#blogpost The Phoenix: The story of my 1990 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am GTA

To you this may look like a typical 3rd gen GM F-body Firebird. You may think it is a typical old, ill handling, slow, heavy, American car. But this 1990 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am GTA is so much more than that. Over the years it has been loved, hated, abused, neglected, forgotten, and re-birthed. The story of this Firebird leading up to today is far from normal. This car has blown away all of the expectations I had for it, and the car continues to surprise me. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me give you some of the history of this Trans Am.

A Brief History

On January 9, 1990, a woman bought this 1990 Pontiac Trans Am GTA from a small, multi brand dealership in Rochester, New York. This car was unique not only because it was bought with the GTA package, but also because it was bought without T-tops which went against the trend of most Firebirds of the time. The GTA package included things like the 5.7 liter L98 V8 (the same V8 that was in most C4 Corvettes that for 1990 models was rated a 245 hp and 345 lb-ft of torque), the WS6 “performance” suspension (yes 4th gen Trans Am owners, you were not the only ones the get a suspension package named WS6), gold snowflake rims, and copper laced GTA badges. In this case, GTA stands for Gran Turismo Americano not grand theft auto. You would not believe how many people have cracked that joke. Over the next couple years, the car was driven lightly, never saw snow, and eventually in 1993 was sold to a used car dealership in Michigan. There, it was bought by an old co-worker of my dad. Over the time he owned it he had the transmission rebuilt after 3rd gear went out, had the underside and engine bay shot with undercoat, changed the oil regularly, and overall took very good care of the car excluding two important things. For one he smoked in the car A TON, which left the headliner and rear seats stained and the rear plastics covered in scuz. Secondly, in 2000, he shoved the car into a storage unit with a full tank of gas when he moved to Wisconsin. The car never ran or moved for the next 13 years until my dad and I yanked the car out of storage.

The Rescue

On the night of April 26, 2013, my dad came home and told me that night we were going to look at an old coworker’s car at a self storage at the north end of Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was a freshman in high school at the time so I had a driving permit but not a licence. Despite that fact I was looking for a project car at the time. So, that night we hopped into the family Astro van and drove up to look at the car. On the way to the self storage my dad told me we were looking at a Firebird but he didn’t give me any details about the car, so I had no idea what to expect. Upon arriving at the self storage, we drove around the buildings a few times before finding the storage unit that held the car. We unhooked the lock and lifted the door to reveal an extremely dusty 3rd gen Trans Am sitting on four completely flat and mostly dry-rotted tires.

When the headlights from our van hit the car I was breathless. Here was a complete, solid, unmolested, Trans Am that was even in one of my favorite colors for cars, white. My dad and I thoroughly looked over the car to see what we had to work with. The battery, as would be expected, was completely flat but a quick attachment of a jump box gave us enough juice to let us examine important things like if the pop-up headlights worked. The gas cylinders that hold the hood up where shot so rather than have one person stand and hold the hood while the other examined the engine, we grabbed a nearby broom which proved to be a perfect substitute for a prop rod. A socket and breaker bar were then put on the harmonic balancer pulley so we could check if the engine would turn over. The engine turned relatively easy and felt smooth throughout a few revolutions. We attempted to put air into the tires to see if they would hold air and we were happy to find all but one held pressure. Well, we were happy until we realized the electric hatch latch would not work with just the jump box juice. This meant we would need extract the spare from inside the car. If you can’t tell from the pictures, that is not a lot of space to work with. The underside of the car was very solid thanks the the undercoating, however the exhaust from the cats back had some rust holes and the Y-pipe had a small crack. Remember how I said that the car was put away with a full tank of gas? Yeah, that turned into a tank full of pure corroded fuel that was so bad that when we later stuck a siphon down the filler neck it only brought up rust and some scuz. After finishing our analysis of the car we wrote up a quick list of parts we knew we would need. The list originally consisted of gas tank, fuel pump, cat back exhaust, brakes, tires, and a few other little things here and there we noticed. As with almost any project this list did not even come close to what actually needed to be fixed on the the car.

