team Associates made money in Trans Am in 1972, they
were pointing toward bigger things, ad so Herb and gang headed south
in the fall 1972, down to the Charlotte World 600 to begin researching
what they would be up against in the big league. NASCAR racing,
you see, is more than just competition. It is a deep ingrained,
institutionalized, cultural phenomenon with its folk heroes and
unwritten initiations.
The backbone of NASCAR’s star system is built on people
who have paid their dues. In other words, although Chrysler, Ford
or GM are in one year and out the next, the Pettys and the Wood
Bros. and Junior Johnson will be there-racing in NASCAR-this year,
next year, every year. There has never been any illusion about that
fact by either the racers of NASCAR’s founding father, Bill
France. You play the game Mr. France’s way or you don’t
play at all. And you can’t really argue because he built it
into a multi-million-dollar show.
Inside of maybe the most sanitary Pontiac Grand National
sedan ever built is so cleverly executed it doesn't’t look
like all the necessary stuff is there. But it is and in stock
configuration wherever possible-to keep cost down. Note 180-degree
headers right side exit.
ILLUSTRATION BY KENNY YOUNGBLOOD
Adams found, as countless Detroit engineers on the various factory
racing expeditions had since the ‘50s, that there is a certain
quotient of black magic ingrained into NASCAR just as there is in
all American racing - USAC, NHRA, SCCA, take your pick.
More important, the stringent demands of the NASCAR technical
committee can be as formidable a foe as the other race cars. Just
how formidable, even in their wildest dreams, they could not imagine.
Five months after Adams Associates’ first southern exposure,
some of the crew gathered in Herb’s room at the Caravan Inn
in Riverside, Calif. It was the end of their second frustrating,
unsuccessful day of trying to worm through NASCAR’s technical
inspection, which serves also as the traditional hazing for freshman
racers. It was raining torrents outside and the electricity would
finally go out and we would talk in the dark, drinking Coors and
finishing the rest of the Dorito chips.
“When we started this thing,” Herb began, “we
didn't want to copy what Petty or Allison had just because they
were winners. There isn't a lot of true engineering innovation in
NASCAR because most people all run the same pieces. You get a Holman-Moody
roll cage and front end set up, get a body, put an engine in and
go racing.
“Well, we believed a lot of what we learned in SCCA would
apply to NASCAR. It’s almost commonplace here to run four
different spring rates on the same car and even different rubber
compounds on the same car and we felt that was wrong. In general,
we were going to try to engineer a straightforward reliable car,
using as many production pieces as possible to keep costs down.
That’s the kind of information that needs to be passed around.”
Being at least in part products of the General Motors system,
Adams Associates is set up like a miniature automobile division,
with responsibility for the automobile’s different systems
(engine, fuel, brake, etc.), assigned along lines of expertise.
Adams is team manager and is the driving force behind this and
the two previous cars. Tom Nell, a graduate of Pontiac’s long-ago
NASCAR effort in the early ‘60’s, directs the Grand
Am’s engine and drive train sections, and is co-owner of the
car. Incredible as it may seem, in these days of Chrysler hemis
and stagger-valve Chevrolets, Nell has extracted enough horsepower
(almost 600) from a 366 cubic- inch version of what is essentially
Pontiac’s old 1963 Super Duty engine, to be competitive, Nell
was part and parcel of the development team responsible for Pontiac’s
hot new 455 SD powerplant, but it’s probably been a trade-off
whether the Division has gained more from Nell’s private racing
activities or he from the SD program. What it boils down to in the
end is that Nell and a couple of other guys are single-handedly
keeping Pontiac’s performance image alive.
The other two main characters in the enterprise are Ted Lambris
(basic body and fuel system) and Harry Quackenboss (chassis).
Herb Adams, left, is the Team Associates manager
and the operations guiding light. Driver, Jerry Thompson, center,
was recruited from SCCA ranks. He is not Mickey Thompson's younger
brother. Tom Nell, below right, sustains life in 366/455 SD engine
still competitive in '70s.
When the Team Associates Grand Am hit Riverside for the Winston
Western 500, it was obvious by the machine’s meticulous preparation
that the car was not one of your corner gas station efforts. The
sight of the deep, lustrous black paint and chromed Clements wheels
($40 apiece just for the chroming and shot peening to negate hydrogen
embrittlement caused during chroming), was not lost on NASCAR’s
superteams.
Neither were neat touches like ducting brake cooling air through
the frame or making sense out of the usual spaghetti NASCAR roll-cage
rules. The Grand AM was so clean inside and out that it almost appeared
not to have all the necessary hardware and yet everything was there-properly
engineered.
