In 2009, General Motors and Chrysler finally succumbed to decades of mismanagement and declared bankruptcy. As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, GM cut down the number of brands beneath its umbrella from eight to just four, cancelling products and plans for Saturn, Saab, Hummer, and Pontiac. Pontiac was an especially hard loss for muscle car fans, many of whom still fondly remembered the GTO in both classic and modern forms.

Four years later and those open wounds still fester. Well, get ready to rub some salt into those wounds too, as Bob Lutz reveals in a new Road & Track interview that an updated Pontiac GTO was on its way when the brand received the axe. 

Lutz answered questions from Road & Track readers, and the first question asks how Lutz would have done the Pontiac GTO program over. Lutz responds that GM already had “a full-size clay model” and that the new GTO would essentially be a “two-door, four-passenger coupe” that would have been based on the Pontiac G8.

Alas, the G8 turned out to be Pontiac’s swansong, and the proposed third-coming of the GTO never materialized as the brand was mothballed. But somewhere out there, some GM employee has pictures of the proposed Pontiac GTO, and we think they have an obligation to “leak” these photos to the public. You know, for science, and to compare it to the 1999 Pontiac GTO concept that we’ve plastered all over this post, as that was the GTO Pontiac should have built in the first place.

If Pontiac had managed to avoid the axe though, what features would you have liked to see on a new Pontiac GTO? A Pontiac G8 coupe may have looked awkward, but GM engineers probably could have pulled it off better than the Grand-Am-like GTO 2.0. Maybe a supercharged Judge version could have been on tap too? It’s all speculation of course, and until GM resurrects Pontiac, it’s all we really have.