Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1962 Buick Wildcat Sport Coupe – A B-Body Buick Joins The Bucket Brigade

Buckets seats in a full-size Buick? Midway through the 1962 model year, Buick added a sporty buckets-and-console model to the B-body Invicta series, with the evocative name of Buick Wildcat. Here’s an early review of the new Wildcat, from the July 1962 Car Life.

The Bucket Brigade

Blame the Monza: While Buick taking inspiration from Chevrolet was not the usual order of things at GM in the ’60s, the huge success of the Corvair Monza had revealed a substantial market for plush coupes with sporty trim and bucket seats, and almost every domestic automaker got into the act as quickly as they could set up the necessary tooling.

One could also point to the influence of the four-seat Ford Thunderbird, whose individual seats and prominent center console were an essential part of its flashy specialty car persona. However, GM hadn’t yet gotten its corporate heads around the reasons for the Thunderbird’s success, and specialty cars required distinct body shells that involved a much greater financial commitment. (The Buick Riviera, arguably the first really serious GM response to the Thunderbird, wouldn’t arrive until the 1963 model year.) What made the Monza so appealing from a corporate perspective was that it was low-risk: Take an existing two-door hardtop or convertible; add flashy trim and individual seats (with or without Thunderbird-style center console); profit! And, if for some reason it failed to thrive, it could simply be dropped or parted out to the options list, with no need for any high-ranking executives to fall on their swords in shame.

 

Buick’s first Monza rival was the Skylark, a sporty version of the Y-body Buick Special senior compact, but by 1962, the Detroit “bucket brigade” was expanding to include full-size models as well as smaller ones. One important development in that area was the new-for-1962 Chrysler 300 Sport, which borrowed the sporty trim but not the performance hardware from the “Letter-Series” Chrysler, but that was far from the only entry in this new segment.

So, midway through the 1962 model year, Buick responded with a new sporty model called Wildcat, borrowing the name of an unrelated 1953 Buick Motorama show car (which is now on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum). The 1962 Wildcat was initially offered only as a Sport Coupe (two-door hardtop) and was technically a sub-series of the mid-level Invicta line. It had a base price of $3,927, making it $194 more than a two-door Invicta hardtop. For that price, the Wildcat gave you a vinyl roof, special wheelcovers, and the obligatory badges and emblems, but the big attraction was the new interior, which included — as the toy commercials used to say — everything you see here:

You can imagine the embarrassment of the Buick marketing team, who had made a big deal of how the 1962 full-size line’s “Advanced Thrust” design had enabled the driveshaft tunnel to be “diminished to a mere ripple,” thereby making the big Buicks America’s (or Canada’s) “only real 6-passenger car.” This was the image that appeared in the early 1962 brochures:

Oops. Whether it really made any sense to install individual seats and a center console on a car this large and otherwise roomy is one of those imponderables, much like the value of the Wildcat’s console-mounted “rallyist’s tachometer,” which was too low to easily read while driving. In both cases, these features add a certain sporting touch at relatively low cost, which was the object of the exercise.

 

Car Life had already sampled the ’62 full-size Buick line by the time the Wildcat debuted — the magazine had tested an Invicta convertible in the December 1961 issue — but they decided the new model was worth another look. Here’s their verdict, from the July 1962 issue.

That “Advanced Thrust” catchphrase appeared often in Buick’s marketing materials for 1962. It referred not to engine power, but to the shifting of the engine forward in the chassis for a greater front weight bias, which Buick claimed provided “arrow-straight tracking, even in crosswinds.” Car Life begged to differ, saying, “we don’t quite share the copywriter’s enthusiasm, particularly with regard to its sure-footedness.”

 

Unlike the flossier Oldsmobile Starfire, Buick didn’t endow the Wildcat with any additional “sock” beyond what was already standard in the Invicta: the 401 cu. in. (6,572 cc) Wildcat 445 engine, with 325 gross horsepower and 445 lb-ft of torque, mated to the Buick Turbine Drive transmission and a 3.23 axle ratio. Since the Wildcat Sport Coupe was only 60 lb lighter than the Invicta convertible Car Life had already tested and had the same powertrain, performance was naturally similar. (Their Invicta was actually slightly quicker (by 0.4 seconds to 60 mph and 0.3 seconds through the standing quarter mile), but not significantly so, and probably within the normal realm of production tolerances.)

