Competing with the Saab 96 on Michigan’s frozen lakes.
I found this car via Bring a Trailer, back when the majority of the content of that site was still Craigslist and eBay finds. I was actually at a work training class, scrolling through my RSS feed during one of the breaks, when I saw the post on Bring a Trailer, and clicked through to find out that the Craigslist ad was local to me. I immediately called the number on the ad and made arrangements to go take a look at the car that evening after work.
I first laid eyes on the car in the rapidly vanishing light after sunset. Painted a shade of slate grey, sitting atop tall but narrow black steelies, a big honkin’ pair of fog lights perched atop the front bumper, and a red winged Pegasus on each front fender, I immediately imagined myself drifting sideways on a dirt rallycross stage in the car with tall numbers on the doors. The car was mostly solid, with no holes in the floor and minor crustiness around the edges, and a working V4 motor and freewheeling 4-speed column shifted manual transmission. I paid cash and brought the car home that very night.
Driving the Saab
With the addition of the Saab, my daily driver Focus ST was permanently booted from the garage. In the garage, I had the Saab, my ’09 Mazda Miata, my ’88 Mazda RX-7, and my ’66 Ford Mustang.
The night I brought the Saab home, it kicked the Focus ST out of the garage for good, joining the Miata, the RX-7, and the Mustang in sheltered comfort.
The Saab was such a different car from all the other cars in the fleet. I was absolutely floored that the Saab and the Mustang existed in the same time period; that such different cars could exist together on the roads is very much a foreign concept to someone who has grown up in an age where nearly all cars are engineered to be as alike as possible in the name of mass market acceptance.
There was as much space in the front seats of the Saab as there were in the Mustang. You sat bolt upright in the Saab, with tons of room for your legs on the completely flat floor. There was no center console or transmission tunnel. The column mounted 4-speed shifter was easy to get used to, and I thoroughly enjoyed rowing gears through it, something that was absolutely necessary to keep up with modern day traffic, as the V4 didn’t produce much grunt unless it was wrung out.
The Saab’s tiny V4 motor.
My car also had the freewheeling transmission, a holdover from when Saabs were powered by the 3-cylinder two strokes and the freewheeling was necessary to keep the motor lubricated when the car was rolling off throttle. A nice benefit of the freewheeling transmission was that you didn’t necessarily have to rev match for downshifts; you could simply take your foot off the gas, wait for the engine to spin down, change gear without the clutch, and then add throttle in your new gear, and the engine spun back up with a vaaa-ruuUUMP!
Lots of space in the cabin for the front passengers. Note the completely flat floor!
Just driving the car around town was fun because the shifting was a pure joy. Super weird, but super fun.
It worked really well as a regular car, too. You could fit people in the back seat way more comfortably than you could in the Mustang. And the trunk was huge. The car is a packaging miracle. I can see how a car like this could appeal to people back in the day. I’d choose this over a Falcon or a Beetle any day of the week for regular car duties.
Look at all that space in the trunk! And you could even fold down the rear seats if you needed more length!
But I didn’t buy the car for regular car duties (though I did plenty of grocery and dining runs in the car too). I had bigger ambitions with the car.
Sideways on ice
I wanted to live my Erik Carlsson “On the Roof” fantasies, but minus the “rolling my car over” part. I had known about the car’s legendary exploits at the hands of one of rally’s greatest drivers, and was inspired to slap my magnetic numbers on the doors and go do some motorsports with the car.
As we were entering winter, what better motorsport to take the Saab to than the ice runs?
Alas, I didn’t get to run as many times on the lakes as I had hoped. I ran the car once with the Saginaw Valley Region at one of their events, some video of which I have here.
Inspired at how well the car did on all-season tires, I went to the effort of putting snow tires on the car before the next ice runs event on the other side of the state. I was going to have a blast with these tires, I thought to myself.
Getting a tow back home when the engine started knocking halfway to a Furrin’ Group ice runs event.
Unfortunately, the little engine started knocking halfway across the state. I removed my magnetic numbers from the doors and called roadside assistance to bring the car home. The tow truck operator, surprised to see a vintage car out on the road in the dead of winter, asked me what I had been doing. I replied that I was merely going to a car club meet — technically true! — and left out the “I was going racing” bit.
