Back when they were plotting out the film, director Hal Needham and star Reynolds were trying to decide what car to cast as Reynolds’ ride. Several Detroit muscle cars were considered — until Needham and Reynolds saw the promotional brochure for the 1977 Pontiac Trans Am.
“I remember when Hal Needham and I first saw this car,” Reynolds says in a video as he sits next to the car when it visited his home. “It was love at first sight.”
To have the brochure ready for the launch of the 1977 model year, Pontiac took a ’76 Trans Am — one with a 455cid V8 and 4-speed transmission — and replaced its front end with the new ’77 design for the brochure photo shoot.
The car is now owned by an 85-year-old woman who had such a thing for Burt Reynolds that she sent her son on a quest to find her a car just like the one the handsome movie star had driven in the Smokey film.
“I looked for years and every lead was a dead end,” David Martino said. Undaunted, in 2014 he found a Bandit-style Trans Am, in Virginia, and bought it for his mother. It would be a few years later before he discovered the car’s actual history
The car’s authenticity has been collaborated with evidence from Pontiac Historic Services and from Smoke Signals, the official magazine of the Pontiac-Oakland Club International. The magazine reportedly had planned a one-page story on the car but, after a multi-month forensic study, ended up publishing an 8-page cover story on the car.
Such promotional vehicles usually are destroyed — crushed — and not offered for sale. But somehow, perhaps because the car was being used for promotional work on the West Coast, it ended up on the showroom floor of Bryant Pontiac, a California dealership, which eventually sold it as a demonstrator model, though not until the proper 1976 model year sheet metal was reinstalled.
Despite going to all that work, Smoke Signals reported that the ’77-model-year Snowflake wheels remained on the car
https://journal.classiccars.com/2018/10/10/an-85-year-old-woman-owns-the-car-that-inspired-the-bandits-trans-am/
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