Over the next month we priced out parts and negotiated a price on the car. A big motivation I had to take on this project actually came from watching Roadkill. Specifically, the junkyard Cuda episode where they got a Plymouth Barracuda out of a junkyard, got it running, and went drag racing in it. I figured if they could do it, my dad and I could do it with this pile. Originally, the previous owner of this car was going to just write the car off to the owner of the self storage who probably would have just sent it to a junkyard. So we rescued this car from certain death by junkyard. We ended up agreeing on a price of $500 for the car as long as we got it out of the storage unit ourselves. So, on May 18, 2013, two days after my fifteenth birthday, we extracted the car from the storage unit for the first time in 13 years. This was not a simple task. Remember that issue with the electronic latch issue that was not allowing easy access to the spare tire? Yeah, that turned into a one and a half hour debacle of extracting the tire and finding out you have to inflate the tire with the weight on the car on it. You have to do this because the spare is one of those spares that is stored flat and comes with a little nitrogen tank that you are suppose to use to inflate it with and if you don’t inflate it with weight on it, it inflates completely wrong. Maybe that is just this spare, I don’t know. Once we got the spare on we pushed the car out into daylight and had to snap some more pictures because this thing looked hilarious with 13 years of dust and cobwebs. Photo shoot over, it was time to get the car on the trailer. Unfortunately, earlier that day we found out the winch on the trailer was seized up so we bought a $40 hand winch as a substitute. This meant cranking the car on the trailer and tying it down took over an hour longer that it would have with a working electric winch. But we succeeded in loading the car and we hit the road leaving a giant cloud of dust behind us.

The next day, we hauled the car from our house to a warehouse my grandpa owns where we were going to store the car until we could work on it. After we washed the car there it looked so much better you could have sworn we repainted the car if you just look at the pictures. In person the paint was still not as good as it could be so we added the job of buffing the car out to the to-do list.

The Rebirth

Over the 9 months, not a lot of progress was made. The gas cylinders for the hood and rear hatch were replaced so we didn’t have to use the broom anymore, parts were ordered, and we robbed a battery from another co-worker’s second gen Dodge Cummins that he was using as a donor truck for his own project. It wasn’t till March of 2014 that we really started moving on this project. At the time my grandfather owed a Chevrolet/ Buick dealership, and we were able to use the workshop to work on the car which proved to be extremely useful for many reasons. The first thing we decided to tackle was the fuel system. In order to drop the fuel tank of these 3rd gen F-bodies the entire rear suspension and the exhaust from the cats back has to come out. All the bolts came out with a little WD40 and while disconnecting the suspension we noticed the sway bar links were shot so we got those ordered up and continued taking out the tank. Once we dropped the tank we popped out the sending unit and found that it was totally clogged with corroded fuel so a new sending unit had to be ordered also. Popping the sending unit out also revealed how bad the inside of the tank really was. That thing looked like it had been sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

We were able to blow out the fuel lines with a air hose so we got lucky there. It was about at this point I started working on the front brakes and wheel bearings while my dad assembled the sending unit and installed it in the tank. Wheel bearings packed and new brakes installed, it was time to lift the new tank into place. the weight of the tank is held up by two “straps” in the car which are padded with felt strips. These strips are glued to the gas tank. Unfortunately, these parts have been discontinued by GM so we had to reuse the old strips. After fitting the new tank and external fuel filter, the rear suspension was reinstalled with the new sway bar links. We did not install the new exhaust yet because we still needed to have a crack in the y-pipe welded up. Once everything we needed was back together, we changed the oil, oil filter, trans fluid, trans fluid filter, and replaced the rear brakes. Once all of this was done, we attempted to start the car. After failing to get the car to start, we checked for spark and concluded the problem must be the fuel injectors where junk. We ordered a set of L98 injectors that turned out being meant for the Corvette. Rumor has it that they flow better that the injectors originally used in the F-bodies. I have no idea if this is true, but they were about the same price so why not give them a try.

To replace the injectors, we had to take the disconnect the throttle body and take the intake plenum and runners out to access the fuel rails. The passenger side runner was the hardest to get off because you have to work around a bunch of coolant hoses and part of the EGR system to get to the lower bolts. Once we got it apart we cleaned up the intake parts and inspected the old injectors. Now that everything was cleaned up we put the intake and fuel system back together and now it was time to fire up the car up for the first time in 14 years.

