PONTIAC MATH
SOMEWHERE, MAC McKELLAR IS SMILING.
Who? Malcolm “Mac” McKellar ran Pontiac’s engine-development team for decades, with his work encompassing Super Duty 389 and 421 V-8s, the OHC Six and the ’61 Tempest’s four, which was simply one half of the existing Pontiac›389. He even had a number of trick factory racing camshafts named for him. Somehow, his name doesn’t pop up in most casual conversations about Pontiac in that era. John DeLorean and Jim Wangers are most often cited there, and occasionally a historian will drop a mention of Chief Engineer Pete Estes in the mix, since he went on to run GM. But McKellar? His name is a deep cut for anyone but the most dedicated Pontiac fan.
Among the experiments McKellar’s division carried out, and a prototype long acknowledged to be one of his favorites, was an overhead-cam version of Pontiac’s 421-cubic-inch V-8. The division tried various valve configurations — two, three, and four valves per cylinder, with three-valve setups using either one or two intake valves—as well as front- or rear-mounted camshaft, which reported that some versions made north of 600 hp on the dyno.) Costs eventually killed the cammer V-8 project, although lessons learned on the V-8s were transferred over to the OHC Six. When McKellar retired in mid-1982, he was gifted a prototype OHC 421, which he later installed in a 1963 Grand Prix. He owned it until the day he died, in 2011, nearly 30 years later. (After Mac’s passing, that engine was being marketed, sans Grand Prix, for a cool quarter-million dollars.)
