“I remember taking it to work and wanting to change lanes and all you had to do was just stab the throttle and the thing would “choo-choo” and it would skid over. You didn’t have to move the steering wheel, it would just shift lanes. It was wonderful.”—Steve Pasteiner

Several years ago I was interviewed by Andrew Filippone in regards to my involvement with and my thoughts about the Buick Grand National. Others that were interviewed include Bill Porter, Steve Pasteiner, Tony Assenza, Don Sherman, Csaba Csere, Martyn Schoor, and Doug Nigro. The trailer from Vimeo is a short teaser from Andrew’s documentary.

More information is on Edmunds Inside Line, including links to Andrew’s Facebook page where you can keep up with the progress of the documentary.

Check out the other posts about the Buick Grand National on Dean’s Garage.

Black Air – “Misfit” Teaser from Andrew Filippone Jr. on Vimeo.

Epilogue

The last hurrah for the Turbo Buick was in a Pontiac. In 1989 Pontiac needed a performance boost for the Indy Pace Car and its replicas. So they shoe-horned a Buick Turbo V6 into 1,555 GTAs with all the trick SCCA suspension and brake pieces and finally the Turbo Buick found its way into a host body where the chassis was up to the power. There was no difference between the pace cars and the replicas. Pontiac’s Turbo Trans Am.

A Dean’s Garage post in April, 2011 entitled Harley Earl’s 1951/1954 LeSabre featured a brochure of the 1954 version of the LeSabre. This post features scans of an original 1951 brochure. Thanks to Lou Yerolemou.

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Photo of the original 1951 version of the car.

From Harley Earl’s website, Car of the Century.

Leading up to Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, certain high members of the Third Reich were flaunting their national pride and power by using a visual cross-reference language or techniques to mesmerize the German public. Politics combined with modern Teutonic engineering ingenuity had never been successfully employed like this before. Germany’s racing propaganda machine was the Mercedes Benz W125, arguably Europe’s most futuristic pre-war sports car. Special notice was taken in Detroit’s auto capital, and Harley Earl vowed to deliver a triumphant message all of his own someday.

When things were settling down in Europe following the war, one of America’s most legendary innovators created a clever comeback in the form of an automobile (according to the Car of the Century website, the Le Sabre was started in July, 1946). Originally planned as a super streamlined car, the Le Sabre comprised more variations on a theme than Bach ever dreamed of—all of which were aimed at winning over a world audience. In the best-selling booked titled, The Fifties, David Halberstam wrote, “Other GM execs drove Cadillacs, but Early drove the Le Sabre, a highly futuristic car he himself had designed; the cost to the company of building this prototype was estimated at roughly $7 million. It is possible that no one exerted as much influence on American style and taste in the fifties as he.”

While this radical concept car had many purposes, the most intriguing one was never publicized. The Le Sabre’s emblem was a flipped Mercedes Benz tri-star logo, surrounded in a bull’s-eye like center target—blending in America’s color of red, white, and blue. Along with the elegant French name symbolizing strength, the Le Sabre was complete. The inverted Mercedes star as a visual hook was truly mysterious, to say the least, as were most of the Le Sabre’s touches. Every one sent out spooky effects to all of its viewers. It’s no doubt the wizardry  was intended to remind the new world community of America’s supremacy and future direction, which of course was opposite of Germany’s pre-war view. Also, in a subtle way, this one automobile clearly pointed out the world’s greatest automaker, too, as well as showing Le Sabre was the most influential car, ever. In terms of numbers and fiance, it is the most expensive car built to date, but because of certain reasons, one being Earl’s secretive nature, this fact has been left largely unexamined. On top of all of this, Harley Earl named Le Sabre as his inspirational muse when originally conceiving his American sports car, the Corvette.

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Mitchell’s Silver Arrow III

John Houlihan graciously sent me a copy of his letter to the editors of Collectible Automobile that provide insights to the origins of the 1971 Riviera, along with a few sketches from the project.

