Kip Cyprus and the 1957 Bonneville Pontiac

Kip Cyprus introduces the 1957 Bonneville Pontiac by mentioning that there were just 630 of this mode made. Kip tells us that there are a lot of missing VIN numbers, which, if you get the production numbers up high enough – so you can make sales and get on the track – you had to get over 500 cars. But 630 is what’s claimed to be produced, and what happened with these cars is that there was just barely enough of these models about one car for every dealer in America.

“The dealer would get the car; it was so rare, and it was the beginning of fuel injection for General Motors, and they were all fuel-injected cars. The car has a fuel-injected motor which resembles the Rochester of the Corvette. The owners of most of the dealerships tended to keep the car for a year; they drive it around and then sell it afterward” said Kip Cyprus.

“This was the most expensive car that was made by Pontiac until 1978. We had gone into a recession in late ’57, and economically, the ’58 was sold for less. This car is in beautiful condition; they were always white and they either had a red interior or a blue interior—it was one or the other.”

Kip Cyprus describes the fule injection system
The fuel-injected system on this car is referred to as a turkey baster, our slang term for the street because the fuel injection system is all underneath this lid and it looks like a rat’s nest of wires and little copper pipes going everywhere. So, they put that cap on to clean up the mess. You’ll notice there’s a blue horn and then two blocks. Well, the accessory horn that Pontiac had was always blue in 1957; it was the last year that Pontiac used the Indian as their flagship on their logos.

“I think it was $6,200 was the sales price on this car. If you think about $6,200 versus a Bel Air loaded up for under $3,000 mimicking the same offerings. This car has so much documentation on it; it actually has the original time slips when it was in Daytona and they would run on the sand. You get a time slip, and I have about 200 time slips with this car” mentions Kip Cyprus.

Kip Cyprus continues: “During the restoration, the car was really interesting. I got all this documentation when I bought the car, and I’m reading through it. It says that the car was owned by the original owner of the dealership, then it was sold, and it had gotten repossessed. A mechanic in the back of a shop had bought the car, and in his notes, he had put that he was racing the car on the sand in Daytona, and he could never get the fuel injection pump to run right. So, he took the fuel injection pump off, ran a regular intake manifold with a carburetor, and he had a horrific backfire.”