“I heard a story many moons ago that it was not uncommon for Pontiac guys on the assembly line to slip in the oddball camshaft or a pair of thinner shim head gaskets to boost the compression on the random GTO passing by, your Triple-Gold Goat might have been one of those, they were all terrific cars!”
Very possible. It was entirely stock. I never played with it like you did with the Catalina. I do know that it kept climbing after the needle was buried ;-)
Sounds like you got maybe a hotter cam or an extra large Rochester QuadraJet (aka 'QuadraBog', lol) carburetor, those carbs were maligned by many, but the secondaries were so large that you could drop a golf ball through them, they would flow massive amounts of air and fuel at full throttle.
GM-Rochester manufactured some sweet gear way back then, my Uncle located an original '64 Rochester fuel injection setup for the small block Chevrolet, got it rebuilt and recalibrated and it went into a '64 Corvette and that was my first introduction to 'old school' fuel injection and the acceleration was positively Old Testament Terrifying, in my not-so-humble-opinion, had never felt anything like it before, or since.
