Bill Mitchell may have held the best job the auto industry ever offered. As the head of General Motors Design, he succeeded Harley Earl, who arguably invented automotive styling and spent his career crafting and fine-tuning this dream job.
It was these guys' responsibility to keep the creative juices of the design team flowing so the stylists could crank out trend-setting designs. That meant traveling the world's auto show circuit and bringing home souvenirs like Ferrari Daytonas, Lamborghini Miuras, and Maserati Ghiblis to serve as inspiration for the team. It meant customizing production cars to try new styling tweaks or powertrain combinations, then driving these million-dollar babies to and from work to evaluate them. It even meant going racing on the sly. We can only hope that, when Bill Mitchell died in 1988, he didn't find heaven to be a disappointment.
The atmosphere was already changing and the budgets tightening when Mitchell retired in 1977, but life was good at GM in the 1960s and early 1970s. Market share was high, and GM led the domestic pack in styling. Mitchell's inspirational efforts paid off in a parade of memorable concept and custom cars. Most were well publicized and are widely remembered today. The Sting Ray racer covered in Motor Trend Classic, Issue Two and its Corvette cousins Mako Shark and Manta Ray are probably the most famous, but his Corvair-derived Monzas (GT and SS) and three Riviera Silver Arrows also garnered plenty of good ink. All were runners, and Bill would occasionally commute in them, bring them to racetracks and other events, and stage impromptu auto shows to gauge consumer reaction to the design directions each explored.
The customized Firebird on these pages was never publicly shown to the press, and hence very little has been written about it. But it was such a favorite of Mitchell's that, upon his retirement, he swung a deal to take this car--and none of the others--with him, promising to will it back to the corporation.
At first glance, the Pontiac Pegasus looks like a long-nosed 1970 Firebird filled to brimming with Ferrari V-12 drivetrain hardware and gauges, finished in a gallon of candy-apple-red paint and two gallons of gold-tone pinstriping and chrome. The decoration suggests it might be capable of leaping and break-dancing, but look past the lowrider decor and many of the modified styling elements point the way toward future GM designs.
Chevy stylist Jerry Palmer drew the initial sketches that caught Mitchell's eye around 1970.
"We were looking at how to freshen up the Camaro. I did a four-by-two-foot sketch early on with a [1958 Ferrari 250] Testa Rossa front end on it. Then Bill Mitchell broke my heart and took it down to Pontiac."
The Pontiac studio further developed the design, adding the marque's signature center divider bar to the grille. Palmer's simple round headlight rings were modified to jut out at the bottom like those on the 1974 Firebird and Camaro. The wraparound rear glass previewed an F-car restyling for 1975, though the production cars lacked Pegasus's subtle boattail contouring of the decklid below. The pinched-profile tail-end treatment would be adapted to Pontiac's 1973 Le Mans/Grand Am A-bodies.
So why a Ferrari engine? Retired design veep Chuck Jordan recalls Mitchell wanting to show the engineers at Pontiac--a division that had dabbled in overhead cams before--what a high-revving low-torque Trans Am would feel like. But maybe it simply seemed like the obvious thing to do in a car wearing Palmer's Testa Rossa face. And Mitchell aide-de-camp Dick Henderson remembers Enzo Ferrari offering to contribute a 365 GTB/4 (Daytona) V-12 engine to the project, which surely sealed the deal.
Details of the original installation are sketchy. Henderson recalls GM's in-house mechanical assembly folks mating the engine to a GM Turbo-Hydramatic at first (to suit Mitchell's fondness for low-effort cruising), only to find that the three-speed was ill-suited to such a highly strung engine. A Ferrari five-speed, likely from a 365GTC/4 was eventually installed. Other accounts suggest Luigi Chinetti's North American Racing Team had a hand in installing or setting up the 4.4-liter competition motor with high-overlap cams and big-bore Weber carbs. In any case, Pontiac engineers reportedly sorted the car out to ride and drive properly, installing Corvette four-piston rear brakes and making other modifications as necessary.
Opening the forward-hinged hood reveals a clean, uncluttered engine bay framing the gorgeous red-headed four-cam engine. With the air cleaner mounted to the hood, there's an unobstructed view of 12 gleaming velocity stacks. The front two are shortened for hood clearance, which compromises the breathing balance somewhat. Similarly, snaking the 12 exhaust header pipes past various chassis obstacles means the runners are no longer of equal length, so exhaust-pulse timing isn't as Enzo's boys originally intended. (Ferrari mufflers and Anza tailpipes ensure that the sound coming out of those pipes is precisely to spec.) Otherwise, the engine fits remarkably well, considering the wheelbase wasn't stretched. Moving the firewall nine inches back, however, elbowed out the air-conditioning system that might otherwise have helped fight the heat radiating off the exhaust. Bill probably didn't rack up many miles on the Pegasus in July and August.
