WHEN IT comes to muscle cars, Buick doesn’t get the credit it should. Detroit’s ground-pounders, born in a turbulent and distant decade, were all about the small-d democratization of power—the cheaper the better. Buick was about 10 percent spendier than the best-selling Chevys, Pontiacs, Plymouths, and Fords that locked horns nightly at any given green traffic light, and for whatever reasons sold in far fewer numbers. So, the idea of a Buick isn’t always what pops to mind when the collective American hive-mind hears the term “muscle car.”
This is both dumb and wrong. If anything, Buick did it first: for 1936, the year Buick boss Harlow Curtice dropped the massive Limited/Roadmasters’ 130-horse straight-8 into the smaller Special-sized chassis and called it Century, he created the big-car-engine-in-a-midsize-body muscle car formula — something other GM divisions would rediscover decades later. He also tripled Buick’s year-to-year sales.
To kids born after the war, however, this was ancient history. A quarter-century later, Buick still knew how to build a torquey engine, but in 1960 the smallest car it built was the Le Sabre, a 123-inch-wheelbase brachiosaurus
