Everyone knows the Hurst Oldsmobiles, but there was a Hurst Pontiac, too, briefly. Meet the 1970-72 Grand Prix SSJ by Hurst.

George Hurst built a mighty speed-equipment empire in the 1960s, mastering the red-hot youth and performance aftermarket and then contracting his company’s valuable expertise to the Detroit automakers. The collaborations between Oldsmobile and Hurst that produced the 1968-84 Hurst/Olds are known to all in the U.S. car world, but actually, the company supplied nearly the entire Motor City, including Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors. On a respectable muscle car of the period, a Hurst shifter was almost mandatory.

As the story goes, Hurst admired a Grand Prix SJ with striking two-tone paint driven by Pontiac advertising wizard Jim Wangers. There he decided that a Grand Prix would make a fine specialty performance car along the same lines as the Hurst/Olds, but with its focus on luxury. The Grand Prix’s model names, J and SJ, were callbacks to the legendary Duesenbergs of the 1930s. So Hurst added a second S to echo another famed Dusenberg designation, and the Pontiac Grand Prix SSJ Hurst was born.

Complete Grand Prix coupes were shipped from Pontiac to a Hurst facility in the Detroit area for the SSJ conversion, which added around $1,200 to the $4,000 list price.  A pair of two-tone paint combinations were officially offered: Fire Frost Gold over Polar White and Fire Frost Gold over Starlight Black, with the color breaks following the Grand Prix’s dramatic character lines. White/gold was the most popular, but a handful of cars in custom paint combinations were also produced, including a silver SSJ for George himself.

Standard or optional features included an electric sunroof from the American Sunroof Corporation, Hurst and SSJ badges, an alarm system, an early trip computer, the Hurst Auto/Stick shifter, and American Racing 200S five-spoke wheels with the centers painted gold. The actual equipment list was fairly flexible. Any standard Grand Prix powertrain could be ordered, the most potent of which in 1970 was the 455 cubic-inch HO V8 with 370 horsepower.

With the launch of the promotional campaign, a Polar White/Fire Frost Gold SSJ was featured on the cover of Motor Trend in July of 1970 (below) with a two-page spread inside the magazine, both starring Linda Vaughn, Miss Hurst Golden Shifter herself. However, the Grand Prix SSJ never caught fire in the same way as the Hurst/Olds, and the program lasted just three years. While the data is less then conclusive, the experts say 272 SSJs were produced in 1970, 157 in 1971, and 60, maybe more, in 1972. Apparently, there are still a number of them around, though. It seems SSJ owners knew what they had.