So Fine in ’79: Three Radically Different Rides Recall a Forgotten Golden Age

In July of 1979, a beleaguered Jimmy Carter gave a televised address on the compounding crises weighing on the nation and his presidency. It was quickly coined the “malaise speech,” and in the decades since, that word—malaise—has come to conjure everything we love to hate about the late 1970s: gas lines; seedy New York subways; inflation; Carter himself in a sweater, beseeching Americans to lower the heat in their homes. 

And of course, there were the cars. Overly large, underpowered beasts weighed down by emissions equipment, ill-fitting rubber bumpers, and velour. Today, even as late-’70s cars slowly gain acceptance among classic-car lovers, they are often regarded at arm’s length and with tongue firmly in cheek, gently mocked for their kitschy decal schemes and anemic engines. 

Funny thing, though—much of what we remember about malaise is objectively untrue. For one thing, Carter never uttered the word in his speech. And far from a low point, the period was a high-water mark for car enthusiasm, with 1979 the best sales year ever, for everything from the Datsun Z to the Pontiac Firebird, for Chevrolet Corvettes and Camaros. The rejuvenated Mustang, redesigned for that year on the Fox platform, sold in higher numbers still. There were also rear-engine Porsche Turbos, ­mid-engine
Fiats, and a slew of little coupes from Japan, all available at a showroom near you. At no other time before or since have so many enthusiast cars been offered in such wildly different configurations and met with such mainstream success. This wasn’t malaise; this was marvelous.

To get perspective on the diversity and unabashed greatness of the era, we gathered three vehicles from seemingly distant poles of the sports car universe: a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am, a 1979 Triumph TR7, and a 1979 Mazda RX-7. They share nothing aside from their model year and their affordability, yet each overcame the challenges of the time in its own way.

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Pontiac Trans Am: The Holdout

There’s no talking about sports cars in the late 1970s without the Screaming Chicken. In 1979 alone, Pontiac sold an astounding 211,453 Firebirds—about the same volume as the modern Honda Civic. More than 100,000 were kitted out as Trans Ams.

The popularity was even more remarkable considering the car’s age at the time. Throughout the 1970s, GM’s resources went toward downsizing both its large and mid-size passenger car lines while abandoning big-block V-8s for all but a few vehicles. The Firebird and its cousin, the Camaro, were frequently threatened with cancellation and were left to soldier on with the platform and basic styling that had debuted in 1970. The corporate focus, clearly, was on meeting new fuel-efficiency standards and staying ahead of changing consumer tastes.

Except that GM in this period was a uniquely unfocused corporation. It still operated under the decentralized structure Alfred P. Sloan had set up in the 1930s, wherein each division had its own management, designers, engineers, and culture. They often viewed nominal colleagues as competition for both customers and company resources.

“There was a lot of jealousy between the divisions,” said Terry Connolly, who started at Pontiac as a rear-axle validation engineer in ’79 and worked at GM until 2014. He recalled being summoned to a senior planning meeting as a fresh-faced 22-year-old and witnessing the rivalry up close. “It got into a shouting match between the axle guys for [the Firebird] and the [Camaro], arguing over who got what,” said Connolly, who is now CEO of the Pontiac Transportation Museum in Pontiac, Michigan. “I realized: These guys don’t like each other.”

Pontiac had in the previous decade come out from Chevrolet’s shadow by building performance cars. Its management, many of them acolytes of the nonconformist John Z. DeLorean, had no intention of returning to those shadows. While the Camaro dutifully shed its high-performance Z/28 guise in the mid-1970s and topped out at a (relatively) thrifty 350 V-8, the Firebird gained a Super Duty 455-cubic-inch V-8. When that became untenable, Pontiac shifted attention to its venerable 400-cubic-inch “mid-block” engine, developing higher compression cylinder heads and a new camshaft, while recalibrating the Rochester Quadrajet carburetor. Output ticked up from 180 horsepower in 1976 to 200 in ’77 and 220 horsepower beginning in 1978. Sales numbers mirrored the upward trajectory (aided, of course, by a certain movie that hit screens in 1977). 

Mind you, the V-8 in these late ’70s Birds were closer in specification to a grocery-getter Catalina station wagon from the previous decade than the high-compression Ram Air III and IV engines offered in Firebirds and GTOs. By 1979, however, all the apex predators had disappeared from the muscle car savanna.

