Steve's Pontiac RA V Page

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Ram Air V

In the mid sixties Pontiac developed a tunnel port head, along with this came some the the strongest blocks and some very interesting bolt on goodies. I want to put up some number crunching of these motors.

Here is a print from GM, they were gearing up for production cars. PRINT

This is from a Firebird Catalog put together by some one in Canada I believe. Catalog

Although I don't believe this to be anywhere near accurate, I will include it. This is a letter to Gerald Steinbrick who was trying to qualify his Ram Air V Warpath for some class at the time. I believe this JJ Kane probably didn't even know where engineering was, much less what they did almost a decade before. Steinbrick Letter

Brian Steinbrick had some additions to the nature of this above mentioned letter, click here.

Some price sheets on Ramair V over the counter parts provided by Brian Steinbrick: SheetA SheetB

Some Exhaust Part numbers from Ric at Classical Pontiac, has some RAV listings: Catalog

This first cell is composed of 1970 block information. First the production number, production code, cast number, and cast date. This is information that is provided by some one that has actually seen or owned said engines.

RAV production codes WY and WI for standard, XY and XW for automatic.

These codes relate to crate motors and differ only from their respective Holley carb designed for transmission usage, best that we can determine. I also suspect they may have come with the equivalent flywheel.


689538	WY	481708
689539	WY	481708	A210
689547	WY	481708	A210
689549	WY	481708	A210
689695	WY	481708	A210

From these production numbers; if we assume there are no gaps, there are at least 157 1970 crate RAV motors.

Blocks stamped DS-1941A have RAV characteristics and I believe are the pre production blocks.

There is an aluminum block cast DS-1001 that has RAV characteristics, FYI this belongs to Tom Schlauch.

There are three type exhaust built for RAV, A and F body. Here is a list of who has sets, compiled with the help of Tom Schlauch:

RAV Exhaust Manifold Tally Sheet, who has a set.

303 F type:
1. Tom Schlauch
2. Gary Daniels passenger side
3. Lance Kramer
4. Ramair Restorations

400 F long branch:
1. For sure but don't know who has them (photographed in 69 Hot Rod and Pete's book)

A body:
1. Glasgo's old set passenger side and full view
2. Mulikin
3. Purely PMD car
4. A fourth may have been located, but details are yet releashed pending procurement.
5. Tom has reported talking to some one at Norwalk with yet another set, plus 5 distributors and a carb.

This is a report that Tom Nell wrote and was included in some of the crate motors:

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Pics of the RAV crate motor out of the Silver Knafel Judge: PicA PicB PicC PicD

And this from a 60's Pontiac Plant Assembly Line worker, what a shame: qoute

You started working at the plane in late 1963, did you ever see any Super Duty cars in the plant?
I never seen any of them assembled. I saw the motors setting in the plants. I heard a story about some "Pike's Peak" cars. Supposed to have been a dozen red Catalinas with Super Dutys. I've seen red cars. !remember seeing' red cars out by the Quonset hut. I have no idea if they were "Pike's Peak" cars; if they was Super Duty or what they were. I didn't go pick up the hoods and look under them. But I did see Super Duty engines. The engineering building had one. And at one time they had a tri-power GTO motor that was painted black. It wasn't Pontiac blue, it was black. It had chrome exhaust manifolds on it. It had a chrome intake manifold. It had chrome tappet covers, and it was painted black. It was really pretty. It sat on an engine stand in the engineering building. It was a show motor. They had Super duty motors in there. At the time, I don't know if they were what they called "bathtub" manifolds or not, but they were aluminum, dual quads, huge strange looking' things that we didn't see on the production lines. We didn't know what they were. We didn't know if they were going to be in production on next year's model, last year's model or what. Unfortunately they had already been through their heyday and weren't going to be produced any more. I don't have any idea where those motors went to. I know a young lad who works in the old plant 8, which right now is a warehouse, just a storage place is all it is. I know that they scrapped a rack of Ram Air V motors, which went to Sam Allen's junk yard in Pontiac. General Motors demands that he crushes, or melts or destroys them. And they watch to make sure that that's done. He said that he knew that there was a rack, which is five, that went out there. These were complete, assembled motors that had been stored there for years, and they were scrapped. I don't know why they would do that, but they do. These were completely assembled motors. They were good, but they were scrap as far as the company was concerned.