Buick Skylark 1st Gen

The 1961 and 1962 cars are the good ones to look at. The Y-body shape is crisp and small in scale, with a shallow greenhouse and a delicate roof, and Buick did the Skylark the right way: not a badge and stripe job, but a set of specific pieces. Its own emblems, its own taillight housings, lower body side moldings, turbine style wheelcovers and a vinyl covered roof, over a plush all vinyl interior with bucket seats on the option sheet. From 1962 the Skylark got a piece of hardware the Special could not order at all, a pillarless hardtop roof, and that is the clearest visual tell between the two cars. It is also what made the Skylark read as a small expensive car rather than a dressed up cheap one. For 1963 Buick threw the sheet metal away and started again. The new body is boxier and deliberately echoes the full size Buicks, with a blunter nose and small fins riding the rear fenders, and it lasted exactly one model year before the A-body arrived. The 1963 car is the one that looks most like a Buick and least like itself.

Buick never raced the Skylark and there was no factory programme behind it. The competition record belongs to the engine, and the engine's record is better than the car's. In 1962 Mickey Thompson took the 215 to Indianapolis, bored out to 256 cubic inches and mounted behind the driver, at a moment when the Speedway was still a front engine Offenhauser monopoly. Three cars were entered and one qualified, with a rookie named Dan Gurney in it, seventh fastest at 147.886mph. Gurney was running inside the top dozen on lap 92 when the transaxle let go, and he was classified 20th. Thompson took the Speedway's Mechanical Achievement Award for the effort, and the rear engine layout he was demonstrating would own Indianapolis within a few seasons. The other half of the story is Australian. Repco built its Formula 1 V8 around the same GM aluminum block family, choosing the Oldsmobile F-85 casting over Buick's own because it carried six head studs per cylinder instead of five, and Jack Brabham won the 1966 drivers' and constructors' championships with it, in a car that carried his own name.

The famous Skylark is not this one. The metallic green convertible the third act of My Cousin Vinny turns on is a 1964, which puts it a generation later and on a different platform. The 1961 to 1963 cars have almost no screen life at all, and chasing one would be the wrong story anyway, because this car's cultural weight is under the hood and it is genuinely large. The 215 aluminum V8 that made a Skylark a Skylark was sold to Rover in January 1965 after GM gave up on it, and Rover built it into the 2000s, in Range Rovers, Land Rovers, TVRs, Morgans and the MGB GT V8. The Fireball V6 that arrived alongside it in the Special had an even stranger life. Buick sold the tooling to Kaiser Jeep in 1967, watched it become the Dauntless 225, and bought it back from a cash starved AMC in 1974 when the fuel crisis suddenly made a small six valuable again. It grew into the Buick 3800, which GM kept building into the 2000s. Two of the most durable engines the American industry produced started here and in the car parked next to it.

Living with one comes down to coolant discipline and rust, in that order. The aluminum block and heads carry cast iron liners and iron valve seats, which is a lot of dissimilar metal sharing one cooling system, and the 215's reputation was built entirely by owners who did not respect that. Plain water, alcohol based antifreeze, or a long interval between changes, and the engine starts shedding aluminum into the radiator core; the water pump and the front accessory housing are usually the first parts to show it. Run a proper inhibited coolant, change it on schedule, and the engine is quietly one of the better designs of its decade. The bodies rust the way every early sixties unibody rusts, at the floors, rockers, cowl and trunk, and there is no frame underneath to hide behind. The two speed automatic is durable but dull and does the engine no favours. Beyond that these are simple cars with a small parts count, and the two things people fear most about them, an exotic aluminum engine and an orphan platform, turn out to be the two things a specialist industry has already solved.