The Pontiac hobby as well as America's automotive heritage lost one of its greatest engineers when noted Pontiac engine designer Malcolm "Mac" McKellar passed away on April 9, 2011. Mac was the lead engineer and driving force behind Pontiac's highly successful Super Duty racing program, which put Pontiac on the performance chart, where it quickly rose to the top.

Besides Mac's astute engineering of Pontiac engines and camshaft designs, he will long be remembered among Pontiac aficionados for the one-off overhead-camshaft 421-cu.in. V-8 that he built and fitted to his 1963 Grand Prix. However, Mac's creation of the OHC Sprint-6 engine was perhaps his biggest legacy.

From an April 2008 feature article about Mac McKellar in Hemmings Muscle Machines:

"The culmination of McKellar's work went into an overhead-camshaft version of the Pontiac V-8. It used a similar zero-lash hydraulic valvetrain to the six-cylinder, but had two camshafts--one per bank of cylinders. McKellar eventually installed the running prototype engine into a 1963 Grand Prix, but Pontiac cut the program short when management decided that the pushrod V-8 engines still offered plenty of power at lower cost and less risk of warranty work. McKellar remained with Pontiac for more than a decade after that, but he said the gas crunch and rise of emissions standards in the 1970s 'took all the fun out of it.'"

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