Period Road Test: Road & Track on the “Highest Performing” Pontiac, April 1986 You Should Know
“Like Rick in Casablanca, who arrived to take the waters and learned there were none, we showed up to test a new Pontiac and found we’d been misled.”
-Peter Egan, Road & Track Senior Editor
With the Fools’ Day upon us, we high-tailed it to the archives to resurface one of Road & Track’s delightful gag road tests, this time from the April 1986 issue on the subject of the Pontiac O-77 Excitement—written by vehicular polymath Peter Egan, accompanied by R&T‘s ever-astute Engineering Editor Dennis Simanaitis, and complemented by wonderful photography from none other than Jeff Zwart.
Click above to open the article in a full-window viewer, or hit the “share” arrow to download the PDF. Individual pages can be viewed in the gallery below.
Many automakers have made things other than cars: Peugeot cranks out pepper mills, Bugatti built trains, Buick gave the US Army the M18 Hellcat tank destroyer, and Toyota manufactures prefabricated homes in Japan. But despite the Pontiac branding, the hot air balloon tested by Road & Track wasn’t built by the boys on Baldwin Avenue. Instead, it was built by an outfit based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who constructed their craft under license from Cameron Balloons in the UK.
For the unfamiliar: hot-air ballooning, also known as lighter-than-air free flight, is essentially Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy at work: propane burners (i.e., the “engine”) heat the air inside the balloon’s envelope (the fabric making up the balloon itself), displacing denser, cooler air and thus allowing the balloon to rise. And that’s part of the gag: the O-77 Excitement was quite literally the “highest” performing Pontiac ever tested by the editorial staff. But that superlative claim still left many questions unanswered—this was a “road” test, after all.
“Suspension travel is superior to that in any vehicle we’ve ever tested, varying from full bump of zero to a droop of about 30,000 ft.”
“Top speed can theoretically reach 200 mph or so in a hurricane, but God help you when it’s time to land…Brakes, too, leave a lot to be desired.”
“Steering is rather vague, as you might expect, and the balloon was no Corvette through the slalom cones. ‘Poor adhesion,’ our Engineering Editor pronounced, after examining the times. ‘The thing just doesn’t have any stick.’”
Balloon pilots are wind whisperers, and must use the varying air currents at different altitudes to “steer” the balloon. Crooning* to the winds in R&T‘s test was commercially licensed balloon pilot Phil Glebe, a veteran of the fast-paced world of professional balloon racing. Glebe also flew a Pontiac-branded racing balloon that was apparently equipped with dual burners, much like R&T’s sky-tested aerostat.
The entire piece is an amusing read; don’t skip the comical footnotes in the test results. We’d like to think that messrs. Egan and Simanaitis might show up in the BaT comments should a balloon ever float across the auction block here, but this prewar Rolls-Royce balloon car is the closest we’ve gotten thus far.
*Crooning: flying low while using a small secondary burner.
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