Dear Editors:

I read with great interest your article entitled 1971–’73 Riviera: Buick’s Beautiful Boattail. In that article Mr. Brown states that “It has never been clear exactly who was responsible for styling this car.” I can shed some light on this subject. I was a member of GM Design Staff and working under Jerry Hirshberg at the time the ’71 was designed.

While Dave Holls is essentially correct stating in his sidebar comments that Bill Mitchell heavily influenced the design, Hirshberg was the studio Chief Designer and supervised the crafting of every surface and detail of that car. However, another designer named Don DaHarsh, working for Mitchell in his secret back-room Studio X, designed the theme model in 3/8 scale before any of us in Advanced Buick studio began the’71 project.

Inspiration for the Mitchell/DaHarsh model probably did come from the famous Y-job and the Stingray, but Mitchell had a mania for sweep-spears, evident on the Delahayes of his youth and demanded that the project that was to become the ’71 Riviera employ this flamboyant styling motif. We inherited the model and Mitchell’s burning desire to create a magnificent and aggressive design statement.

Our first effort under Hirshberg was a superb interpretation of DaHarsh’s model—Mitchell’s swashbuckling excess and the design team’s fine sense of line, form, proportion and detailing. This model was on a combined A/E body platform. It had a deep “V” windshield tapering through the monocoque body to the now famous boattail.

Cost was the prime factor in changing the size of the ’71 Riveria. The unusual A/E package, the deep “V” windshield, and other economic factors of the times forced Buick management to dictate that we redesign our sleek coupe and use the B-body seating package and glass. At the time this directive was a disaster—totally destroying the original concept.

Our design team worked tirelessly for months to convert what was once a shark into a whale, albeit a superbly detailed and proportioned one. The beautiful car you see today is a tribute to this effort and to the skill of Hirshberg and his team. I am proud to have been a part of this slice of automotive history.

John T. Houlihan

Does anyone have images of that original 3/8 model or the first A/E version of the design?

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This post contains a gallery with photos from Steve Sicklick, whose dad owned Dorwin Chevrolet in East Harford, Connecticut from 1955 through 1982. Brad King sent photos of his Dad, Maury King, who was a designer for Ford in the ’50s and ’60s and worked on the 1956 Thunderbird facelift. Brian Jackson contributed photos of several interesting Buicks from the ’70s and ’80s.

Also included in the gallery are photos of Mark Donohue by Mike Parris and myself. And a photo taken in November, 2009 of Molly Sanders who died in April. Molly played an important part of the development of several Buick promotional cars including the Buick Grand National.

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For you performance Buick enthusiasts, sketches and photos of the Buick Camel GT car (Morgan Performance Argo JM16 GTP) campaigned by the Morgan Performance Group in 1985–86. Racing photos courtesy of Racing Sports Cars. My involvement was limited to a sketch of a paint scheme. I don’t know why the rendering shows rear fender skirts unless the photos of the prototype provided for reference had them. The car competed at Sebring in 1986 (DNF); the 1984 Camel GT500 in Charlotte (10th); the 1984 Coco-Cola 500 (5th); the 1984 Camel Continental at Watkins Glen (DNF); the 1984 Michigan 500 Camel GTP (7th); 23rd 1985 Annual SunBank at Daytona (17th); 1985 Charlotte Camel GT (6th); 1985 Lumbermens 500K Camel GT (10th); 1985 Camel Continental (9th, 1st in Lights).

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Buick LeSabre PPG Staff Car

Another Buick promotional vehicle, this time a PPG Staff car. Kind of ridiculous now. Now that I think of it, it was ridiculous then as well.

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Oldsmobile Calais Kelly American Challenge Car

This Oldsmobile Calais rendering developed into a modeling project at Diversified Glass Products where Gary Clark and I modeled the flared fenders. I found a few photos of the resulting race car on the Racing Sports Car site.

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Print of artwork by Ken Okuyama. There is a studio photo of the design being worked out in scale and full-size clay models on a post entitled GM Design Photos from the Early ’90s, Part 3.

