Cadillac Eldorado 5th Gen

This is Bill Mitchell's Cadillac, drawn by Chuck Jordan's studio with Dave Holls alongside him, and most of the work was subtraction. The 1959 fins came down to something a grown adult could own, the wraparound windshield went in the bin along with its dogleg pillars, and the flanks flattened out, reportedly under the influence of the slab-sided 1961 Lincoln Continental parked across town. Then the studio added a fin back. The skeg runs along the bottom of the rear quarter panel and finishes below the back-up lamps, so from behind the car shows four fins, two up and two down, and no other Cadillac generation does. It lasted exactly two model years. Mitchell decided the skegs made the tail look like a rocket ship and had them off the 1963 cars, and they never returned. The 1961 nose is the convex jewelled grille leaning back toward both the hood lip and the bumper; the 1962 is flatter and more upright with a thicker centre bar, adopted because the first version was thought inside GM to look too much like a Chevrolet. The Eldorado's own contribution to all of this is a script and a spear molding.

No Eldorado raced in 1961 or 1962, and the reason is more interesting than the absence. The 1957 AMA agreement, under which the American manufacturers swore off factory racing, still bound General Motors on paper in both years and by then almost nobody else. Pontiac had built its Super Duty engines anyway, Chevrolet had the 409, and by the summer of 1962 both were winning openly on hardware sold over the counter with factory part numbers on it. Henry Ford II tore up his company's copy of the agreement in June 1962 and went racing in the open. GM did not stop pretending until January 1963, when its divisions were ordered to shut their programmes down and withdraw the Super Duty 421 and the 427 mystery motor. Cadillac needed no ordering, because Cadillac had never gone near any of it. Nor did its engine have anything left to offer. The triple-carburetor 390 that made the 1959 and 1960 Eldorado quicker than the rest of the range was dropped after 1960, which left the halo car running the same 325hp four-barrel as every other Cadillac in the showroom. Whatever competition life the Cadillac V8 still had was lived in other people's cars, in drag racing's modified classes, without a dollar from Clark Street.

The odd thing about this generation is that its shape is everywhere and its badge is nowhere. When a film needs 1962 to arrive in a driveway it reaches for this Cadillac. Don Draper buys a blue 1962 Coupe de Ville in the second season of Mad Men, in the episode called The Gold Violin, and Green Book puts Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga in a turquoise 1962 Sedan de Ville for a concert tour of the segregated South. Both of those are de Villes, and that is the point: in these two years the Eldorado looked like every other Cadillac, so the culture absorbed the shape and ignored the model name. The fins have outlasted all of it. Ant Farm buried ten Cadillacs nose down in a Texas field in 1974, spanning 1949 to 1963 in build order, to show the tailfin being born, growing monstrous and then dying, and 1961 and 1962 are the point in that sequence where it is visibly on the way out. Cadillac itself was doing fine. 1962 was the company's sixtieth anniversary and a record year at 160,840 cars, roughly three times what Lincoln and Imperial managed together.

A 1961 or 1962 Eldorado is one of the easier big American convertibles to live with, as long as you know where its money goes. Mechanically it is a Cadillac like the other 138,379 the company built in 1961: the 390 is understressed and rebuildable by any competent shop, the Hydra-Matic is tough, and the move from air springs to coils means this generation does not carry the one system that made 1957 to 1960 cars a gamble. What needs attention is everything powered. The top runs on hydraulic cylinders and a pump that weep and slow with age, and the six-way seat, the windows, the vent windows and the trunk pull-down are all motors and switches of a certain age. Rust turns up in the usual places, floors, trunk pan, rockers and lower fenders, and in the middle of the X-frame. Brakes deserve respect: four drums, and on 1961 cars a single hydraulic circuit. Chrome is the quiet budget item, because there is a great deal of it and replating a whole car costs more than anyone expects. None of it is obscure, and none of it stops anybody.