One-year-only Cragar S/S Sparkler 15-inch
wheels (which Mancini found still in their
boxes) with staggered-size Polyglas GTs give
the GTO a mild day-two attitude.SEPTEMBER 2019 17“When I was 12 years
old, I found the car
of my dreams”
In the meantime, it was my job to learn
everything I could about GTOs. I studied,
read books, and purchased vintage maga-
zines so that I could read the new car road
test articles. That’s how I learned of Ace
Wilson’s Royal Pontiac and the Royal Bob-
cat package. More on that later.
You have to understand that in the early
to mid 1990s, I was still obtaining informa-
tion by writing to people and clubs by snail
mail, calling for print catalogs, and check-
ing out books from the local library. There
was no internet access like today. I can
assure you I was the only kid in the fifth
grade reading the Ames Performance cata-
log cover-to-cover or the GTO Restoration
Guide over and over again.
I started planning exactly how I wanted
to restore the GTO, and I decided it had
to be 100 percent original with maybe a
few select period-correct speed upgrades.
When the GTO finally came home from
storage around 1997, I did what any kid
would do—I took the car completely apart.
I spent as much free time as I could work-
ing on the car with the plan to have it fin-
ished for my senior year of high school.That didn’t happen. The project took a
lot more time and money than I had at the
time, and my wanting everything perfect
compounded the problem. My father and
I worked on the car on weekends over the
next decade, always moving the project
forward but at a very slow pace. After
college, I started working at a restoration
shop, where I was able to get some serious
progress done on the body. By 2006, the
body shell and chassis were completed.
In 2008, I set out to start my own res-
toration shop, and so the project stopped
completely and the new shop became my
focus. Working on customer cars took pri-
ority, and it would be a long time before I
thought of starting back up on the GTO.
Fast-forward to 2017: I made the deci-
sion to pull the car out of storage and fin-
ish the restoration. It was completed just in
time for the 2017 MCACN show in Chicago,
where I presented it in my companies’
display.