Buick Skylark 3rd Gen

The 1968 restyle gave the Buick intermediate all-new sheet metal and a semi-fastback roofline, and it carried a signature the other A-bodies did not have. Dave Holls's studio revived the Buick sweepspear, the long curved bodyside crease that arcs back from the front wheel and fades ahead of the rear, a motif Buick had used in the 1950s and now pressed into the flanks of a coke-bottle intermediate. It reads as calmer and more expensive than the creased, aggressive lines of the GTO or the 4-4-2, which is exactly what Buick wanted. The GS wore the same restrained body with little more than badges and a hood treatment, the sleeper look that defines the whole line. The exception is the GSX, which threw the restraint out: Saturn Yellow or Apollo White paint, thick black body stripes with red pinstriping, front and rear spoilers, seven-inch wheels and a tachometer mounted out on the hood where the driver could read it. The 1970 restyle sharpened the front, and the GSX package turned the quietest muscle car in the lineup into the loudest-looking one Buick ever sold.

Buick was a luxury division and never ran a factory road-racing program for this car, so its competition record was written on the drag strip rather than the road course. The Stage 1 engine was built for the quarter mile, and it delivered: Motor Trend tested a 1970 GSX at 13.38 seconds and 105.5 mph and called it the quickest American production car it had run that year, ahead of the Hemi and 454 cars it was measured against. That reputation carried into NHRA stock and super-stock bracket racing, where properly geared Stage 1 Buicks became genuine class contenders and stayed competitive well into the 1970s after the showroom cars had been detuned. None of it came with factory backing or a championship banner, which suits the car. The GS earned its racing credibility the same way it earned everything else, by quietly beating faster-looking machinery and letting the timing lights do the talking.

The Buick GS has always been the muscle car for people who already know, which has kept it out of the mainstream imagery that made the GTO and the Chevelle famous. It has no signature film role, no hit-song namecheck, no reserved spot on the bedroom walls of the 1970s. What it has instead is a deep, almost evangelical following among enthusiasts who treat the Stage 1 and the GSX as an insider's secret the rest of the hobby took fifty years to notice. In muscle-car circles the phrase that trails a GS 455 around is some version of the one that beat the Hemi, and the Saturn Yellow GSX has become shorthand for the whole idea of the underestimated sleeper. Its cultural weight is real but narrow, the reverence of specialists rather than the fame of a poster. That is finally shifting as auction results and magazine retrospectives push the Buick story out to a wider audience, but the GS remains, fittingly, the muscle car you have to be told about before you understand it.

Owning one of these is mostly a story about rust and torque, in that order. The Buick V8s are the easy part: the 350, 400 and 455 are stout, low-stress engines built to loaf, and beyond the oil leaks every car of the period wears, they ask very little. The 455 in particular has torque to spare and does not need to be revved, which makes a well-kept one a genuinely relaxing car to drive in a way most muscle cars are not. The trouble is the body and frame. These full-frame cars rot at the rear frame crossmember and the shock mounts, and the radiator core support corrodes from behind where you cannot see it. The bodies go at the lower fenders, the rear window channel and the trunk floor, and a vinyl roof almost guarantees hidden corrosion underneath. Front ends get loose with age, and the earlier drum brakes are adequate rather than reassuring given how quickly the car gathers speed. None of it is mysterious or unfixable, and a sorted car is dependable and easy to live with. The lesson every owner learns is simple: buy the metal, because the mechanicals are the cheap part.