Chevrolet K5 Blazer 1st Gen

The Blazer is the C/K pickup with two ideas applied to it. The first is the cut: everything behind the front doors is a single lift-off unit, so the vehicle can be a closed wagon on Friday and an open one on Saturday, and there is no B-pillar interrupting the line. The second is restraint. The 1967-1972 GM truck body was already the cleanest thing in the class, with a shallow beltline, a shoulder crease that runs the full length of the flank and a simple horizontal grille, and the Blazer benefits by leaving it alone. Bill Mitchell ran GM design from 1958 to 1977 and the Action Line trucks are among the least fussy work produced under him. The proportions are what makes it: short overhangs, a lot of glass and a body that sits square over the wheels rather than perching on them. Chevrolet never styled it as a lifestyle object, which is precisely why it has aged better than the things that were.

No factory Blazer competition programme is documented. Chevrolet built this vehicle to a cost, as a way of selling a pickup chassis twice, and a works desert team would have cost more than the development of the truck itself. The industry backdrop matters too: the Automobile Manufacturers Association had banned factory-supported racing in 1957 after the Le Mans disaster and the 1957 NASCAR grandstand crashes, and while Ford walked away from that agreement in 1962, General Motors stayed conspicuously out of official motorsport into the 1970s. So while Ford's Bill Stroppe Broncos were winning the Baja 1000 outright in 1969, 1971 and 1972, and an International SSII was taking production four-wheel-drive honours in 1977, no comparable factory Blazer result exists to put beside them. What the Blazer got instead was privateers, who found exactly what Chevrolet had: a cheap, strong, endlessly repairable pickup chassis. The competition history here belongs to owners, not to the manufacturer, and it is written in trail damage rather than trophies.

The first-generation Blazer's cultural life is mostly a working one. These were the trucks of forest services, ski patrols, ranches and rural fire departments, and that is where most Americans of a certain age first saw one, which is a different kind of fame from a film credit. What has happened since is more interesting. The 1967-1972 GM truck body has become the most collected American pickup shape of its era, and the Blazer has been carried along with it into a restoration and custom scene that treats these trucks the way the Ford world treats an early Bronco. The Action Line Blazer now turns up in advertising as visual shorthand for outdoor competence, usually in a colour Chevrolet never offered. There is no famous film car and no hit song, and the page is not going to invent one. Its standing comes from having created the American full-size two-door 4x4 wagon as a mass-market product, and from the fact that nearly every rival spent the following decade copying the formula.

These trucks were bought to be used and they were used, so the honest ones have all been apart at least once. Rust is the recurring bill: rear quarters, cab corners, rockers, floors and the seams around the removable top, and the top itself corrodes at the corners where the seals hold water against steel. Doors sag on worn hinge pins. Steering boxes develop play, and on a vehicle this tall the play is more noticeable than it is dangerous. The powertrains are the easy part; small-block Chevrolets and TH350s are the most forgiving combination in the American hobby and they will take neglect for years before complaining. What owners talk about is not reliability but weather. The removable top leaks somewhere on almost every truck, the heater is optimistic and the cabin is loud at speed. None of that stops anyone, because the compensation is a vehicle you can strip to the waist on a summer afternoon and then drive up a mountain.