The Super Duty is born
In the early 1960s, Detroit was waking up to a new kind of horsepower war. Long before the term “muscle car” had officially entered the lexicon, Pontiac was already staking its claim as a performance leader. At the center of that revolution stood a beast draped in full-size steel: the 1963 Pontiac Catalina 421 Super Duty—a factory-built dragstrip warrior that helped redefine the guts of American performance.
More than just a stoplight brawler, the Catalina Super Duty was the physical embodiment of Pontiac’s growing performance image. Born from a combination of corporate rebellion, engineering brilliance, and a hunger to dominate the quarter-mile, the ’63 Super Duty remains one of the most revered and rare factory-built performance cars of the immediate pre-muscle car era.
Christening the Catalina
The Pontiac Catalina made its debut in 1950 as part of General Motors’ line of new pillarless “hardtop” two-doors that captured the spirit of postwar America. “Catalina” was simply the name of the hardtop derivative of existing Pontiac models until 1959, when it became a stand-alone, mid-line Pontiac model available in hardtop, sedan or even a convertible body types. That year, Pontiac also began its split-grille front-end motif and its “Wide-Track” handling theme, adding more pizzazz to the Pontiac brand as it blazed head-on into its performance marketing strategy under the industry’s brightest minds of the period: General Manager Bunkie Knudsen, marketing whiz Jim Wangers and engineers John DeLorean and Pete Estes.
In 1961, all GM products received a significant restyling and the Catalina model returned, but was now at the bottom of the Pontiac hierarchy as it sat on the make’s shortest full-size car chassis with the least amount of trim. In 1963, the Catalina remained Pontiac’s least-expensive full-size two-door model — and its lightest.