Since the car carried no major sponsor’s sign to many, the
Grand Am could only mean Pontiac’s long-awaited return to
competition was a fact. Herb knew how far this myth had gone when
several NASCAR inspectors began asking to get in on the Pontiac
parts deal.
Had they known, for instance, that the pretty paint was an experiment
by Ditzler Division of Pittsburgh Plate Glass to learn the hard-use
characteristics of flexible, urethane-based paint on normal sheet
metal, or that the team was dining nightly on Big Macs, the southerners
might not have been as suspicious.
Team Associates driver Jerry Thompson was another puzzle. Who
was he? Since most people in this league had never heard of the
devastating Owens-Corning Thompson-DeLorenzo Corvettes, the notion
that Jerry Thompson was Mickey Thompson’s younger brother
persisted right up to race day. Mickey Thompson services part of
Pontiac’s car pool on the West Coast, a factory contract,
so the connection was obvious.
One thing led to another and Team Associates found themselves
mired in problems while their competitors were sorting their cars
in practice. First, NASCAR took exception to the funny-looking NASA
hood ducts (which are part of the 455 SD factory option), that other
competitors thought gave an unfair advantage other the cowl intakes
“everybody” else was using. Then there was a problem
with the way some of the roll-cage was fared into the bodywork at
the back of the sidewindows. Then there was the rear spoiler. Then
it was the driver himself: one NASCAR official suggested it would
be smart to replace him with one of it’s reliable (NASCAR)
regulars.
One thing led to another and Team Associates found
themselves mired in problems while their competitors were sorting
their cars in practice. First, NASCAR took
exception to the funny-looking NASA
hood ducts (which are part of the 455 SD factory option), that
other competitors thought gave an unfair advantage other the cowl
intakes “everybody” else was using. Then there was
a problem with the way some of the roll-cage was fared into the
bodywork at the back of the sidewindows. Then there was the rear
spoiler. Then it was the driver himself: one NASCAR official suggested
it would be smart to replace him with one of it’s reliable
(NASCAR) regulars.
On the second day of qualification, after about 30 total practice
laps, Jerry Thompson put the Team Associates Grand Am on the grid
14th. He was the quickest qualifier that day but it didn't mean
much as the car never had enough time on the course to be proper
sorted out.
By race day, Herb felt they were in pretty good shape, even starting
mid-way back in the pack. At about the race’s halfway point,
when Thompson was running seventh, ahead of most of the NASCAR boys
he was supposed to be inferior to, it looked like things were finally
working on their favor.
But with about 200 miles to go, the Grand Am’s four-wheel
Corvette disc brakes began to lose pressure. Thompson zoomed into
the pits and the crew found fluid leaking out of the rear brake
calipers. Those beautiful wheels were flexing more than the team
had anticipated and the occasional contact had ground off the caliper
bleeder screw.
As the brakes were being repaired, a NASCAR official said there
was a one-minute limit on the track side of the pit wall and the
car had to be brought behind the wall of be disqualified. So, the
crew was forced to put the Grand Am’s wheels back on and roll
it behind the wall before the brake fix could be completed. Later
in the race, Richard Petty’s STP Plymouth was timed by NASCAR
with an official five-minute pit stop-the track side of
the wall.
So, the Grand Am’s brakes were repaired and Thompson went
charging off into the fray, trying to make up some of the lost time.
In due course the rod actuating the master brake cylinder failed
and he finished 14th with no brakes.
To complete the demanding Riverside race at all your first time
out is an accomplishment itself. A year ago, Mark Donahue failed
to make four laps in the AMC/Penske Matador before retiring. Heartened
by the fact Tom Nell’s engine was still going strong at the
end of 500 mile and that they had complied with all NASCAR’s
demands without any serious problems, the gang headed back to Detroit
to prepare for Daytona.
In the interim between Riverside and Daytona, NASCAR sent around
a letter to each of the entrants advising that in order to pass
inspection all front spindles would have to be re-magnafluxed. Adams
Team Associates did the job and left for Florida with the magnaflux
slip in their pocket, thinking every-thing was fine.
When they arrived, everything wasn't’t fine. They showed
the spindle magnaflux slip to an inspector.
“You just did the front spindle,” the inspector
said.
“That’s all the letter said,” Herb responded.
“Well,” said the inspector, “we’re not
going to argue over that, but you’re going to do your front
hubs, rear axle shafts, rear hubs, wheel bearings, ball joints,
everything.”
A day later, as all that work was completed, another inspector
came around. “We noticed during magnaflux (inspection), you
didn't’t use the same kind of ball-joints everybody else is
using, so you’re going to have to put them in,” the
official said.
Again the team complied, finally rebuilding most of the front
suspension. One day melded into another and finally, five days later,
they were allowed on the track. But it was the last day to qualify
for the 125-mile qualifying races that determined starting positions
for the 500.
