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GENE BUTERA, THE MANUFACTURER
From the July 1968 Issue of Car and Driver
The original Boss Wagon—the 1966 Plymouth Fury III so much beloved of Car and Driver—has now seen its second birthday and is about to come face to face with its fifty-thousandth mile. Both the concept and the vehicle have worn extremely well, so well in fact that we decided to do another one.
This time we selected an Olds F-85 Vista-Cruiser, largely because several engineers whose opinions we trust have called it the best-handling and most stable of all of the current crop of station wagons, and because Oldsmobile Division has been showing such extraordinary signs of life in the areas of enthusiasm and high performance. The Olds—albeit strictly a one-off custom job—is a worthy successor to our aging Plymouth, and if it is a bit more boss than wagon, we can only defend it on the grounds that we are car nuts, not teamsters.
In the Wagon Department the Olds loses to the Plymouth. It is just as long and just as heavy, but much narrower inside and out, making it considerably tighter and more limited for both people and cargo. In fact, its smaller interior dimensions are the only feature of the entire package that qualify it as the intermediate-sized car its F-85 nameplate implies. It is a great big car, friends, make no mistake.
It is in the Boss Department, however, that the Olds excels our Plymouth and just about anything else we can think of. It is a veritable bear. It goes, stops, steers, and handles like hell. It is so fast you wouldn’t believe it. It does a big 94 in the quarter-mile, with an ET of 14.7 seconds, but unlike so many cars that deliver lots of sturm und drang in the quarter, it is perfectly happy to turn a corner or stop at the end.
New York National Speedway, where we conducted our performance tests, features a 0.5 mile shutdown area and a short return loop that can be negotiated at about 55 mph by test drivers with more brio than brains. The Olds was so good going through the quarter, then being hurled through the return loop that followed, that we’d like to see the whole procedure added to drag racing programs as a special event. The funny cars might end up a little less funny as a result.
To say that our Olds wagon was nonstandard would be an understatement of massive proportions. Basically a double-domed Vista-Cruiser, its standard-equipment 350 cu. in. V-8 was replaced with a mighty giant of a ram-air 455 developing tons of torque and herds of horsepower. And the enthusiasts in Lansing weren’t content to substitute just any old 455, they went a step farther and breathed all over the thing, bolting on a set of 4-4-2 heads, a special capacitor discharge system, and the camshaft from their hottest ’67 4-4-2 option. The result was the strongest, most responsive powerplant of any we’ve driven in the seven-liter-plus category.
Big engines are usually thundering torquers, but shy on the zappy responsiveness of small-displacement screamers. The 455 combined the best of both worlds—bags of torque, but very sporty at the same time. It normally only wound to about 5400, but if it had turned any higher than that it would undoubtedly have detached our retinas. What’s a big engine for? Retina Detaching is a mere hazard of the trade. Besides which, it’s worth it when you come across something as close to Truth as Boss Wagon’s Cousin.
Bolted to this superstrong engine was a pumped-up 3-speed Turbo Hydra-Matic that shifted more crisply and authoritatively than most manual boxes. Only when it got hot from repeated acceleration tests and a lot of forced manual upshifts did it lose some of its sharp punch, and then only between second and third. The final-drive ratio (with limited-slip) was the optional 3.42 instead of the standard Vista-Cruiser’s 2.78, and it ran on Olds’ beautiful styled steel wheels (from Motor Wheel Corp.) with 6.0-in. rims and Goodyear H70-14 Polyglas tires.
The front suspension is part of Oldsmobile’s police “Apprehender” package, as is the rear, only the front is pretty straight while the rear bristles with evidence of the same special attention that the engine got. The front’s made up of stiffer springs and shocks and a stabilizer bar. The rear has stiffer shocks and springs, plus the control arms and rear stabilizer bar from the 4-4-2. Brakes are disc front/drum rear, again of the police “Apprehender” (not to be confused with “Apprehensive’) genre.
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Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com
