Seeing any classic car come out of long-term storage is a beautiful thing, but everything becomes that much better when the vehicle in question is a muscle car. Especially if it’s an early Pontiac GTO.
The first-generation GTO is far from rare so it’s not exactly unusual to find examples rotting away in barns. But finding a pair of 1965 examples stored in the same barn, as YouTube’s “BK Garage Restorations” did, is a rare event. And fortunately enough, he purchased them and dragged them out of their graves.
These classics from the golden era have been sitting in a barn, alongside other cars and a ton of parts, since the early 1990s. Yes, they haven’t been moved in a whopping 30 years. How did they end up in storage for so long? Well, it seems the previous owner bought them in the early 1990s and was planning on restoring them. And even though he bought some of the necessary parts, life got in the way and the cars remained untouched for three decades.
Come 2022 and one of the GTOs is in a rather poor shape. Missing many components and covered in surface rust, it won’t get back on the road anytime soon. However, the car is totally restorable.
The second GTO, on the other hand, is in far better condition. Seemingly complete and still wearing its factory paint, the cream example is pretty much an unrestored survivor. And it really comes back to life once the new owner gives the car a proper cleaning.
Granted, it’s not yet ready to hit public roads and we don’t even know if the engine will fire up after so many years without a sip of gasoline, but it’s the kind of barn find that might run and drive with just a bit of work.
Introduced in 1964, the first-generation Pontiac GTO arrived with a 389-cubic-inch (6.4-liter) V8 engine under the hood. In 1965, the base four-barrel mill delivered 335 horsepower, while the optional Tri-Power version came with 360 horses on tap. Pontiac built about 75,350 of them that year. As I said, far from rare, but definitely cool.