So we had done it! We got this car running for the first time in 14 years and man we were crazy happy. Right up until the car shut it self off without warning. You see at the end of the video my dad pop up from under the hood at look at me. He asked me if I shut it off and I was like, “No, did you?”. When he said, “That’s not good,” my heart dropped because I thought this meant we had a big problem on our hands. The rest of that night went into trying to identify the problem. The car was turning over put it was not snapping to life. If I remember correctly, we could not hear the fuel pump running therefore it was not getting fuel and we may have noticed the spark plugs where not firing but I don’t quite remember. By the end of the night we found out that a fuse blowing every time the car ran for about 45 seconds was what was causing the car to shut off. Because we were not sure why the fuse was blowing and it was the end of the weekend, we decided we would ask some of the mechanics at the dealership to look into the issue over the next week. Over that next week the professionals were able to trace the issue back to the fuel tank. In other words, something in the sending unit was causing the fuse to blow. This meant the entire rear suspension and fuel tank had to come out in order for us to pop the new sending unit out to see what was causing our issue. After going through that hour and a half process again we popped the sending unit out and nearly immediately saw what was wrong. I will never forget as long as I live the look on my dad’s face and him saying, “Son of a Bit**,”. What happened was there is a small hose clamp that serves the purpose of holding a small sound-deadening doohickey in place just above the fuel pump that my dad forgot to tighten when he assembled the sending unit. This meant the clamp slid down and was crossing the two terminals on the internal fuel pump causing the fuse to blow. The reason for why the fuse blowing happened 45 seconds into the car running and not right away I will never know, but we proceeded to tighten that clamp and reinstall the fuel system and suspension. The rest of that weekend consisted mostly of changing the rear differential oil, wire brushing rusty bits of the underside of the car, and doing a full undercoat job on it. The next weekend I got to move my car for the first time under its own power. The car had been moved to the back lot of the dealership so it was not taking up a garage spot over the week. Man, getting to drive that car just across the parking lot was exhilarating despite the fact I was only doing like 2 mph because one of the tires was flat as a pancake.

Our next task was to flush the radiator. Our process for doing this was as follows: First drain all the old coolant, then we refilled the radiator with water, from there we ran the car to operating temperature so the thermostat would open allowing water to cycle through the engine, after about 5-10 minutes we would shut the car off and drain the water, from here the water process was run about 3 times and it was noticed the radiator leaked so we ordered a new radiator and took out the old radiator. Luckily the leaky radiator was discovered early Friday night so we were able to order one in time to get it in on Saturday. That was another huge advantage of doing all this work in a dealership, we could order parts and get them in the next day or sometimes later that very day. Once the new radiator came in, it was installed and filled with fresh coolant.
It was at this point the car would have been perfectly roadworthy if we put the exhaust on. At that point there was about three or four weeks till my 16th birthday so I was hoping to have the car on the road by then and at this point that could have easily been accomplished. However, we decided to tackle the faded paint. To do this we moved the car over to the dealership body shop so we would have easy access to buffer wheels and rubbing compounds. We actually took off the rear spoiler and got it repainted along with the door trim because the clear coat was coming off them. Another interesting thing we did as part of the paint refreshing was take the entire rear hatch off so we could sandblast and repaint a small metal strip that runs along the upper edges of the hatch glass. When we where blasting that strip, we also took the time to sandblast and repaint the rear sway bar. I have to say, this thing actually looks pretty cool without a hatch on it. Sometime in the future I may take the hatch off and drive it around for a day, just to say I did it. The paint refresh ended up taking almost all of our time over the next three weekends. The most interesting thing that happened in that time was I got to drive the car from the body shop, across the lot to the main shop so the car was not taking up space in the body shop. During this short trip, I got to feel full throttle for a split second which left me giggling with excitement.

Once we finished refreshing the paint this car looked so much better. It was a total night and day difference in person. Form here we got a new set of BFG Sport Comp-2 tires mounted up on the wheels, Installed our new exhaust, and took the car for it’s first test drive. At this point I should point out it is about two weeks after I turned 16. I had taken my driving test and passed with only one point off. So, I had my licence and was super excited to finally drive this car on the road. Our test drive went very well. Everything was running good, the trans was shifting smoothly, and this thing was getting all sorts of looks. In the end, the only big thing that we noticed was wrong was the car wandered when you let go of the wheel. So we scheduled an alignment for the upcoming week and left the car at the dealership for another week. While the car was getting aligned, the mechanics noticed the front shocks were actually shot. My grandpa actually ended up paying for the alignment and the new front shocks which was super generous. Up until this point, I had covered all the costs except for the tires which my parents helped me out with as a 16th birthday present. That next weekend we were on vacation, but that Monday was a holiday so I got to pick up the car and drive it on my own. I actually drove the car straight to a friend’s house so I could pick him up and we could go for a cruise. The first on ramp we hit I put my foot to the floor, the thing took of and me and my buddy where just laughing like crazy. We were giddy and we spent the entire afternoon just cruising around and checking out what this car could do.
That next day I got to take the car to school for the very first time. At this point a good chunk of the people in my class knew about the project. Mainly because I went to a small school so word traveled fast. A few of the die-hard import guys in my class had been trash talking this project from the beginning, so I was interested to see what they would think. Everyone’s reaction when this car first rolled into the parking lot was way better than I could have ever imagined. One of those who trashed talked turned and it was like he had just seen a ghost. Everyone else in the parking lot was looking to, it was a feeling I will never forget. That extreme feeling of accomplishment, like I just broke the mold of what everyone thought of me. That day, tons of people came up to me and asked me about the car. Was it mine? How much did I pay for it? How fast is it? Will it do a burnout? Even people who pretty much never talked to me were suddenly super interested.
Over the following summer I drove the Trans Am everywhere. I drove rain or shine, wherever I went until the little plastic gears in the pop-up headlight motors disintegrated due to them being 20+ years old. This meant I had more of a curfew than Michigan law already has for 16 year olds. This was probably for the better because I was already doing enough stupid stuff in the day, and it would have only been worse at night. I washed the car almost every week whether the car needed it or not, just because I enjoyed giving the car attention. In that first summer we quickly answered the question of could the ol’ ‘bird do a burnout. The answer is yes. Yes it can.