Despite the car’s winter escapades being cut short, I’m glad I had a chance to experience driving the car around in the cold and snow. Whereas the Mustang took a lot of coaxing to start in the cold, the Saab never failed to start on the first crank. The heater in the car was also really good, more than enough to keep me warm on long winter highway jaunts, or when I was waiting in grid for another run on the lake.
And damn, that car was really good on loose surfaces. Going from rallycrossing a Focus ST to doing ice runs in the Saab took almost no adjustment at all. And it wasn’t until years later, when I would try driving the ’66 Mustang on ice (with real snow tires and it still sucked!) did I realize how good the little FWD Saab was compared to its contemporaries.
Selling the car
I owned the Saab for just six months, from the fall of 2014 to the spring of 2015. At the time, I was getting deeper and deeper into National autocross competition with the Miata, and I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to carve out time to make the Saab roadworthy again.
I put the car up for sale, polling my friends on Facebook first to see if anyone I knew wanted the car.
The Saab goes to its new owner, Paul.
Appropriately, Paul, a fellow autocrosser and friend hailing from Ohio, was interested. Paul himself had a F Modified autocross car, essentially a two stroke “sound of a million buzzing bees” little formula car, and it totally made sense that he’d have a buzzy little Saab to go with his buzzy little race car. We struck up a deal, and he and his wife grabbed a U-Haul trailer and picked up the car.
Goodbye, little Saab!
In the time since, Paul has sold the F Mod car and stopped autocrossing Nationally. But the little Saab is still in his possession, waiting for its engine rebuild. I hope that the engine gets rebuilt sooner rather than later so the car can enjoy the wonders of the open road again, but I understand that sometimes life has other plans.
Of all the cars I have owned, my ownership of the Saab was one of the shortest yet one of the most impactful. I usually don’t miss the cars that I pass on to new owners, as by the time I’m ready to sell a car, I’ve done pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do with it. But my time with the Saab was cut short, and I feel like I still have unfinished business.
Maybe someday I’ll have another one.
Loved every moment of this, including the ice run video. The whole time I wondered just how horrible the Mustang would do on such a course, and giggled a bit when you got to that part at the end. But if I may offer one corrections, it wasn’t that the Saab was so much better than everything else (though with FWD it was surely quite good), but that the Mustang was so much worse than everything else on slick surfaces. 2 inches of snow would immobilize them unless you had good snow tires and big bags of ballast in the trunk.
These fascinate me for another reason – Mrs. JPC’s father owned the Saab franchise in my city for a short while when these were in showrooms. I have never been clear why he got out of it, but it had to have been a hard sell when there were so many more normal options out there.
In my first 19 years of car ownership, my first, third, and fourth cars were a ’68 Saab 95 (the wagon version), a ’69 96, and a ’68 96, all V4’s. I really enjoyed them. One day I was giving a friend a lift, and suddenly he said, “Where’s your drive shaft?”
None of my Saabs was the color yours was, but I think Saab called that color Ore Grey.
I fully understand the temptation of buying cars that are interesting. The hard part is often deciding what to get rid of and when, lest you annoy the neighbors with a driveway or street full of cars. Been there, done that, no more. At one point in the early 80s, I had 9 cars in the garage (2 car), the driveway (3 car) and the street. Once I quickly curbed my temptations, I quickly got down to 3. Tried storing three of them at a friend’s farm, but that was a disaster of another flavor.
Congrats on keeping your collection under control.
I had 3 SAAB 96’s, a 1961, a 1962 four speed, and a 1968 V4. Of these, I loved the 1962 four speed the most: michelins, Carello (non sealed beam) halogen head lights, Koni shocks and a GT two pipe exhaust system. Did a LOT of TSD rallying in the MA, NH,ME,VT area, bothe summer AND winter, with a few 24 hour winter rallies .ABSOLUTELY LOVED this car, bouncing off snowbanks, e brake for cornering in slippery stuff! Very solid car! Shiuldr/lap belt, Not the inetetia reel kind. Loved this car and really niss the 96s!
Your lake is a lot bigger than the one I use, but it’s such fun to drive on the ice (when on a lake, not so much the street), that all looks very familiar including the backwards driving and the head on a swivel action.
I always forget how bumpy the ice really is, generally not smooth at all.
What a great experience, owning a SAAB 96, and in an excellent color to boot.