The Trans Am looks every part the old lion among our trio. Whereas the Triumph and Mazda peer into the 1980s with their wedge shapes and flip-up headlamps, the bigger and brawnier Pontiac consciously looks back. Shaker hood scoop, fender flares, ostentatious decals—this is still the tough-guy language of a ’60s muscle car. The interior, largely unchanged throughout the second-generation Firebird’s run, is heavy on chrome and turned aluminum, a refreshing contrast to the dark plastic that already dominates the TR7 and RX-7 cabins.

It’s also distinctly 1960s American in how it drives. Modern Camaros and Mustangs ape the firm ride and handling characteristics of German sports sedans. This Trans Am is having none of that. The shifter and clutch are hilariously heavy—you’ll develop Popeye arms shoving the Borg-Warner four-speed into reverse—but the steering is fingertip light and the suspension pillow soft. Which isn’t to say it can’t hang. Chuck the T/A at a corner and the suspension leans but then sets, and the car tracks through neatly. In tighter turns, the rear end feels ready to step out—practically begging you to stomp on the throttle and make donuts. So much of the cult of Trans Am revolves around its style, and to be sure, it has that. But there’s a surprising amount of substance here, too.

It’s still the language of 1960s muscle.

Of course, the Trans Am is really all about its engine. The 400 makes its presence visible through the jostling of its shaker hood scoop and audible with a hearty baritone that’s a touch lower than a small-block Chevrolet V-8. Step on the throttle and the rumble turns into a roar, accompanied by an audible whoosh of air intake as the Quadrajet’s secondary venturi open. The T/A is happiest at the low end of the tachometer, with 320 lb-ft of torque available at 2800 rpm, but is willing to charge past its 5000-rpm redline. No surprise, many of these engines blew up from being over-revved in street races (the connecting rods in particular are weak points).

1979 Pontiac Trans Am

• Engine: 6.6-liter V-8
• Power: 220 hp @ 4000 rpm
• Torque: 320 lb-ft @ 2800 rpm
• Weight: 3700 lb
• Power to Weight: 16.8 lb/hp
• Fuel Economy: 12 mpg
• Base Price: $6400
• Hagerty #3 Value: $45,000

In fact, the entire Pontiac V-8 family, which dated back to 1955 and played an outsize role in the muscle car era, was about to meet a premature end. “Emissions was the huge challenge,” explained Connolly. GM’s famed bean counters tolerated the existence of separate engine families among the brands but weren’t about to waste precious resources modernizing all of them. Starting in 1977, “6.6-litre” Trans Ams and Formulas sold in California had an Oldsmobile 403 engine. By 1979, the writing was on the wall. Pontiac had stockpiled about 10,000 of its home-cooked 400 engines for Firebirds and offered them exclusively with a four-speed manual. Then, it was gone. Eventually, so was the Firebird, which never again achieved anything close to 1979’s sales total, and so was Pontiac as a whole. By the late 1980s, the “division” was just a “brand,” having been merged into one sales organization with Chevrolet.

GM spent savings from such streamlining efforts on a variety of boondoggles—roboticized assembly lines, Saturn, Hughes Aircraft, a brief affair with Lotus—that left it exhausted and short on cash. The company was, and is, imagined as a complacent colossus, resistant to any change that might eat into its profit margins. Yet it more often has suffered from a well-intentioned but misguided insistence on reinventing itself. Driving the ’79 Trans Am, a brilliant nine-year-old model that still thrills 46 years later, one can’t help but wonder what might have been if General Motors had simply done less.

Triumph TR7: The Shape of the Future (That Wasn’t)

Across the Atlantic, the British were feeling something more acute than a mere case of malaise. Late 1978 and early ’79 are known there as “the Winter of Discontent,” the culmination of a lousy decade for the country and its fast-receding empire. Strikes across multiple industries, largely demanding wage increases to keep up with inflation, cost the British economy the equivalent of 128.7 million working days during the decade. Even the gravediggers went on strike. At British Leyland’s Liverpool factory, workers walked out for a mind-numbing 17 weeks between late 1977 and early 1978 and were openly scornful toward the car they were responsible for building.

“It’s a load of bloody rubbish that car, one load of bloody rubbish,” a Triumph line worker told the BBC in 1978.

The vehicle in question is the one you see here, the Triumph TR7. The above sentiment has become dominant over the decades. The TR7 is a regular on “worst of all time” lists, the butt of many a joke. “It’s the best and worst of British cars,” quipped Ron Sell, the owner of the TR7 you see photographed here.

Yet this may be the most misunderstood car from this misunderstood period.

