Guilty Pleasure: 1961-63 Pontiac Tempest With Trophy 4 Engine
The early Pontiac Tempest was a John Delorean-backed machine with plenty of wildly innovative features, including a rear-mounted transaxle and flexible cable-style driveshaft.
One of those innovative features, however, wasn't so great: the four-cylinder "Trophy 4" engine, which was a designed-on-a-shoestring-budget-at-the-last-minute deal, essentially one cylinder bank of the 389-cubic-inch V8, knocked together by Smokey Yunick on a random workbench in his Florida shop.
The Trophy 4 was nearly as heavy as a V-8, would shake the fillings out of your teeth if it wasn't tuned perfectly, and only the most frighteningly completist Tempest zealots--if there is such a thing--would ever want one today.
Now, your early Tempest with the 215-cubic-inch, destined-to-become-the-Rover-V-8 engine is pretty cool, and the Tempest with the 326-cubic-inch V-8 is also cool. A few years later, you could get a Tempest with a SOHC six-cylinder engine boasting the first timing belt in production automobile history, which is extremely cool.
Everybody wants one of those cars. The Trophy 4-equipped cars, however, are seen as somewhat shameful things, so of course I want one for my fleet of Guilty Pleasure cars.
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