A car with the hood up is a different photograph from a car with the hood down, and at a Monday-night meet it is also a much rarer one. Most people close everything, wipe the paint, and stand back where you can watch them being casual about it. This 1966 GTO 389 sat with its hood open from the time I arrived until the light was gone, and the owner never really left the fender. I had already photographed this car once, the shape of it, the turquoise, the stacked lights going gold in the last of the sun. This time I went at the half of it that actually does the work.
The Man With the Orange Cloth
He never stopped. Every time I came back around he had that orange cloth out again, going over a rocker cover he had already done twice, and I do not think he was cleaning anything by that point. That is most of what these Monday nights in Richmond Hill actually are. People sit in folding chairs beside cars they have owned for thirty years, and the wiping is just something to do with your hands while you wait for somebody to walk up and ask you a question.
I like photographing that more than I like photographing the car. A pair of hands and a cloth over a painted fender tells you the thing is loved, and that is not a fact you can get out of the bodywork.
What the 1966 GTO 389 Air Cleaner Tells You
Look at the air cleaner. One round chrome lid with 389 on the decal, sitting over a single four barrel carburettor, and that one detail places the whole car. Pontiac built 96,946 GTOs in 1966, the best year the model ever had, and 77,901 of them left the factory with exactly this engine, the 335 horsepower version. The other 19,045 got Tri-Power, three two barrel carburettors under a wider lid, rated at 360.
Here is the part worth knowing. 1966 was the last year you could buy it. General Motors killed multiple carburettors across every division for 1967 and carved out an exception only for the Corvette, so the Tri-Power GTO stopped right there. It also happens that 1966 was the first year the GTO was its own model at all. Before that it was an option package you ticked on a Tempest LeMans.
So what was sitting in front of me is a 1966 GTO 389 in its most ordinary form, in the year the model peaked, and only 12,798 of those 96,946 cars were convertibles. I did not know any of that while I was standing in the parking lot. I just liked the blue block against all that chrome.
Wood, Chrome and a Row of Round Dials
The inside is the other half of this set. Pontiac wrapped the 1966 dash in wood grain and set four round dials straight into it, and somebody has since added a small pod of three more gauges underneath with a tachometer hanging below that, which is exactly what people did to these cars and exactly what a purist will tell you not to do. The wood rim steering wheel is the piece I kept coming back to. Black vinyl over everything else, and then that one warm circle of wood in the middle of it.
The shifter on the console is an automatic. Nobody wants to hear that about a car like this, but it is what is in the car, and I am not going to shoot around it.
An engine bay is a hard thing to photograph well. You have a black hood acting as a lid over the whole scene, chrome throwing the sun straight back at you, and a deep shadow down between the fenders where no detail survives at all. I expose for the bright metal and let the underside go black, because the alternative is lifting those shadows until the whole bay turns flat and grey and looks like a parts catalogue. No flash, available light, same as everything else I shoot. The Leica Q3 and its fixed 28mm means I cannot stand back and zoom in, I have to lean over the fender myself, which is also how you end up in a conversation with the owner.
If you want the rest of this car, the body, the colour and the low sun on the outside of it, that is all in the first set from this same night. There are more of these Monday nights in my street photography projects, and there will be more, because these lots north of Toronto fill up every week from May to October and I have barely started on them.
Thanks for looking!