 

The Buick Turbine Drive, née Twin Turbine, née Variable-Pitch Dynaflow, was the only transmission offered on the Invicta and Wildcat in 1962. This was the last of Buick’s “pure” torque converter automatics, with a five-element torque converter (with two turbines and two stators, one fixed-ratio and the other variable-pitch). You’ll often see people describe this as a two-speed automatic, but it’s really a continuously variable transmission, using the multiplication provided by the stators and a planetary gearset within the converter hub, with an effective ratio of up to 3.4:1 at stall.

Behind the converter was a Ravigneaux planetary gearbox providing low, reverse, and neutral, but this had no provision for automatic shifting: You could manually select Low for extra dig or additional engine braking, but switching back to Drive was your affair — the transmission would not do it for you, any more than it would automatically shift from Reverse into Drive. In Drive, flooring the throttle would flip the switch-pitch stator blades to their low angle for a bit of extra mid-range power, but if you were really in a hurry to pass, you would need to select Low, which could be held past 60 mph.

 

Although the text of this article doesn’t mention it, it’s clear based on the earlier CL Invicta test that the listed acceleration times were obtained by starting in Low then shifting to Drive just past 60 mph. You could of course start in Drive, but Car Life had previously noted that doing so would cost you roughly 2 seconds in 0–60 acceleration time — still perfectly adequate, but not quite “torrid” by contemporary American standards.

Even starting in Low, the transmission did soften off-the-line response a bit, but the Car Life editors found this useful, since it made it easier to get a good launch without spinning the tires. You could also order a positive traction limited-slip differential (an extra $48), which they recommended. Incidentally, despite their concerns that the “Advanced Thrust” design made the big Buick too nose-heavy for good traction, the spec panel reveals that the actual weight distribution was 54/46, which was hardly terrible for a big front-engine/RWD car.

 

Car Life was not pleased with the handling of the big ‘Cat. I know some readers bristle at these car magazine complaints, arguing that the buff book fixation on sporty cornering wasn’t what buyers wanted. The editors of Car Life were prepared to concede that, but they couldn’t accept the Wildcat’s hopelessly inadequate shock damping, which gave a plush ride on smooth pavement, but “a wallowing action over bad roads that comes close to the human threshold for seasickness.” They were more happy with the brakes, which were Buick’s famous finned drums (aluminum in front), and had better-than-average fade resistance.

The Wildcat’s straight-line performance was pleasantly brisk — 0 to 60 mph in 8.9 seconds, the standing quarter in 17.0 seconds at 82 mph — but even for 1962, this was definitely not what we’d now call a muscle car. Nonetheless, the Car Life editors’ concern that the 1953-vintage Buick V-8 was at the end of its development potential was somewhat premature. Buick subsequently managed to bore the engine a bit more for a total displacement of 425 cu. in. (6,970 cc), and the bigger engine would become optional on the Wildcat starting in 1964.

 

At this time, Buick was still recovering from its late ’50s sales skid, which had been due in part to sales volume outstripping quality control. Assembly quality had improved markedly since then, and Car Life was now generally pleased with Buick fit and finish (although their early-production ’62 Invicta had suffered a few untoward squeaks and rattles). Their Wildcat was solid, as well as it should have been at this price.

The data panel above includes at least one embarrassing error: It suggests that Low could be held to 77 mph at 5,000 rpm, which is wrong. With the 3.23 axle and 7.60-15 tires, Low gave 14.07 mph/1,000 rpm, so 5,000 rpm in Low would be 70 mph. In the Car Life Invicta test, they shifted from Low to Drive at 62 mph, which was about 4,500 rpm.

As an Invicta sub-series without its own model code, the Wildcat’s total 1962 production is unclear. Factory production figures don’t distinguish it from the Invicta Sport Coupe, which totaled 12,355 units for 1962. The Encyclopedia of American Cars claims that only 2,000 of those were Wildcats, which sounds low, even considering the late introduction.

 

This first Wildcat may not have had ferocious performance or commanding sales numbers, but it did have a big appetite: By 1963, it had devoured the rest of the Invicta lineup except the station wagon. The expansion of the line quickly diluted whatever sportiness the Wildcat originally possessed — by 1966, it was becoming a decidedly overweight and lazy housecat — but the nameplate survived through 1970, after which it was replaced by the Centurion.

Bucket seats and center consoles are so ubiquitous now that it can be hard to see what the fuss was all about, but if the early “bucket brigade” wasn’t really very sporty, cars like the early Wildcat did have a sense of occasion that still has the power to charm, if not to thrill.

Related Reading

Curbside Classic: 1963 Buick Wildcat – I Think I Want To Fight
Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1964 Buick Wildcat with 425 V8, Dual Quad Carbs and 4-Speed Manual — More Carbs and Gears Are Not Necessarily Better