Chris Dunnett
Bandit Club Bio - Chris Dunnett
I have been a Pontiac guy since I was a kid. I guess that my interest was
infused through the seats of my Dad’s 1968 GTO when I was very young. My love of
the Trans Am was also fostered by my Dad and his choice of cars. I will never
forget the day a while after my parents had divorced when my Dad arrived to pick
us up in a brand new 1979 Trans Am Special Edition. I was in kid heaven. I have
great memories of “divorce weekends” going in the T/A to the drive in and
sitting on the roof in the T-top cut outs.
That T/A SE was the car I got to drive when I got my license at 16. How cool did
I feel?! The teenage girls I rumbled up to carry out for the evening loved it;
their fathers did not. Tragically, a windy road and some unexpected ice resulted
in me wrapping it around a telephone poll. The T/A was resurrected, but it will
be an eternal source of father/son teasing.
My first car of my own was a 1972 Firebird Esprit I bought for $900, much to my
Dad’s horror. It was red with a black vinyl top, rear quarters consisting of
nothing but bondo, and a station wagon 455 2bbl stuffed in so that a hole in the
hood to accommodate the air cleaner was covered by a black fiberglass teardrop
shaped hood scoop-like thing.
I sold that car my senior year in HS to buy my first T/A. It was a silver 1977,
W72 400 4-speed, hood bird delete car that I saw for sale near my house. It had
119k miles on it when I bought it, but the original owner had kept it in
immaculate condition. After some pleading of poverty, I got it for $2,500 in
1986. I drove that T/A for seven years, all through college. Much to my shame
now, I did not have the funds to keep the car as well as the previous owner.
After long and dependable service and over 170k miles on an un-rebuilt (and
virtually un-serviced) engine, however, the car still ran OK if a bit tired and
had relatively minor body rust problems, but the frame rails were rotting. I
(now regretfully) sold it when I got hired by the Department of State to go
overseas.
And such ensued more than a decade of Trans Amus interuptus. I maintained by
love of Trans Ams, but my lifestyle was not conducive to owning one. I am a
Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State. That means that I
have spend much of the last 13 years working as a diplomat at U.S. Embassies
overseas in Tbilisi, Georgia (not Bandit-land but the former Soviet Union),
Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean where I met my wife, Belgrade, Serbia and
Montenegro (former Yugoslavia), and in September 2005 we moved from Belgrade to
a new posting at the U.S. Embassy in London (here is a link to our Embassy
website
www.usembassy.org.uk
.
So with no permanent place of abode it was hard to get back into the hobby. I
finally took the plunge in May 2004 when I bought my 1978 W72, 4-speed SE on
eBay sight unseen while living in Belgrade. It lives for now at my brother’s
house, where my brother and father also enjoy helping with upgrades and
exercising my far off toy. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the 2004
and 2005 TA Nationals with my car while on vacation in the U.S. Corresponding on
the Bandit TA Club Yahoo group, buying parts for my TA on eBay and looking
forward to the annual trip to the U.S. to visit family and drive my TA have been
welcome connections to home.
Pictures from the Birmingham, England Classic Car Show 2005
Pictures from the Americana International in Newark, England 2006
American Auto Club UK magazine that has my wife and I in it
My 12 Days of a Trans Am Christmas Song
