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Published: Wednesday, Oct. 07, 2009 / Updated: Thursday, Oct. 08, 2009 09:56 AM

Classic Car Corner: What is a Muscle Car?

While eating my barbeque sandwich and waiting on the awards to be handed out at a car show this past summer, a lady walked up to me and asked, "What is a

muscle car?"

That is a very good question and one which is answered differently by many experts in the classic car industry. Depending on who you ask, you can get a wide array of answers to the definition of a muscle car.

Probably the best definition I've heard goes along the lines of a two-door rear wheel drive mid-sized car equipped with a powerful V-8 engine at an affordable price. So to me, the Corvette, Thunderbird and early Mustangs were not really muscle cars in the truest sense. They were really sports cars.

The next question often asked is, "When did it start and who started it?" Some say that the Rocket 88 in the 1949 Olds started it and others say the Chevy 265 CI small block in 1955 started it all, but in my humble opinion it really got going with the introduction of the 1964 GTO by Pontiac and it lasted until the end of 1972 (with the exception of the Super Duty 455 CI Pontiac Trans Am in 1973 and 1974).

The 1964 GTO is a car that deserves a column unto itself because it was really introduced by a handful of engineers and PR people at Pontiac without the company executives really knowing it until the car was selling so fast that it became a runaway train that no one could dare stop. Pontiac essentially put a 389 engine in a Tempest mid-size body car and mass produced it at an affordable price. The car jump started the muscle car era as over 32,000 units were sold in 1964.

The muscle car era was really that "perfect storm" of events that came together at the correct time. You have to think back to 1964 and at that time there were a lot of young kids in the U.S.; they were a product of the baby boomer era after World War II when all the GI's returned home from the war. These youth were wild and free and looking for cars that would take them where they wanted to go in a hurry. This was also a fairly prosperous time in the country so an affordable car with plenty of power fit the bill perfectly for this generation.

I always think back to one of my favorite characters from the automotive industry, "Bunkie" Knudsen, who was general manager of Pontiac and who had the famous quote, "You can sell a young man's car to an old man, but you'll never sell an old man's car to a young man."

With this philosophy, "Bunkie" basically drove Pontiac to the forefront of the muscle car era that was about to explode.

Another milestone occurred in February, 1964. That's when Ford introduced what would become one of the legends of automobilia and that was the Mustang. The Mustang was the "child" of Lee Iacocca (yes, the same person who "saved" Chrysler in the early 1980s with the K car) and was never designed or intended to be a "muscle car", but the new "pony car" did catch the attention of the youth in the country with its great looks and affordable price. The '64 Mustang went on to sell over 417,000 units and was no doubt responsible for the coming of the Camaro and Firebird in 1967 as GM sought to jump on the bandwagon. Interestingly, Plymouth actually beat Ford to the market with its own "pony car" by two weeks, which was the Barracuda.

But, the Barracuda of 1964 was quickly thrown together as a re-skinned

Valiant and did not sell well.

After the sales success of the '64 GTO, the horsepower and cubic inch race

was really on the next six years and culminated with the production of 427

Camaros, 454 Chevelles, 426 Cudas, 455 Buicks and so on.

There is no true, universally accepted definition of a muscle car nor an exact time frame of when they roamed the earth, but I think everyone would agree that the

1960s and very early 70s was its heyday. It was, as one youthful buyer of

the era put it, a great time to go to the dealership!