Inspired by Claus' pics of the Canadian T/A's i went into a book i have here and took some pics of the styling ideas the had for the look of the all new 67' Firebird and the new look for the 69' Firebird. Seems like GM put some of them to use elsewhere within

67'Firebird:


69' Firebird:


David

Wow you guys find some really interesting stuff, thanks for posting!

'69 Firebird is a love/hate car already...look how many ways they could have screwed it up!

Wow. Some of those almost have a Stingray or Buick look. Interesting. Thanks. I saw a couple of those before but that's all.
I wonder why they didn't end up with the '67/'68 bumper contour better match the fender or visa versa.

The top 67 pic looks like the Banshee we'll never get a chance to restore. Too bad. Thanks for posting the pics, very cool!

I sure am happy the 69 turned out like it is , and not one of those!

Bjorn, you can see a close resemblence to the 69' styling in two of the pics.Also looks like a mid 70's lemans came out of one of the pics too.

David

I agree, Bjorn, they went a much better route w/ it then in the pics shown.

Jim2002,

The 67 pontiac bird original planning was SO close to the Vette that the chevy folks at GM said NO WAY (it would have taken away buyers from the Corvette sales)!

Pontiac lost the fight and had to go from a two-seater conception to a four-seater very late in the 67 game...thus the use of the 67 Camaro Body at the last moment for our first FGF.

Back then the GM exec cronies truly ran the decisions for Chevy and Pontiac and forced the infamous GM "all-for-one, one-for-all" mentality to maximixe sales. This hampered originality ideas from within the creative Chevy and Pontiac design offices for many, many years.

Alot of history and decision making crammed into those few sentences above, but basically thats the way it went.

Its kinda interesting how things come out after seeing the concepts. On the 67 if not for the front bumper it a vette with shaved door handles. and with the 69...it looks like some of those were in a SEMA show. LOL. Does anyone know if any of those went for auction at barrett-jackson or something...i saw a bonneville concept this past year go for i beleive over a million dollars

Nash, I thought that was why the Banshee was never put into production either. I believe that was in 64. That would've been something if our FGF's woulda started then. Did you ever notice that " F & G" are the 6th & 7th letters in the alphabet? So that's pretty fitting, huh?

James,

All I know is that it was a very LATE decision in 1966 that caused Pontiac to creat the 1967 Firebird. Banshee-thought-process aside, the Pontiac team wanted a two-seater and was hammered in late 1966 by the GM execs.

The Firebird Team had less than six months to truly come up with a Firebird for 1967. They of course used the Camaro body and frame, and the rest is history.

The bottom pic of the '67 sure has some Camaro overtones, and the top two pics of the '69 sure have a lot of styling cues that carried over to the '73 GTO. Glad they did away with the center bar in the grills.