The TR7 came as a follow-on to the long-lived TR6. Although it looks like an extraordinary leap forward—“The shape of things to come,” per period marketing materials—it deliberately took several steps backward. Triumph dealers in the United States were begging for a back-to-basics sports car that would be inexpensive to own and easy to repair. The TR6’s independent rear suspension and straight-six were thus ditched in favor of a four-cylinder and a live rear axle. A decade and change later, Mazda followed a similar back-to-basics playbook for the Miata. But building cars is a team sport, and in the 1970s, relations between British Leyland management and its workers hit rock bottom. And so, the TR7, despite receiving positive reviews upon its introduction in 1975, quickly gained a reputation for poor quality.

“The doors on some TR7s fell off, because the hinge pins weren’t installed properly,” said Richard Truett, an engineering and technology reporter for Automotive News and Triumph savant who has, by his count, owned 15 TR7s and TR8s. Additionally, many of the pieces from British Leyland’s parts bin proved unworthy of sports car duty—rear axle and cooling issues became all too common.

The strike of 1977 might have feasibly been a mercy killing for the TR7, only British Leyland wouldn’t let it die and, to its credit, used the involuntary downtime to make significant improvements to the car. Those included a heavier-duty rear axle, a five- (rather than four-) speed transmission, and fixes for the cooling system. BL then shuttered the Liverpool factory and moved all TR7 production to Coventry, England, where the TR6 had been assembled.

All to say, the 1979 TR7 photographed here was a very different animal from the much-derided one that had arrived four years earlier. And that’s without considering the most obvious change: the convertible top. The TR7 debuted as a coupe only, owing to the expectation that U.S. rollover standards would make droptops unsellable, but it rushed the ragtop into production for ’79. It soon became the better seller and was eventually the only version offered in the States.

1979 Triumph TR7

• Engine: 2.0-liter I-4
• Power: 86 hp @ 5500 rpm
• Torque: 103 lb-ft @ 3000 rpm
• Weight: 2355 lb
• Power to Weight: 26.3 lb/hp
• Fuel Economy: 19 mpg
• Base Price: $8395
• Hagerty #3 Value: $6000

Our Triumph’s owner was mildly concerned that his TR7, which had sat for much of the summer, might not be in its finest tune. But the four-cylinder fired up without hesitation and settled into a happy purr. The steering wheel looks like that in the Trans Am but has no power assistance. It tested this author’s noodle arms at lower speeds but felt just right as speeds built. The gearbox is slicker than the one in the Pontiac, although it still requires a bit more oomph than most modern sports cars. One-to-two shifts are accompanied by a satisfying “pop” through the exhaust.

Despite its live rear axle, the car rides remarkably well over broken Detroit pavement. The natural trade-off is some body roll, but the car still feels nimble and responsive. It also feels bigger, for better and for worse, than its diminutive two-seater dimensions let on, with the top of the doors rising close to your shoulders. In modern terms, it feels a half-step more luxury car than bare-bones roadster, perhaps closer to a Mercedes-Benz SLK or a BMW Z4. It is, in any event, by no means “rubbish.”

“If the ’81 car had come out in ’75, we’d still have Triumphs today,” said Truett.

If. The damage had already been done to the car’s reputation. Worse, Britain’s economy had spiraled. Inflation skyrocketed to 13.4 percent, then peaked at 18 percent in 1980.

The most misunderstood car from this misunderstood period.

BL was forced to raise prices significantly and still lost money on every car it sold in the United States. Triumph was killed in 1984 (a year shy of its centennial); the rest of BL, despite a bailout from Margaret Thatcher’s government later in the decade, split into pieces and slipped beneath the waves.

Mazda RX-7: The Miracle

Whereas the United States and the United Kingdom were unmistakably experiencing economic and social decline in the 1970s, the vibes were very different in Japan: The country was in the throes of a postwar economic miracle. The incredible growth even reached Hiroshima, the city leveled by an atomic bomb in 1945. Scientists had speculated it would take close to a century for any plants to grow there. Yet just 35 years later—incredibly, less time than between the production of the cars featured in this story and today—it had roughly tripled its prewar population. It was also home to a globally successful automaker, Mazda, which was founded in the 1920s to produce cork and machine tools. Mazda was headquartered some 3 miles from ground zero and was shielded by a mountain from the atomic blast. For a time during reconstruction, it housed Hiroshima’s municipal government.

Mazda produced its first passenger car, a crude, V-twin-powered coupe, in 1960. A year later, it licensed the technology for the Wankel rotary engine from German automaker NSU. Several other automakers experimented with the technology in the period—GM produced several rotary-powered Corvette concepts—but no one developed it as diligently as Mazda.

