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Mid-’70s Muscle Car: Hot Or Not?

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Mid-’70s Muscle Car: Hot Or Not?

1974-chevrolet-chevelle-laguna-s3You’re driving in a new neighborhood when you spot an old muscle car beside a garage. You instinctively hit the brakes and back up. There sits a Colonnade-roof GM muscle car from the mid-’70s. Maybe it’s a Chevelle that says “Type S3” on the fender or an Olds with “4-4-2” painted along the bottom of the door. Part of you is excited. You’ve discovered an old muscle car. But another part of you says, “Not so fast. It’s not a muscle car, it’s a ’70s muscle car.”

 

Is this a great find? Do you get revved up or not?

 

As the turned pages of our calendars accumulate, newer and newer cars become vintage. Generally, vintage interest begins percolating at around 20 years, which puts cars of the mid ’70s almost 20 years past that point. So where’s the party? You’ve probably noticed there isn’t one. For the most part, mid-’70s cars never really caught on. There are pockets of interest here and there, but less than for cars of other eras.

 

Why? Well, let’s start with this: Two of the biggest muscle car nameplates, GTO and Mustang, were gone — GTO literally and Mustang figuratively. GTO went out on a weak note, with a couple of models in its final years that diehards turned their nose up at. And Mustang? You know the story. The name continued, but the Pinto-based, four-cylinder Mustang II was a far cry from the original that had taken the nation by storm 10 years earlier. Ford actually sold a lot of Mustang IIs, but they didn’t generate much enthusiast interest then or now.

 

Add to the Missing-in-Action list ’Cuda and Challenger. That’s a lot of heavy hitters no longer on Team Muscle Car’s active roster.   Those that did survive (Camaro, Chevelle, 4-4-2, Trans Am, Charger, Nova… were there others?) got lobotomized with weak cams, decompressed compression, restrictive single catalytic convertors, and clumsy emissions systems. Times had changed and there was no going back.

 

I’ve read plenty of hate directed at the mid-’70s cars. This isn’t hate. I actually like some of them, deficiencies and all. But the truth is still the truth, and it doesn’t always go down easily. There will always be a few crusaders who bristle at the notion, but mid-’70s cars were constructed from different DNA that did not include the things we loved about the ’60s generation, primarily big power.

 

Yet, if we’re going to be honest seekers of truth here, we must also acknowledge that there were some bright spots too, even if not under the hood. I like the swivel seats in the Laguna, and the fat steering wheel, engine-turned dash, and handling of the Trans Am, probably the best overall car of the period.

 

There were a few more ’70s gems too. Oldsmobile continued its wonderful Hurst/Olds program for 1973-1975 and 1979 and for the off year 1977 slipped in an Indy pace car. Buick had ’75 and ’76 pace cars too, but the most visible are the ’78 Corvette and ’79 Mustang pace cars. This group has to be considered the most likely to succeed; the Corvette and Mustang have a following already.

 

Can I tell you what I think is probably the best of the ’70s? You may laugh, but it’s a Vega. Yes, a Vega, Chevrolet’s hated, under-engineered, and roundly ridiculed subcompact. It was offered as a GT, and even a premium DOHC Cosworth, both of which… well, never mind. Serious leadfoots loved transplanting V-8s into Vegas, giving them the kind of acceleration kick that makes personal injury lawyers wish they’d been born sooner. I had a friend who had a 427 Vega. He dropped just the engine into an otherwise stock Vega. Sweet mercy. I can’t believe the stock axle, which didn’t take kindly to small-blocks let alone a 427, survived the first hour.

 

Yenko built a handful of Stinger Vegas with turbocharged four-bangers, and offered kits for V-8 swaps; Motion Performance built a few V-8 conversions; but all of these are very scarce these days, probably the lowest production Yenko car ever. Technically they’re early ’70s, but to me they’re mid-’70s cars at heart, so I consider them members of the post–muscle-car muscle car club. That’s my rule, or is it the exception? I have another rule that every rule must have an exception or it can’t be a rule, and there are no exceptions to that rule. Got it?

 

As a group, I wouldn’t get my hopes up for a big surge in value as with ’60s muscle cars. As the cliché goes, they are what they are. Love ’em, or hate ’em, or love to hate ’em.