1987 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS - Primordial Ooze

I've never been fans of General Motor's downsized intermediate "A-bodies" that debuted in 1978. That would be, in no particular order of contempt, the Oldsmobile Cutlass and Cutlass Salon, Buick Regal and Century, Pontiac Grand Prix, LeMans and later Bonneville and the Chevrolet Malibu and Monte Carlo. Cadillac, for reasons that escape me, didn't get one although you'd think, in retrospect, that an updated Seville would have looked better as one of those little "A-bodies" versus what they did with the nameplate starting in 1980. Too small, too weird, too awkward and just too much of generally too little, of all of the truncated "A-bodies", that that looked smaller than they actually were, the Monte Carlo was my least favorite.

Swoopy, silly and just as ridiculous if not more so than the hideous Cutlass and Century "slant roofs" or whatever they called them, it was amazing that nobody upstairs ordered development stopped on this bomb and demanded that they start over, but no one did.  The 1978 Monte Carlo had the interesting or dubious distinction of being an emulation of an emulation. For the record, the above Monte Carlo is a 1980.

  

Things got much better when GM cleaned up the design for 1981 but by then the market had already begun to shift away from personal luxury cars. Was it because GM, who did not invent the personal luxury car but is singularly responsible for propelling the segment to stratospheric heights that defied reason, sold a series of horrible looking cars? Well, if the brake shoe fits you gotta wear it. There was still a sizable body of fans for these "types" of cars but for forward-thinking fashion-conscious buyers, the personal luxury car's goose was cooked.

For 1983, in the midst of a semi "muscle car renaissance" at GM and Ford, Chevrolet "reintroduced" the Monte Carlo SS. Sharing nothing except the same name from the Monte Carlo SS of 1970 and 1971 fame, make that lore since it never sold that well, the 1983 Monte Carlo SS featured a high output version of the 305 cubic inch Chevrolet small block that was optional on Monte Carlo's. Using a Camaro-derived aluminum intake and the same cam as an L-81 Corvette, the "big" 305 made 25 more horsepower than the "regular" 305; pretty heady stuff back then.  Monte Carlo SS' also got an exclusive new nose and grille, sport suspension, 15x7 Rally wheels and white-letter Goodyear Eagle GT's. In my humble opinion, the performance bits and pieces made the car actually what it should have been as a base model. An "SS" model should have performed like our 1987 subject here powered by a, get this, carbureted LT-1 from a 1994 Buick Roadmaster. 

Remarkable what an appearance dress-up package and a fair to middling increase in performance can do for an automobile. All of a sudden, what was once a benign, dare we say inert little car like this plain-jane 1986 Monte Carlo was transformed into something that we'd portend to be...a legend. Amazing what horsepower and styling starved car wonks will gravitate towards when they'd been deprived of such as long as we'd been. The personal luxury car was dying and replaced by, a muscle car? Not really but the inversion was interesting - back to the primordial ooze we went. At least for a little while.