Junkyard Find: 1971 Buick Skylark Custom Sport Coupe
While I've witnessed an endless stream of 1946-1975 Detroit sedans heading to The Crusher during my decades of junkyard crawling, sporty Detroit coupes of that era tend to avoid that fate. This applies especially to 1964-1972 GM A-Body coupes and even more so to those with factory V8s, yet that's just what I've found in a Denver-area car graveyard.
The General built the rear-wheel-drive A platform from the 1964 through 1988 model years, although the platform was renamed the G-Body for 1982 (because they wanted to recycle the A name for the new front-wheel-drive Chevy Celebrity and its siblings, for reasons that probably didn't even make sense at the time).
The 1964-1972 A-Body coupes and convertibles became sought-after classics of an over-idealized American automotive era. Sure, for every SS 396 Malibu there would be a few dozen straight-six- or 307-powered Chevelle sedans with three-on-the-tree manuals, but so what?
The most famous GM muscle cars of the 1964-1972 period were all A-Bodies: the Chevelle SS 396/454, the Pontiac GTO, the Oldsmobile 4-4-2 and the Buick GS. All printed money using John DeLorean's formula: midsize coupe + big engine from a land yacht + cool graphics/wheels/hood scoops = PROFIT!!! This taught GM's suits that investing in marketing paid much better than investing in engineering, which worked well for a while but then … didn't.
You know how many 1964-1972 GM A-Body coupes I've documented in junkyards since I started doing this job 19 years ago? Today's Skylark is just the third, after a 1969 Skylark and a 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass.
For the 1971 model year, the Buick A-Body was available as the Skylark, the GS and the SportWagon (the Special name was used on the base models through 1969, after which it proved simpler to just offer several grades of Skylark instead).
The A-Body's chassis technology was advanced for American cars of the time, with a sophisticated all-coil-spring suspension that its Chrysler and Ford rivals couldn't match. These cars looked good, too. Buick, being at the top of the GM Ladder of A-Body Success, had the busiest styling. The members of the Chevelle and Cutlass families were cleaner looking, especially after the 1968 redesign; this is a big part of their enduring popularity at car shows today.
The year 1972 was the final one for the A-Body Skylark. After that, the Skylark name was used on Chevy Nova siblings, Chevy Citation siblings, Pontiac Grand Am siblings, and Chevy Corsica siblings. The last Skylarks were 1998 models.
Today's Junkyard Find is a Skylark Custom, and it's heavily optioned. The base price was $3,317 (about $27,754 after inflation), but the out-the-door cost certainly was much higher.
First of all, there's the engine. This car was built with a 350-cubic-inch, Quadrajet-topped Buick V8, instead of the base (for the Skylark Custom) two-barrel 350. This engine was rated at 260 horsepower.
The 350 four-barrel was the base engine for the '71 GS, while the non-Custom Skylark had a 250-cube Chevrolet straight-six as standard equipment. The SportWagon had the same powertrain specifications and options as the Custom.
Then there's the TH350 three-speed automatic transmission, rather than the base three-on-the-tree column-shift manual.
There's air conditioning with a Cadillac-style thermostat temperature control. I can't find the price for this, but it would have been plenty.
Manual four-wheel drum brakes were standard equipment on the Skylark and Skylark Custom for 1971, while power discs went on all GSs and SportWagons. With a curb weight of 3,391 pounds (about the same as a new Camry or Accord), this car must have been exciting on long downhill grades. At least the original buyer of this car paid extra for power boosting.
This car's final parking space is right next to a 1949 Buick Super, and a few spaces away from the 1960 Jaguar we admired last week. All three cars arrived together and came from the same owner.
The interior is unexpectedly nice for a car that sat outdoors in High Plains, Colorado for years or decades.
I found receipts for parts and repairs from the middle 1990s inside, and there's a 1999 emissions inspection sticker on the windshield.
This case from a locally released CD compilation from 2002 was inside.
All these clues suggest that the car last moved under its own power around the turn of the century.
Nearly a quarter century of exposure to the elements has taken its toll.
Here's why GM cars with padded vinyl roofs can be so expensive to restore.
There's rust elsewhere, too. A 1971 Malibu coupe with factory small-block in this condition would be an economically viable restoration candidate, especially in the rustier regions of the continent, but not a Skylark coupe in the Mountain Time Zone.
The build tag tells us that this car was born at Fremont Assembly in Northern California, which shut down after the final Cutlass Ciera was built in 1982. GM and Toyota rebooted the facility as NUMMI two years later, closing it in 2010. Today it's a Tesla Factory.
Since I came of automotive age just up the Nimitz Freeway from Fremont Assembly (I got my first driver's license two months after it shut down the first time), it pleases me when I find junkyard cars built at that place. So far I've written about a dozen or so discarded Fremont Assembly vehicles, probably better than 50 NUMMI vehicles and even a Tesla Model S.
"It looks like a knife, going into the wind."
Brakes smoothly and in a straight line.
Help us fight pollution now while we look for better answers (because our lobbying didn't fend off government emissions standards as long as we'd hoped).
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
1971 Buick Skylark Custom two-door in Colorado junkyard.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
More by Murilee Martin
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I remember when the roads were full of the GM A bodies.
And the high school parking lot. A cheap used car that was easily 'souped up'.
Brett Leroy in Corner Gas drove a a 1968 Ols Cutlass S. A car which suited his personality and being the operator of a gas station.
"This taught GM's suits that investing in marketing paid much better than investing in engineering." - Truer words were never written.
I had a 71 Cutlass with the 350 long, long ago. Good times