The team opened with a speed of 160 mph and by the end of the
day they had worked the Grand Am up to 169 mph-a long way from the
185.662 mph of pole-sitter Buddy Baker.
But that was it, time had run out, the 125 miler was at hand.
During the race, the 366 engine, which had performed faultlessly
on Riversides’s road course, began to detonate under Daytona’s
sustained open-throttle running and eventually blew a head gasket.
Thus sidelined, the Team Associates Grand Am did not qualify for
the 500. There went $5000 down the tube. Period. End of experiment.
Now, Herb Adams and Team Associates are back in Detroit. They
think if they had been able to run more at Riverside, they would
have discovered the wheel/brake caliper interference problem and
the brakes probably wouldn't have failed. In which case, the car
might have placed third or fourth, since Thompson could run with
Ray Elder, who did finish third.
The one day on the Daytona course told them they had too much
compression and not enough power, and that their front suspension
geometry (which provided for no camber change or to change on either
the banking or straightaway), had to be slightly redesigned. In
five more days, they might even have made the big race, but then
again, maybe not. In any event, Tom Nell is rebuilding a lower compression
version of the 366 and a pair of 430s for comparison tests.
Also, they will not return to the Southern Grand National circuit
until summer, if then. Simply, with no major sponsor yet committed,
Team Associates is almost out of money and can’t see going
to any more races, knowing they probably will not have sufficient
time to get properly set up. Instead, it seems much more prudent
to take the Grand Am to nearby Michigan International Speedway and
complete a thorough test program at their own pace and within their
pocketbook. This done, they no doubt will take a crack at USAC’s
two big stock car races at MIS and Pocono. Beyond that, there are
no definite plans.
Through it all, Team Associates have tried to keep a positive
outlook and a spirit of cooperation with NASCAR. Still, they can’t
exactly fathom why, with the only potentially good Pontiac on the
circuit, NASCAR hasn't’t seen fit to let them run more.
For its part, NASCAR has taken the position that the Team Associates’
car, like any new car, has had so many things to be corrected that
naturally track time will be reduced. When the team gets its act
together, as far as technical requirements go, then the car will
be able to get the track time they need. In the last analysis, what
shall or shall not run is NASCAR’s decision.
And yet, we haven’t been talking about a group of backyard
racers. These guys design our passenger cars for us. They know how
to make an automobile comply with technical requirements. The whole
smog and safety flog hasn't been exactly shooting fish in a barrel.
Perhaps Roger Penske summed it up best one raw day at Daytona when
he commented to Adams: “You’re going through what we
went through last year.”
The tragedy of the whole affair is that a beautiful piece of machinery
that could give Pontiac fans something to cheer about, help NASCAR
fill its stands and keep Team Associates going, is sitting in a
garage in Waterford, Mich. But then, a lot of people thought the
“sucker” ground-effect Chaparral should not have been
sidelined either. (Text as written from the May 1973 Motor
Trend article by Eric Dahlquist.)
With about 200 miles to go, the Grand Am’s four-wheel
Corvette disc brakes began to lose pressure. Thompson zoomed into
the pits and the crew found fluid leaking out of the rear brake
calipers. Those beautiful wheels were flexing more than the team
had anticipated and the occasional contact had ground off the caliper
bleeder screw.
The crew was forced to put the Grand Am’s wheels
back on and roll it behind the wall before the brake fix could
be completed. So, the Grand Am’s brakes were repaired and
Thompson went charging off into the fray, trying to make up some
of the lost time.
*Reprint of the text as written - with the exception of most
illustration comments - in the May 1973 Motor Trend article
by Eric Dahlquist (above).
Credit and a big thanks to Pontiac Grand Am Enthusiast
-Murray aka: Murray
Simon for finding this long lost May 1973 Motor Trend
article of this beautiful Pontiac Grand National Grand Am sedan.
I remembered reading this very article in Motor Trend when I was
12 years old and had been seeking to own another copy for information
from the article. I believe Murray found this in his vast Pontiac
Grand Am archives.
And credit and special appreciation to The
Spirit of Team Associates:Herb
Adams, Ted Lambris, Harry Quackenboss and Tom Nell, with driver
Jerry Thompson; who at the time of my 1st reading this
article in 1973 re-ignited my earlier desire and appreciation
for all Pontiac Hi-Po vehicles and the-then-new 1973 Pontiac Grand
Am (One of which we own today) and the general Pontiac performance
image. To me this was yet another testament of the overall contributions
to the REAL Pontiac Performance and Handling superiority in the
1970's created by Herb Adams and his fellow engineering team.
Their accomplishments are, literally, in our garages and driveways
equipping those vintage Pontiac's we all drive and enjoy today.
And the Silverbird 
