I have a real treat for you Poncho fans this month. Our feature car is this unrestored 1965 Pontiac Parisienne Custom Sport which was factory built with a 409 and a 4 speed transmission. Rick Yakimec has been the owner of this rare Pontiac since 1976. Rick didn't know how rare this car was until quite a few years later. Here's the story about this Custom Sport as told by Rick's brother Ken:

My older brother was always the real car nut in the family. His first car of many was my dad’s discarded 53 Bel Air four door sedan that he stuffed a 1956 vintage 265 into as soon as he could find any kind of small block Chevy to take the place of the 235. It was quite a screamer, for what it was, but it always left him wanting something with a bit more displacement.

In about 1976 he had the chance to buy a tired, beat, ugly, black 1965 Custom Sport cheap from another local who had acquired it out of Edmonton and rebuilt the motor crudely and quickly (and usually in an altered state of consciousness as well). This fellow added quite a few more scars too it during the short rough time it spent with him. 

I must say it looked pretty impressive when he lifted the hood to show me the massive 409 under the hood and going through the gears was pretty cool but it was pretty clear the 4 speed was kinda sick.  It had a T10 in it which he thought at the time might have been original but as we know now was a light duty replacement for the original Muncie

Once he actually discarded the T10 and the original factory shifter for a used Muncie and Hurst shifter and put on a Holley 750 in place of the original Square box four barrel, we went for a test drive.  This did not go well.

As I recall, he said those famous words, “Watch this!”,and through the gears we went at max RPM’s. I think it was just after the first to second shift when all of a sudden we felt a massive shudder and I turned my head just in time to see the drive shaft spiral out from under the car and head like a torpedo into the ditch.

 Once we managed to get stopped we went and picked up the pieces and took a look under the poor mangled underneath of the car. Bad Scene! The bell housing had actually been cracked almost all the way around the tranny area and the drive shaft was bent like a banana.  Luckily we knew a guy who could weld cast aluminium and we had access to local boneyards for another driveshaft so in a week or it was running again and this time we made through all four gears very impressively. The Holley really woke that thing up.

Anyway my bro drove the heck out of it for a couple of years (with the engine holding up like a champ oddly enough) and had many more adventures including having a front wheel come off at about 85 mph when all the lug nuts snapped off. (Badly out of round old Radar mag wheel we figured.)

He didn’t lose many impromptu races as I recall, but there came a time in the late 70’s when he was looking for an engine to stuff in a really quite nice chrome grilled 1955 GMC big back window Hydramatic-equipped short wheel base pickup  that he bought from a local miser. The 261 was kind of done and so was the 800 pound Hydramatic so he thought a 409 with a 350 turbo would do the trick.  It did. What a tire smoking beast! 

It’s kind of funny now but I remember stealing a few bits out of the engineless 65 to help equip the 1939 Buick I was working on at the time as it was just an ugly old car with no engine from my point of view.  I kept bugging him to get rid of the old hulk too.

I’m not sure what prompted him to send the VIN into GM Vintage Vehicle Services back in the 90’s but once he got the numbers back that indicated the rarity of this thing (74 produced) I have to admit I looked at that thing with a lot more respect. I definitely stopped bugging him to haul it to the boneyard at that point. 

When we found that it was a late production 409 Pontiac (late March 1965) and once we realized that that production date would have made it one of the very last 409 cars ever built he started to think about putting it back together.  Just for the record it is a 340 horse, triple black 4 speed car with power brakes, steering and am radio (tachometer as well) but for options that’s about it. Not even a posi.

It was about 2010 that he pulled the engine out of the GMC and put it back in the car and put the original carb, Muncie M20 tranny and wretched OEM shifter back on the car.

He has never found the time to restore though so it still wears all its battle scars proudly including the sort of modified front fender where the wheel came off. He has replaced the busted up rear chrome for some better stuff and also changed out the crunched in trunk lid.   I swapped out the caved-in driver’s door for one from a black 65 Parisienne parts cat, but it had the right patina as the rest of the car so that seemed OK.

We found out recently from one of the veteran old car guys in town that it did spend most of its early life in this town and that it was the undefeated highway drag race champ for about 10 years. That would have explained the blown tranny I guess.

The pictures are kinda poor but this thing isn’t going to look all that new from any distance or angle so it is what it is.

If you want see it run you can look it up on Youtube under Old Brutes THM where you will see three big block Canadian Ponchos running in my yard on a nice summer day in 2013.

Not sure about its future. Once in a while he talks about selling it but without any enthusiasm. Once thing’s for sure though, it has had quite a past!