No Reserve: 1977 Pontiac LeMans Can Am for sale on BaT Auctions - ending September 6 (Lot #54,607) | Bring a Trailer Sharp looking car
I may have some serious bias to the styling, but I absolutely love this car! Pontiac attempted to make a last stand in the GTO lineage. It is too bad that the production was cut short.
Story I read on these was that they did a 'first run' of however many they built, then later in the production year were going to build some more, only for the production honchos to find out someone had literally broke the mold for the rear spoiler, and it was too costly to make another mold.
It was always going to be a low production number model, but less than 1400 were actually produced. Still my favorite headlight-grille-body contour combination of all of the A-Bodies in this generation.
I was told that seeing it was a limited production run, the mold was made on the cheap side with no back up mold purchased. This hurt continued production and there was some talk about repairing or replacing the mold, and it would be expensive and time consuming (no C&C Machining back then) they talked about filling the remaining orders without the spoiler that was to be dealer added when they became available. But then someone in the accounting figured out that for every Can Am made, it was 1 less Grand Prix they could make as the dash was shared with that model, and at the time they could sell every Grand Prix they could make for at least 3X the profit they could make on a Can Am as it was a more expensive car to make with the outsourced conversion & Shipping costs. And that was the final nail in the coffin for the Can Am. As the Supplier of the Dashboards was already at full production and they could not make any additional dash's. They also stopped making 77 Lemans GT's about the same time, as they also used the Grand Prix style dashboards. Rumor has it the cars awaiting conversion when they ran out of rear spoilers were completed and sold as white 77 Lemans Sport Coupe's. And you can spot them by the Grand Prix dash's. I did find a very rusty and worn white 77 Lemans with a red interior & a Grand Prix dash. I did not think anything of it as you can swap the dash's on the with no fitment issues. Was it originally to be a Can Am? Who knows. The engine was gone, and it was pretty picked over in the early 90's when I saw it in a local Detroit wrecking yard.
I was really surprised that no one in the comments section mentioned the incorrect 15X8 snowflake wheels on this car. I think they are a nice upgrade over the 15X7 wheels that were optional on this model. The 15X8 wheels were not available until the 1978 Model year, on the WS6 equipped Trans Am's & Formula's And yes it is a very sharp looking car.
That is a degree of detail that I did not know. I'm still partial to the 5 spoke look of the Pontiac Rallye II wheel or some good ol' Cragar 5 spokes.
