Two 1967 Firebirds, One Driveway: The Grammy Winner Who Wrenches Before SunriseMost two-car garages hold a daily driver and a long-suffering project. Julian King's holds a matched pair: a red 1967 Pontiac Firebird convertible and a Plum Mist 1967 Firebird Ram Air 400 coupe. Same make, same model, same model year, two different body styles and two very different colors, and there is nothing accidental about any of it.King is a Grammy-winning sound engineer who grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia and now lives in Brentwood, Tennessee, deep in country music country. Speaking with Erik Larsen for the YouTube channel Heart and Horsepower, he explained that his favorite part of owning the cars has almost nothing to do with driving them. It happens before sunrise: garage doors up, lights on, coffee in hand, sitting out in the driveway with both Firebirds while the rest of the neighborhood is still asleep.Why both cars had to be 1967sThe model year was never negotiable. King's wife was born in 1967, which gave him a convenient argument for buying not one but two cars built the same year she was. The second half of the pitch was color. Her favorite is purple, and Pontiac happened to offer Plum Mist in 1967, a shade that almost nobody orders today and almost everybody stops to look at.It is the kind of reasoning that only makes sense to people who already own old cars, and perfect sense to everyone who does.The red convertible came firstKing found the drop-top in Charlotte, North Carolina, which made for an easy weekend round trip with a trailer. It left the factory with the 326-cubic-inch V8 and a two-barrel carburetor, rated at 250 horsepower. A previous owner had already nudged it toward High Output specification with a four-barrel Quadrajet and dual exhaust, so it breathes considerably better than it did new. King added a Turbo Hydra-Matic 350 three-speed automatic.Add it up and the car almost certainly clears the 285 horsepower Pontiac quoted for the 326 HO back in the day. Mechanically it needed only sorting rather than saving, which suited him fine, because the quiet morning tinkering is the hobby as far as he is concerned. If you like Pontiac drop-tops with the hotter engine, our look at a rare 1968 GTO convertible with the 400 HO is worth a read.Then he wanted something louderThe convertible scratched one itch and created another. The answer was the second car: a Plum Mist Ram Air 400 coupe. Notably, King was not specifically hunting a Firebird. A Camaro would have done the job just as well. The color is what closed the deal, and then the math kept it closed.Firebirds show up far less often than Camaros at any given cruise-in, they wear a very different front end, and by King's estimate a comparable 1967 Camaro runs $8,000 to $10,000 more on the open market. Anyone who has followed the money on a first-generation F-body knows he is not wrong; see what goes into verifying a real one in our story on a black 1969 Camaro Z/28 hidden for 47 years.A quick refresher on the 1967 FirebirdPontiac launched the Firebird on February 23, 1967, as the upscale answer to the Ford Mustang. It shared the F-body platform with the Chevrolet Camaro but wore its own beak-nosed styling and its own engine lineup, and it arrived late on purpose, since GM wanted to give the Camaro a clean run at the Mustang first.Even with that shortened first model year, Pontiac built 82,560 Firebirds for 1967, split between 67,032 coupes and 15,528 convertibles. The nameplate ran four generations before Pontiac ended it on August 27, 2002, undone by falling demand and new federal head-impact standards. For a reminder of how strange and inventive Pontiac could get in that era, look at the 1962 Tempest LeMans and its Trophy 4 half-V8.Driven hard, wiped down oftenNeither car is a climate-controlled museum piece. Both get driven extensively and both get worked over with a stack of shop towels afterward, kept ready for a long road trip or a spur-of-the-moment Saturday. Fuel stops turn into impromptu history lessons with strangers who want to talk about the one their uncle had, which King says is the actual point of the hobby.The best day so far came this past Father's Day. His kids came to visit and everyone wanted to go for a drive, but nobody was going to fit in one car, so both Firebirds came out at once. If that sounds familiar, we covered another Pontiac family story when a Michigan family tracked down their late father's 1978 Trans Am a decade after selling it.So, would he sell?Larsen ends every owner interview the same way, and King gave the only honest answer available to him. Someone would have to overpay badly, and even then he would not enjoy it. The cars are wound too tightly into his mornings, his family, and the way he moves through a day to have a price that makes sense.Watch the full storySource: Heart and Horsepower on YouTube, via autoevolution.