I drove the car up until the end of that fall when I bought a 2007 Chevy Trailblazer for the winter. Here in Michigan, we can have some pretty wild winters and they put a little devil called salt on the roads which is terrible on cars. For this reason if you really value your car you keep it off the road over the winter. Over that winter we took out the section of exhaust that goes from the exhaust manifolds to right beyond the cats. We took it out so we could sandblast it, fix a crack in it that had formed over the summer, repainted it, and shoved it back into the car.
The next summer was another successful season of cruising, hooning, and attending a few car meets. One really cool thing I got to do with the car was cruising out to Grand Haven, Michigan, with my dad. I was in the Trans Am, and my dad drove his 1979 Camaro Rally Sport that he has had since he was in high school. Grand Haven is a beach side town on Lake Michigan that is a very popular place to go in the summer. When we got there, we ended up parking next to a 1st gen Camaro so we had the first through 3rd generations of GM f-bodies lined up.

Toward the end if the of that second summer we noticed that the intake manifold gasket was leaking oil down the back of the engine. So the main project for the next winter would be tackling that issue. This was a pretty big job because the entire intake, fuel system, alternator, and distributor had to come off. While we where taking the distributor out we noticed the inner terminals on the cap and the rotor where both very corroded. As a result, we decided to order replacements so we wouldn’t have a future spark issue. The manifold itself came off with little headache, but those dang lower intake runner bolts were a pain again. Another headache of the process was scraping off the 26 year old gaskets. Cleaning the residual gasket took at least three hours, it was bad. We also ended up taking the manifolds and other parts to a parts washer to further clean them up. Once everything was cleaned up we reassembled the intake, fuel system, alternator, and distributor and we were set for the car to hit the road.

The first place I drove the Trans Am that spring was to a friend’s house. When I got in the car to leave, I noticed a puddle of coolant had formed in the passenger foot-well. As it turned out the heater core sprung a a leak and was dribbling coolant down into the foot-well. My temporary solution for this problem was to buy a couple fittings and make a bypass for the heater core. The bypass looks very sketchy, but it works so that worked for me. I do have a new heater core sitting on a bench near the car, and plan on tackling that project as soon as I can.

The month following was fairly problem free but then, one night while I was out cruising, I lost 3rd gear completely. It pretty much turned into another neutral. The car would “shift” into 3rd but there was no propulsion happening at all. As it turned out the 3rd gear clutch packs had completely fried. Loosing 3rd gear in these transmissions is common. In fact, the previous owner had the trans rebuilt once already. So far the progress on getting the trans fixed has been slow. My dad and I have removed the transmission, however my limited funds has put a hold on the rebuild. Once I get enough cash to get the trans rebuilt, I plan to have the internals upgraded so I will not have to worry about it breaking again.

So that is where the car is today. Sitting up on jack stands in the garage with the transmission laying on the floor next to it. I cant wait to get to move on with this project. I really have been missing having the car part of my daily routine. I’ve enjoyed every moment with this car and I look forward to driving it as long as I possibly can. I don’t plan on quitting on the car anytime soon. My main goal for the car is to create a fun, reliable daily driver that I can go and tear up a track with on the weekends. The car still has a long way to go, but I am ready for what ever challenges the process may throw at me.