CLASSIC AMERICAN PEOPLE ‘Motortown Maverich - The John DoLorean Story’
New innovations continued to feature in all Pontiacs throughout the Sixties, and in late 1965 Pontiac announced a new engine for the ’66 Tempest and Le Mans models – the ‘OHC 6’, and it was all pure DeLorean in concept. John DeLorean explains his thinking behind the engine and his reasons for its short production span:
“GM, at that time, [1960s] used to buy every car of any consequence and run them all [for] 50,000 miles at the GM Proving Ground... and at the end of that time all of these cars were torn down and everything was looked at. At that point in time, the cars that had the combination of good performance and good fuel economy were all overhead cam cars… in particular the little Mercedes – they would perform with the best, but still got four or five more miles to the gallon. Of course, fuel was 24 cents a gallon, so nobody cared much about fuel economy…
“I started looking into it with a view that it really made sense, so we built the O.H.C. engine. We used the Chevy cylinder layout, and of course had a different block and a single overhead camshaft. We used the cog belt for the first time in
