1968 Pontiac GTO Ram Air II

This car, Lot 644, sold for $132,000, including buyer’s premium, at Barrett-Jackson’s Northeast 2016 auction in Uncasville, CT, on June 2016.

When you tell someone your 1968 GTO hard top cost $132,000, they’ll likely ask if it’s gold-plated. All the media attention in recent years has been on Judges and Ram Air IV cars. The casual muscle car enthusiast knows ’68 GTOs had those cool hideaway headlamps, vent windows and maybe a Hurst Dual Gate shifter. GTO won the Motor Trend Car of the Year Award ostensibly for their Endura bumper and solid design. But in hindsight it should have been awarded for the release of the Ram Air II engine.

Hopping up the GTO

1968 was an important year for GTO. The Ram Air engine changed considerably in the space of a few months. It went from being a 1967 carry-over D-port 400 to an all-new, savage animal capable of low 12-second ETs with proper super tuning.

Sporting option code 347, the Ram Air started out the 1968 year as the hot mill, but on May 15, Pontiac released a bulletin to their dealers advising them a new 400 engine was available to replace it. The new mill used the same 347 option code but was called Ram Air II.

It packed forged-aluminum pistons with 10.75:1 compression, round-port cylinder heads with oversized tuliped valves, an aggressive cam, and a distributor with an advance curve to match. The cam was Pontiac’s first computer-designed profile, while the crankshaft, block, heads, harmonic balancer, intake and carburetor were all special for this engine.

Wolf in sheep’s clothing

Without decals, wings, call-outs or special clues to identify a Ram Air II, these cars flew under the radar. Pontiac treated it as a running production change rather than a new model to be hyped. Ram Air II GTOs were built from May to July — three months’ worth of production. Pontiac only made 246 cars: 199 4-speeds and 47 automatics.

Was it a fast car? It devoured the smaller-cammed Ram Air III that came later and gave a Ram Air IV a hard time if it had too many options to weigh it down. Only a 455 HO or Super Duty could top it.

With all the attention being piled on the mainstream Ram Air III for 1969 and the revised Ram Air IV, Ram Air II was shuffled deep in the deck and lost. The only ones who remembered it were the lucky few owners and those who were burned by its scalding performance.

The II has always been a Pontiac aficionado’s car. Most people find it hard to distinguish between the base engine, 400 HO, the carry-over Ram Air and the Ram Air II. Press info was scarce on the engine. To date, only 19 examples — including the subject car — have been found among Pontiac fanatics. If you want numbers matching, it falls down to six cars. The survivor total is less than 25% of production. They make GTO Judges look positively common.

Rare and valuable

Rarity affects auction values, of course. Very few cars have been sold with their original engines. Take a look at the Verdoro Green hard top from the Thomas Stutzman Collection sold at Barrett-Jackson in January for $110,000 (Lot 1347). It was restored to show-standard but did not claim to have the original numbers-matching engine.

The highest price in the ACC database is $149,600 for a convertible example at Auctions America’s Fall Auburn venue in 2011 (ACC# 187170). There have been two recent sales of restorable projects online, but these were nabbed quickly. Both made the rounds on forums and blogs when they appeared.

The automatic Ram Air II is much more rare and should be, in theory, worth the same if not more than a 4-speed car. But the fact is the market has always shown a decided preference for stick-shift muscle where offered, and it will be the same with this model.

No excuses

That brings me to our subject car. It was the recipient of a no-excuses frame-off complete restoration. The owner started with a 52,000-mile car that had been taken off road in 1972 and up to that point had never left Illinois. The front clip was removed at one point, which assured no more mileage was added on over the years. It was verified as an original Ram Air II prior to restoration and given the white-glove treatment. It doesn’t get much better than that.

The first half of this year has established the floor for show-quality NOM and numbers-matching Ram Air II hard tops. This rarely happens in such a short amount of time with two similarly equipped cars. But with these two sales, we can see the outline of pricing on a typically equipped model, and for a show-quality, numbers-matching stick-shift car, that pricing is $120,000 to $140,000 depending on options and paint color.

So with that, it’s clear to me that the sale price here was accurate for the top end of the market. It will be awhile before another one appears with a verifiable background, a good starting point for renovation and an equally solid restoration. By then the market will likely have risen. All things considered, this was fairly sold and well bought.

(Introductory description courtesy of Barrett-Jackson.)