The inertial force that started the supercar trend - Pontiac GTO - holds a distinctive position in the automotive world for 1968. Not only does it continue to establish the class standard in the fifth year of its existence, but it also represents a unique and revolutionary engineering/styling function. Its salient innovation is the integration of a rubber bumper with the body design, rendered in a manner that provides a direction and impetus for the entire industry. Never before has an automobile been so successful in confirming the correlation between safety, styling and performance as the 1968 GTO. With the new combinations of aesthetic unity, unbroken styling lines, decreased body vulnerability, increased impact absorption, and responsive power, handling and controllability, it convincingly proves that optimum design/function criteria for nearly all automotive purposes, can be achieved in one unit.
Pontiac people eat well. Prime rib an inch and a half thick, choice veal with a grapefruit and cheese condiment, filets, grapefruit in V.S.O.P. brandy for dessert ... all in the company cafeterias. Maybe that's where they developed their technique.
They're all epicureans. . . sophisticated . . . they know that the best way to assess the competence of the chef is by his omelette. Turning a proper omelette takes guts and time and some pretty crafty legerdemain, but once it's done you'll stand two heads higher than the next man.
With most people, their eggs shall always be chickens. Never Benedicted. Not even a mediocre liver omelette. Just chickens. They're members of The Establishment, so they let things develop in their own conventional, natural, inferior way without any attempt to buck the tide with improvements. Then they all disappear in anonymity.
But lots of people are different. John DeLorean, for instance, is Pontiac's general manager and only 42 years old; Jack Humbert, chief stylist, is 40; Josh Madden, plastics expert, appears to be less than that; and they're all just too far removed from that inglorious moment of being dropped into the dregs of oblivion known as corporate retirement programs, to let it dull their acumen.
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