Detail of “The Essence of Buick Poster” artwork by Andy Hanzel.

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For a great deal of very interesting information about the GM’s turbine powered Firebirds, visit How Stuff Works online.

1975 Buick Century Pace Car Sketch

In looking for some other artwork I ran across a sketch for the 1975 Buick Century Indy Pace Car. There are several posts on Dean’s Garage devoted to Buick Pace Cars.

I ended up with a box of slides from a major Buick-Oldsmobile show previewing the 1977 Buick and Oldsmobile models. The show included Riveria and Toronado models that never saw the light of day. Also in the gallery are shots of Olds and Buick J-coupes that were never produced. The show probably took place in 1975. In the background on the above image above the deck lid to the left of the door is a Gray Counts rendering.

Click on any thumbnail to open the gallery of images.

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Performance Design (see The Early History of the Buick Grand National and Performance Design) was created as an assumed name for freelance activities with Herb Fishel and Buick’s promotional efforts in the late ’70s. The 80X was featured in Hot Rod Magazine, October 1979. It was called the 80X because the Skylark was build on the new X-body platform for the 1980 model year.

Keep in mind that in the late ’70s the whole idea of what a performance car was, changed because of federal regulations, corporate downsizing, smaller engines, emission and fuel economy standards. Until computerized fuel injection engine management systems would become mainstream, new car performance was very modest by ’60s standards. Buick was struggling with image and an aging customer base, and needed to try and come up with ways to appeal to a broader market. Performance promotional vehicle creation was part of that strategy. Because these vehicles needed to be real cars that magazines would evaluate, they needed to preform much better than stock. That gave Buick the excuse to develop the unlikely V6 as a performance engine. This engine development produced factory performance parts that saw competition in a variety of racing venues, and eventually did see its way into production as the 3.9 liter turbo in the Buick Grand National and Pontiac Turbo Trans Am, and later in an even-fire configuration as the 3800.

Another thing worth noting is that Buick didn’t have any performance platforms like Chevrolet or Pontiac. So we were trying to make a performance car from an up-scale luxury car with conservative styling. It was no easy trick to take a stiffly sectioned boxy notchback and turn it into a performance car. If success is measured in lasting historical significance, then the 80X and the ’79 Century Roadmaster were not successful. But they were building blocks that helped lead the way out of the fog of the late ’70s.

80X concept sketch.

The modeling on the Buick 80X was done at Diversified Glass Products in Pontiac, Michigan by a group of very talented GM sculptors, mostly from Buick Studio. Larry Brinker acted as chief modeler. Other talented sculptors that helped on the project were Al Holgerson, Ted Klein, Dan Curtis, Dave Curtis, and Claudio Bertolini. If I’ve left anybody out, please let me know. We would meet at Diversified and work in the evenings and on Saturday. It was not the best of environments to work in, as it was a working (read: dusty) fiberglass fabrication shop during the day.

This is how these things start. Pretty scary and hard on the sheet metal.

Larry Brinker working on the front fender flare.

Models always go through ugly stages that tests the designer’s convictions. This car was no exception.

The sculptors were the best anywhere.

The hood blister came out nice. I felt free to break away from the stiff sections of the car and create a more organic form.

The finished model.

Two-page spread as it appeared in Hot Rod magazine, October 1979.

Publicity shots of the 80X.

Considering that these add-on panels were going to be offered to the pubic, I thought about ways to make the panels easier to install. I came up with the idea of attaching them with a C-shaped rubber molding with rivets instead of a lot of extensive and expensive body work. The C-shaped molding slipped over the flange designed into the body panels The lower leg of the molding went under the flange, and the upper leg of the molding covered the rivets that held the panels in place. The molding also added a visual, graphic element to the panel design. The idea was that the installation would be easier and far less expensive than traditional panel installation methods. I learned later that the shop that installed the panels and finished the car had a difficult time getting it perfect. Oh, well.

I imagine these are rare parts. Like none, maybe.