I mentioned Buick's Centurion in my recent soliloquy about a 1973 Buick Apollo and I thought I'd do a quickie deep dive on one today. Our brownish red on off white convertible here hails from model year 1973. Depending on your point of view she's either a beaut or a brute. I'd say a combination of both.
The first Buick Centurion was a 1956 GM Motorama concept car that was as far out '50's cool as it got. Squint your eyes a tad and you can see a lot of 1971-1973 "boat tail" Buick Rivera in the rear end although none of that polarizing styling made it to the Centurion of the 1970's.
These cars replaced the Wildcat in the Buick lineup and were marketed more as a luxury car than sporting full size car like the Wildcat was. Buick changed up the trim somewhat on their LeSabre and shoehorned it into their lineup supposedly above the LeSabre but below the Electra. While the splitting of model hairs to come up with what are supposedly different models still goes on today, to the unenlightened the Centurion was a LeSabre. Wait, you know what? To us that know better it is a LeSabre. Who's kidding who? It was available as either a two or four-door hardtop and a convertible like our subject here.
More years ago than I care to admit, I test drove a 1973 Centurion convertible and was not impressed. In fact, it was one of the more terrifying experiences of my young driving life. Although I learned to drive on my father's woe-be-gotten '72 Cadillac deVille, I had never gotten comfortable driving it because it was just too damn big and loosey goosey. Manly Man I portended to be, I felt as though I needed a car that was equally as big as my dad's and, hence, the test drive of that Centurion. For the record, my Daddy's Caddy was slightly bigger since it rode on GM's "C-body" chassis whereas these rode on the slightly smaller wheelbase GM "B".
Powered by the Buick "350-4", V-8 that was offered as the base engine on '73's only and not the mighty "455-4" our subject has, I found it sluggish and unresponsive despite the owner bragging about how powerful the car was. What there was of handling was ponderous - I could hardly keep the thing in lane as the front end seemed to have mind of its own. Not sure if the car was supposed to be like that or not seeing the car was a good ten years old at the time and the owner was the kind of guy who looked like he beat the living daylights of it. What got me the most was what a shuddering mess the whole thing was - not unlike my father's Cadillac.
I came to find late that the flexing of its chassis was not only endemic to all convertibles back in the day, but the 1971 vintage GM full size cars were designed to flex to some degree to make them ride smoothly. Well, that may have made them nice to ride in but to drive these things you should have had to apply for a boating Captain's license.
I recall the guy wanting around $1,800 he was as flexible on the price as the car's chassis was. I was between cars at the time and that price was a good $750 to $1,000 more than I wanted to spend, and he quickly caved to like $1,200 which made the conversation fairly awkward since I really didn't care for the car. I loved the way it looked and the notion of convertible to me has also been more romantic than practical but oh-my-god what a slob of ride and handler that thing was. I told him I'd think about it.
The year of that test drive was 1983 and folks were giving these cars away back then. Our very clean subject here is for sale for $14,995 so it would have been nice to spend that little back then and have it appreciated to the degree that these have. Shuddering body and all. However, I have no regrets to this day about not taking him up on his willingness to take $1,200 for it.
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