Warren Tripp’s license plate is
the only giveaway to the Tri-power
setup under the GTO’s hood.RIDING A TIGER
22 SEPTEMBER 2019
Now That’s a Goat
of a Different Color!
A
memorable moment in The Wizard of Oz was the first
scene inside the Emerald City when a horse drawing
a carriage kept changing colors, prompting the line,
“Well now—that’s a horse of a different color!” (Actu-
ally four horses were used during filming, each one tinted with
powdered gelatin.)
What does this all have to do with Warren Tripp’s Sunfire Red
1964 GTO? To answer that, we need to back up a bit in time. The
first car he ever owned was a bright red 1964 Goat (probably
Grenadier Red, according to the old paint codes). His wife, Carol,
really enjoyed tooling around Reno, Nevada, in it, especially when
teenage boys baited her at stoplights. She’d smoke ’em every
time.
“At that time, it was superb,” Warren notes in hindsight. “It
would outrun anything around it.”
As a young man, however, purchasing such a hot machine
By Steve Temple
required a bit of chicanery. Warren misrepresented it as a tepid
Tempest to his father, who praised him for his practical choice.
Little did he know what his son was up to until sometime later,
not realizing the GTO was initially a performance package for the
Tempest. “I pulled the wool over his eyes,” Warren admits with a
mischievous grin.
As time went on, however, life got in the way. Or rather, an ex-
pectant mother.
“My wife was so pregnant she couldn’t fit behind the wheel,”
he explains. So about seven years after acquiring their beloved