This entry is close to my heart for three reasons:
1. My wife is from Beaverton, MI, so your Ross Lake video was familiar to us both.
2. I really want a Saab 96.
3. I’ve waited for a flatbed tow truck after an old car broke, namely, my ’65 Mustang.
Owned a bunch of these in the 80’s, a wagon, couple sedans, including a Saab Special (like yours) with the exterior chrome strips and the wood steering wheel.
I lusted after Saab, as the thinking man’s car, as the counterpoint to U S land barges and chromed horsepower that so disgusted me.
They treated me alternately with delight and and then with utter frustration, like any loved object.
I still have some parts stashed away in my garage.
Anybody need a rack and pinion set?, a radiator?, brake and clutch pedal assembly? and etc. just let me know.
The only new car my family ever had was a 1969 96 v4. Dad traded our ’65 Falcon 170 3 speed in on the SAAB (it was still an acronym at that point) so I would have a good winter car for my daily commute to college–40 miles one way with no class cancellations except in full blizzard conditions. It performed superbly and even allowed me to break-trail into unplowed parking lots by skidding over the snowbank on the smooth underbelly until being over center enough put the weight back on the front tires to pull the rest of the car over. School was in a hilly town, and the only hill that I couldn’t climb in four years also defeated an all wheel drive town snowplow truck until he backed up the hill using his sander to sand his own way up! It was a great car until the rust did it in. After college, I had to have a truck, but my parents kept driving another less rusty 96 dad found until they both gave up driving close to 30 years later!
Wow, this was an unexpected COAL — I’m sorry to hear that your time with the Saab was so short, but it probably provided you with a great deal of enjoyment per mile.
I liked reading about the comparisons between this and the Mustang; they do indeed seem like they were from different worlds, which, in effect, they were. Great video too. I doubt I’ll ever get the chance to try ice racing, so I enjoy reading/watching it instead.
I’ve never looked in the trunk of one of these, but as a former 900 owner, I definitely see some similarities in the wide, flat floor and the fold-down seat.
I had 2 96’s and a Sonnet. My green 96 started showing signs of a failing freewheel. It was pretty rusty, so I decided it would end it’s life as a convertable. I welded the doors shut and took a sawzall to the roof, discovering that all the wiring to the rear goes up the driver’s windshield pillar and through the roof. I drove it for a couple weeks, getting in was a chore due to the clingy cloth seats – climb over the door and thrash and wiggle your way down.
I’ve got a 1970 96 and it’s one of the most quirky little cars I’ve ever seen or owned. They are a ton of fun to drive with the 4 on the column. Mine’s a bit rusty and rat rod looking, and it now needs some transmission work ): Hopefully I’ll get mine back on the road soon enough. Great article and beautiful car!
SAAB owners since I was fifteen, there are three now in the drive. The 96 is the most fun I’ve had sitting upright in a car!
My 96’s and my Audi 4000 quattro were the best driver’s cars I’ve owned. There was a 10-year gap between the last 96 and the 4000, so hard to say which was a better driver’s car. Probably the 4000, but it had the advantage of being a much newer design.
Great post! Loved the video. This car seems right out of left field for you, you certainly got to enjoy it.
When I was a kid, elderly neighbors had two of these cars. They didn’t drive them much and they were mostly stored in the garage. My brothers and I had never seen cars like this and we would leak in the garage windows. We didn’t know what they were. One of the cars was black and the other was white. So we called them “The Salt and Pepper cars”.
This story sent me back to the 1970’s and the pleasure of experiencing two Saab 96’s owned by past friends of mine. The first one was a used 1967 Saab 96 with the 3 cylinder, 2 stroke engine and all of 46 hp. My friend bought it to drive in the WNY winters. The sound of the two stoke engine and exhaust note was unique. We had fun driving that Saab thru snow banks at the local mall parking lot after closing and drifting it sideways. Nothing could beat that front wheel drive for grip back then.
The second one was a 1973 Saab 96, v4 engine, rally prepared by another friend of mine. His claim to fame was placing 8th with it in the 1976 Canadian Winter Rally. Do yourself a favor and search the internet for Len’s Saab Story where he explains his passion for the Saab 96 and details all the rally problems with the Saab from the dual throat carb. heat problem, the modified exhaust for rallying, and the vacuum brake system. Thanks for the post.