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Dalton pairs a rust-riddled 1967 Buick Skylark with a Pontiac LeMans engine on a strict $2,500 budget, turning what looks like scrap into a running muscle car. Pole Barn Garage’s low-buck formula has built a loyal following, including viewers who say the builds genuinely motivated them to get back to their own garages. Watch the full transplant come together.
This 1966 Buick Skylark Gran Sport hid a genuine street brawler under GM’s most conservative badge, running the final year of Buick’s torque-heavy nailhead V8 before the design retired for good. Only a fraction of that year’s Skylark production ever wore the GS badge, making a numbers-matching example a genuine rarity today. Read on to find out why collectors are finally giving Buick’s understated muscle car its due.
This 1968 Buick Skylark runs an 11-second quarter mile thanks to a stall converter and valve train work — but the real story showed up in the comments, where a man claiming to be the car’s first owner describes getting it from his parents in 1975, catching air on gravel roads, and sliding it into an impossibly tight parking spot while showing off for a girl he later married. It is a joyride video that accidentally became a decades-long love story. Watch the full clip and read the comment for yourself.
George was not hunting for a classic when he spotted a Buick Skylark with a for-sale sign in Lisbon, Ohio, in the summer of 2014; he just stopped for a closer look. What he found was a GS455-powered GSX tribute car with its original numbers-matching 350 engine stored safely away, parked in a garage alongside a small private muscle car collection. Read on to find out about the one-of-a-kind GM production mistake that makes a factory GS455 Stage I Skylark one of the rarest muscle cars of 1970.
The 1966 Buick Skylark Gran Sport carried a 401-cubic-inch nailhead V8 that Buick was obliged to advertise as a 400, because GM had capped intermediate engine displacement at that figure. It made 325 horsepower and a genuinely enormous 445 lb-ft of torque, which is how the engine got its Wildcat 445 name. It also cost meaningfully more than a GTO. Read on for why Buick’s muscle car was the fastest one nobody bought.
General Motors capped intermediate-car engines at 400 cubic inches, and Buick’s V8 measured 401. The brand’s answer was to print “400” in the brochures and sell the car anyway. Under the 1965 Skylark Gran Sport’s hood, that nailhead V8 made 325 horsepower and 445 lb-ft of torque, enough to earn the nickname Wildcat 445. Every Gran Sport also rode on the convertible’s reinforced frame, whatever the body style. Read on for how Buick built a muscle car without admitting it.