Buick Built Only 72 of These 1971 GS Stage 1 Automatic Convertibles — One Magazine Says It Could Outrun a Hemi

Only 81 Buick GS 455 Stage 1 convertibles were built for 1971, and just 72 of those got an automatic transmission — making this triple-black example one of the rarest muscle car convertibles GM ever produced. A magazine once claimed a car just like it could beat a Hemi Plymouth GTX in the quarter mile. Here’s the story behind the numbers, and the Jim Morrison ad campaign that almost never happened.

Buick built only 72 of these cars — ever. In 1971, at the tail end of Detroit’s horsepower wars, the GS 455 Stage 1 could still humble machinery it had no business beating, and one magazine even backed up the boast with a stopwatch. The car in this week’s spotlight is a triple-black Stage 1 convertible pulled from the Brothers Collection, and it’s rarer than almost anyone realizes: of the 81 Stage 1 soft-tops Buick built that year, only 72 came with the three-speed automatic, making it one of the lowest-production performance convertibles GM ever sold. A few years earlier, Buick’s marketing team had tried to borrow a song from The Doors to sell this very performance package — and Jim Morrison shut the deal down himself. What survived under the hood turned out to be just as stubborn as that history.

This week’s Muscle Car Of The Week video — Episode #184 from V8TV — puts the spotlight on exactly that car: a 1971 Buick GS 455 Stage 1 convertible finished in triple black, straight from the Brothers Collection. The description accompanying the video calls it the recipient of “some of the best Buick had to offer” that model year, and the walkaround backs that up, tracing the car from its GM “A-body” underpinnings — the same platform that also carried meek six-cylinder sedans and fully loaded station wagons — up to the top of the Buick performance ladder.

Viewers who’ve watched the full video keep coming back to one moment: the burnout at the end. Commenters called it an unusually confident move given how rare and valuable the car is, and more than one owner of a 70-72 GS Stage 1 chimed in to defend the car’s reputation as a genuine sleeper — a plush, comfortable convertible that could embarrass drivers who didn’t know what they’d pulled up next to.

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Only 81 Convertibles, Only 72 With the Automatic

The Stage 1 package didn’t exist until Buick needed it. By the late 1960s, the Gran Sport — which started life as a trim option on the Skylark in 1965 before becoming its own model in 1967 — was losing ground to faster machinery from Pontiac, Chevrolet, and Oldsmobile. Buick’s answer arrived in 1970, the same year GM lifted its 400-cubic-inch displacement cap for mid-size cars. That single rule change let Buick drop its 455-cubic-inch V8 into the GS, and the Stage 1 tune turned it into one of the era’s most underrated big-blocks: 360 horsepower and a monstrous 510 lb-ft of torque, more twisting force than almost anything else on the street.

1971 changed the math. Emissions rules and the looming shift to unleaded fuel forced Buick to drop the Stage 1’s compression ratio from 10.5:1 to 8.4:1, which cost the engine roughly 15 horsepower and 50 lb-ft on paper, landing it at 345 gross horsepower (275 under the new net rating system) with 460 lb-ft of gross torque. Buick still built fewer than 1,000 Stage 1s for the year — estimates range from about 800 to 900 units out of 9,292 total GS 455s built in 1971, meaning roughly one in ten Buick GS buyers paid for the performance package. Order one as a convertible, and the odds got much longer: just 81 Stage 1 soft-tops were built that year, and only 72 of those, like the car in this video, came with the three-speed automatic. The other nine got the four-speed manual. Every automatic Stage 1 also came with a mandatory 3.42:1 rear axle and a milder 10-bolt Positive Traction differential, a compromise Buick engineers made so a taller gear wouldn’t over-spin the air conditioning compressor.

For readers who like tracking down how rare American iron has survived this long, it’s worth a detour to another long-lived family machine we’ve covered: a Mercury that’s stayed in one family for six decades, read that story here.

The Song Buick Almost Borrowed From The Doors

The Stage 1’s backstory includes one of the stranger footnotes in muscle car advertising. In 1968, Buick wanted to use The Doors’ “Light My Fire” to sell the new GS Stage 1 package, building an ad campaign around the line “Come on, Buick, light my fire.” The rest of the band sold the rights without consulting their frontman, and when Jim Morrison found out, he personally called Buick and killed the deal. The company backed off using the actual song, but the phrase itself proved too good to waste — “light your fire” kept showing up in Buick brochures well into the early 1970s, stripped of its Doors connection but still riding on the association.

The Hemi-Beating Claim Muscle Car Fans Still Argue About

What actually makes the Stage 1 special isn’t just the rarity, it’s the engineering underneath it. The 455 was the largest-displacement engine GM put in any mid-size car, fed by twin functional hood scoops with foam-sealed dual snorkels feeding a four-barrel Rochester Quadrajet. That torque figure — 510 lb-ft gross in 1970, still a heavyweight 460 lb-ft after the 1971 detune — is what gave the Stage 1 its reputation as a low-RPM bully that could out-launch cars with bigger horsepower numbers on paper.

That reputation got put to the test in 1984, when Muscle Car Review published a feature titled “50 Fastest Musclecars” and backed it up with an actual drag race: a 1971 GS 455 Stage 1 beat a Hemi-powered Plymouth GTX two out of three runs in the quarter mile. The magazine’s all-time list ranked the 1970 Buick GS 455 Stage 1 third overall, behind only a 427 Corvette and a 427 Cobra roadster, and ahead of every Mopar on the list — a claim that started an argument among muscle car fans that, four decades later, still hasn’t fully died down.

It also helps that the Stage 1 rarely announced itself. Buick never sold the GS 455 as a stripped-down drag special — even the Stage 1 came standard with the brand’s usual plush bench or bucket seats, sound insulation, and a soft ride tuned more for boulevard cruising than a stoplight brawl. That’s exactly why owners in the comments describe it as a sleeper: a triple-black convertible with a formal roofline and chrome trim doesn’t look like a car built to hunt Hemis, right up until the light turns green. The GSX, Buick’s more flamboyant Stage 1 variant with its bold stripes and rear spoiler, got most of the magazine covers; the plainer GS 455 Stage 1 convertible got the results and comparatively little of the credit.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.