As captured in Framing John DeLorean, a new film directed by Don Argott and Sheena Joyce and told in a documentary style with dramatic reenactments starring Alec Baldwin as DeLorean and a supporting cast of top Hollywood character actors, the engineer came up with a loophole-with Estes’ approval, of course-to justify the high-performance aspect of the car. So the top executives at GM would never have approved the GTO as conceived. The result was a maneuverable but brawny car with a racing-friendly surplus of power and torque.ĭeLorean called it the Pontiac Tempest LeMans GTO, and it created a new category of automobile that would come to be known as the muscle car.īut GM had a strict mandate prohibiting its engineers from sticking big engines in smaller cars to make them go fast. When Pete Estes took over the reins of Pontiac in 1961 and DeLorean was named the division’s chief engineer, he seized the opportunity by having his engineering team throw a big, 389-cubic-inch V8 engine from the full-size Pontiac Bonneville into the midsize Pontiac Tempest. He wanted to replace those sedate rides with sportier vehicles, machines that embraced a youth culture more interested in going fast than being cozy. While other GM executives focused on building stately automobiles that seemed to float down the street on a cloud, DeLorean had different plans. “When DeLorean left,” he says, it “had become the third-best nameplate in the auto industry, right behind Chevy and Ford.” It was “like an old person’s division.” A 1964 Pontiac GTO. NEWSCOM
Patrick Wright, author of On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors, the bestselling tell-all book about the auto giant. Pontiac seemed to make only stuffy cars for older adults. At the time, GM was the biggest company in the world and the place to be, but Pontiac struggled with its brand identity and wasn’t connecting with America’s youth-suddenly a huge new consumer force driving the country’s emerging car culture. In 1956, DeLorean took a position at General Motors as an engineer at the Pontiac division. Before long, he became a rising star in the company-and in the industry. He officially began his automotive career in 1952, joining the research and development team at the Packard Motor Car Company. His education was interrupted by World War II (he served in the Army), but he eventually earned a master’s in automotive engineering and, later, an M.B.A. It has been speculated that John developed a love for the California lifestyle during these escapes. Hemmings Daily reported that when things got particularly rough, she would whisk the boys away to her sister’s home in Los Angeles. John’s mother, Kathryn, worked for General Electric and tried to keep things together at home. Drivetribe , an online community platform for auto enthusiasts, reported that his “poor English and problems with alcohol prevented him from ever progressing beyond the factory floor.” The DeLorean and its iconic cameo in “Back to the Future.” ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY His father, Zachary, was a union organizer and foundry worker at the Ford Motor Company. The son of immigrant factory workers, John Zachary DeLorean was born on January 6, 1925, and grew up in a primarily working-class neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. So how did the man behind America’s first muscle car become a figure with such a tortured legacy? Because much like the car he’s most famous for-the DMC-12, a cultural icon thanks to its featured role in the “Back to the Future” movies-he’s both celebrated for his sleek fantasy vision of the future, and widely mocked for his spectacular, and sordid, failures. DeLorean’s longtime attorney and staunch personal advocate Howard Weitzman told the Los Angeles Times after the carmaker’s death in 2005 that “John DeLorean had one of the most warped views of right and wrong” he had ever come across. He also was accused of being a thief, a fraud, an embezzler and a brazen con man who fooled everyone he ever did business with, from celebrities to superpowers, bilking them out of millions of dollars in the process.
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