Summary

Royal Bobcat 428 conversion and ordered new from Royal Pontiac by Arnie Beswick. A March 1968 Popular Hot Rodding magazine cover car. Frame-off restored and powered by a 428/425hp V8 engine and a 4-speed manual transmission.

Details

Original owner, Mike Rutherford had planned to buy this GTO and have his good friend Arnie Beswick replace the stock Ram Air 400 engine with a 428/425hp unit. Because of his busy racing schedule, Beswick advised Rutherford to order his new GTO from Ace Wilson's Royal Pontiac, whose elite crew would handle the transformation. Word of the project apparently spread, because the car's arrival at Royal coincided with a visit from Popular Hot Rodding magazine photographer Lee Kelley, who took the now famous cover shot of Royal's Milt Schornack and Dave Warren hoisting the 428 into the car's engine bay. Rutherford, who owned the car until 1999, raced it extensively on the street for the first couple of years, with Beswick tuning the car for the occasional foray to the drag strip, where the two shared turns at the wheel. Beswick's search for more performance in the GTO began even before its arrival at Royal, when he secured a pre-production set of Ram Air II cylinder heads, which were bolted to the 428 short block prior to its installation. He took the car to JR Headers, who installed a custom-fabricated set of tubes, and he modified the front and rear suspension for improved launching, always respecting Rutherford's caveat that the car not be cut. As Beswick recalled in a feature article on the car in the June 2009 issue of Muscle Car Review, Even though it was more of a street car than a race car, it did make numerous trips to some Midwestern drag strips, including Cordova, IL, and Kahoka, MO. The 'Boss Man' lettering was put on the car when Rutherford felt it had paid its dues and earned the title. The Boss Man Royal Bobcat GTO was eventually acquired by noted muscle car collector Mike Guarise. A frame-off restoration was performed using primarily refinished parts original to the car, including the 4-speed manual transmission and the 428ci V8 engine that appeared on Popular Hot Rodding cover photo. In fact, that shot was re-created for two magazine articles when Schornack and Warren flew in to help install the engine to complete the restoration.