The RX-7 was a smash hit, Mazda selling nearly 72,000 in 1979 alone.

The RX-7, introduced for 1979, featured Mazda’s most advanced and reliable rotary yet, a 1.1-liter, 100-hp screamer capable of revving to 7000 rpm. It is, to understate things, quite a contrast from the Triumph’s sturdy but breathless pushrod four-cylinder, let alone the Trans Am’s big V-8.

But what’s more striking are the mundane ways in which the Mazda feels more modern and frankly more refined than its American and British peers, especially inside. The seats are more comfortable and hold you better in cornering; the dashboard panels align precisely with those for the doors; it even has more useful space for cargo (not trivial in an era when so many people bought sports cars to serve as daily commuters). Despite all that, the RX-7 started out nearly $1500 less than the Triumph. For anyone wondering how “Japan Inc.” came to dominate the American car market in the decade that followed, this is an instructive example.

1979 Mazda RX-7

• Engine: 1.1-liter rotary
• Power: 100 hp @ 6000 rpm
• Torque: 105 lb-ft @ 4000 rpm
• Weight: 2400 lb
• Power to Weight: 24 lb/hp
• Fuel Economy: 17 mpg
• Base Price: $7195
• Hagerty #3 Value: $10,600

For all the ways it feels more modern, the RX-7 comes across as the most antiquated of the trio for its size. It’s a half-ton and change lighter and 30 inches shorter than the Trans Am and manages to look and feel a class smaller than the dimensionally similar TR7. The thin-rimmed steering wheel, even without the benefit of power assistance, requires little effort. The windshield pillars seem to consist of just enough metal to hold the glass. Driving the Mazda is a bit like putting on spandex workout clothing: At first, you’re painfully aware of how tight everything is, but soon enough, you forget it’s even there.

The RX-7 was a smash hit, Mazda selling nearly 72,000 in 1979 alone. One of the buyers was Robert Knight, a young machinist who was having trouble finding steady employment. A Japanese car in southeast Michigan, home of Detroit and the Big Three automakers, was still a tad taboo in the late 1970s (in 1982, country singer Faron Young released the single, “Are You ­Hungry? Eat Your Import!”), but Knight loved the styling and “really loved the rotary engine.” He drove it extensively, including on a cross-country jaunt. Then, life happened. He went back to school to get a doctorate in medical physics and raised a family. The RX-7 sat. But some 20 years later, at his kids’ urging, he reconditioned the car bit by bit. Today it’s a pristine, nice-running example. The rotary even has its original apex seals. When the sunset put an end to our shoot in east Detroit, Knight hopped in and drove it home.

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Our time with these genuinely enjoyable, delectably different sports cars offers some useful insights. The first is that you should consider buying one. All three are awfully attainable compared with similar cars from other eras. The RX-7, despite shocking appreciation among Japanese sports cars, is still an easy find in good condition for just over $10K. Roughly the same amount of money would buy you an excellent, fully sorted TR7 (trust us, you want it sorted). The Trans Am, due to the rarity of its 400, is by far worth the most—you can expect to pay $45,000 for an example in good condition—but remains a bargain relative to late ’60s Pontiac muscle.

We just didn’t realize how good we had it back in 1979.

In a broader sense, our trio also gives us a new vantage on the present. We once again find ourselves, midway through another tumultuous decade, experiencing a kind of national malaise. Polls indicate one of the few things many of us agree upon, regardless of party affiliation, is that the country is headed in the wrong direction. Once again, that feeling has bled into our automobiles. Today’s cars are, of course, faster, safer, and more efficient than anything from 1979, but the grim realities of global competition and toughening regulatory compliance have badly eroded the wild diversity of the late ’70s. Two of the three brands represented in this story are dead. The third, Mazda, survives and manages to offer one of the last truly affordable sports cars, but it sold fewer than 10,000 Miatas in the States in 2024. Crossovers in various sizes account for 90 percent of what it makes.

It’s possible that we just didn’t realize how good we had it back in 1979. But a more realistic and hopeful conclusion would be that we never know how good we have it. The salient difference between then and now is that then is then—we know what happened. The economy recovered. The cars got faster. Carter lost to Ronald Reagan but became a wildly popular ex-president thanks to his charitable works. If “malaise era” cars can teach us anything, it might be to distrust our sense of malaise. As Carter put it in that fateful speech, “The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July… Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations.”

This story first appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.