Interior space appears uncompromised, and little of the original Firebird trim remains. The leather-covered dash is modified to accept the Ferrari-spec Veglia Borletti gauges. A new wood-trimmed center console houses the Ferrari shifter (without the clanging chromed shift gate), while the handbrake is moved down to the side of the tunnel. Custom leather bucket seats--sans headrests--are sewn to look like those used in Ferraris and Maseratis. A Ferrari fuel filler is mounted to the rear deck, which doesn't open. A spare gold-chromed Borrani wheel and tire reside in view beneath the rear glass, relegating any luggage to the rear seat area.
But Mitchell never planned to go touring in the Pegasus. He much preferred to spend time in quieter, more comfortable transportation and to use cars like this to make a splash at events, especially at racetracks. He'd set up a show-car corral in the paddock and drive a few demonstration laps but never race. Leaving the track at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, one rainy afternoon, he clipped a bridge support while wiping a fogged-up windshield. Mitchell used the occasion to restyle the nose without the divider in the grille. He reportedly "restyled" the front one more time in retirement, after which the car was properly restored, right down to the Randy Wittine-designed pinstriping.
Slipping behind the wheel of this mongrel beast is a surreal event. The seats and dash look and feel Italian, but the heavy doors, brittle switchgear, and ultralight power steering scream Yankee Doodle (at least a telescoping feature allows the wheel to be positioned at an Italian-arm's length). The fenders bulge upward like those of a vintage racer. The engine fires instantly in subfreezing weather, and the clutch takes up smoothly near the top of the pedal travel. Without proper plates and insurance, we dare not probe much of the 200-mph speedometer, but thanks to a 4.10:1 axle ratio, we get ample use of the shifter and clutch at reasonable speeds. At 3834 pounds, the Pegasus accelerates like a Ferrari Daytona with an extra passenger aboard, and the short gearing causes the tires to scratch at modest throttle openings even in third gear. Not surprisingly, it handles like a leaf-sprung live-axle Trans Am with a linebacker on board. But the best part is the sound, which will ring familiar to anyone who's listened to the short film "Rendezvous" with the volume cranked up.
After spending a day with the Pegasus, one has to wonder what might've happened had it impressed Pontiac engineers enough to launch a program to differentiate the F-body twins with high-revving smaller-displacement Pontiacs. Maybe two OHC Sprint sixes on a common crankshaft? Sorry, the unburned hydrocarbons are starting to addle the brain...
Mitchell and Ferrari:Influence Sans The Passion
The creation of the Ferrari-engined, Ferrari-nosed Pontiac Pegasus concept by Bill Mitchell raises the question "why?" Was Mitchell, like Chuck Jordan (his top assistant, who eventually became GM's Design VP), a Ferrari lover? Did he share Jordan's Prancing Horse passion?
As Mitchell's undercover speechwriter during his last couple years at GM's styling helm, I don't recall much discussion of Ferraris. Nor did any of his dozens of Corvette concepts show significant Ferrari influence. As far as Jordan recalls, the only Corvette design element lifted directly from a Ferrari was the wall-to-wall horizontal body-side groove of the 1970s 308, which reappeared on the 1984 C4 Vette--designed long after Mitchell's retirement.
What of the story that Mitchell demanded both Ferrari and Rolls-Royce influence in the luxury coupe concept that became the 1963 Buick Riviera? "He went to the London auto show and saw these razor-edge Rolls-Royces," Jordan recalls. "Meanwhile, we were working on this four-passenger Thunderbird competitor, doing jet-plane sides and pointed fronts, a real aircraft-influenced 'wow' car. Later, he said, 'Here's what I want to do. Tell the guys we want a car that has sporty elegance, a Ferrari/Rolls-Royce.'
"The Ferrari influence is harder to see, but the sporty feeling is certainly there. It has some rake and fenders that leap a little. There's a stance to it, and the proportion is sporty. It's not stuffy like an English car."Did Mitchell own any Ferraris? "He knew he ought to learn more about them," Jordan says. "So he told [Warren Fitzgerald, his administrative assistant], 'Fitz, buy me a Ferrari.' And Fitz bought him one of those big, old Ferraris, like a Tour de France, not a really romantic one. And he didn't like it. Those old Ferraris were hard to steer at low speeds and not what he was used to. He said it was trucky. So he said, 'Fitz, sell the thing.' That was before the Pegasus.
"No, he didn't have the passion for Ferraris."
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