1983 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS Hits the Gym

From the May 1983 issue of Car and Driver.

It could be argued—indeed, the prop­osition has been put forward numerous times in this journal—that the Chevrolet Monte Carlo is every bit as appealing to the car enthusiast as a Toyota Starlet is to Doug Fraser. From the enthusiast’s point of view, the Monte Carlo has aver­age handling, discernible performance, insipid manners, and simulated neoclas­sic styling reminiscent of a Singer Ga­zelle or something. In other words, it’s everything you never wanted in a car. But, heck, it wasn’t intended for you hot-bloods anyway. The average buyer is pushing 50 and has one foot on the golf course and one eye on a retirement condo in Florida.

The plot thickens. Despite the EZ Listenin’ preferences of such buyers, the Carlo happens to be the sole surviv­ing front-engine, rear-drive, intermedi­ate-size, personal-luxury coupe in the whole Chevrolet lineup, and you know what that means: it’s the only Chevrolet on NASCAR’s eligibility list for Grand National competition. Sheeeit fire. Buick has been winning all kinds of GNs without ever admitting that there’s a Chevy engine under the Regal skin, Pontiac is playing to the fans with King Richard in a Grand Prix, and now Ford is flexing its fancy new aero Thunder­bird. Chevrolet has the choice of doing nothing, in which case the Carlo will just dodder off for another dose of Ar­thritis Pain Formula, or it can give the car a massive hormone injection in one last valiant attempt to restore its youth.

Cut to the general manager’s office, where Bob Stempel is saying: “One thing we have to watch very closely is our competition. It became obvious to us as Ford proceeded with their Thun­derbird, and the shape on the front of that car, that it was quite aerodynami­cally clean. So we started an aero program on our current Monte Carlo to see what we could do in a similar vein to slick up the car. You know, with many aero experiments you end up with a front that looks like an old Burlington Zephyr streamliner. But this one started to look so good it just seemed a natural for us to introduce it as an SS package.”

Meanwhile, over at the wind tunnel, the technicians have sculptured a new nose that accomplishes three significant feats: it eliminates the pseudo-neoclas­sic grille, pares back the drag coefficient to 0.375 (15 percent lower than the stock version’s), and trims front lift sig­nificantly. The Carlo’s basic construc­tion readily lends itself to such a nose job anyway because the fender and the hood all end at a single cut, as if the front sheetmetal had been assembled and then trimmed to size with one thwack of a giant bologna slicer. On the standard Carlo, the raw end is covered with a rubber-ducky frontispiece shaped to simulate yesteryear’s elegance; on the SS, it’s shaped to penetrate the air. In both cases, the headlights and the bumper attach to the structure behind, so what you see is merely a skin. In fact, the Carlo and a number of other Detroit models are designed with just a quick change in mind: a new look can be in­troduced without expensive and time­-consuming sheetmetal changes.

Only two other aero aids are visible on the SS, and they are there primarily for appearance. First, a small skirt is at­tached to the bottom of each front fend­er just forward of the wheel. This con­tinues the line established by the nose and makes a minor contribution to directing air around the front tires. In back, of course, is a teeny NASCAR-­style spoiler fastened to the trailing edge of the deck with six man-sized bolts. That lip will never rip off, no mat­ter how many times it’s used as a handle to slam the lid.

Interestingly—make that commendably as well—the aero mods on the SS are by far outnumbered by mechanical revisions to improve performance. With homologation specials like this, one de­cision has a way of leading to another in such a way that the final project is a lot more complicated than anybody would have imagined at first. Going in, all Chevy really wanted was to avoid being shut out at Daytona by the new Thun­derbird; a new nose is a relatively easy solution. For it to be allowed on the track, however, it must be sold on the street. And since your basic Carlo buyer doesn’t want a bullet nose messing up his K mart classicism, new buyers have to be found, which, in turn, means more and more changes until the package goes critical for some other group. Giv­en the purpose of the new shape, the idea of putting a motor under the hood and suffixing “SS” to the name is mere­ly the course of least resistance.

Bob Stempel admits agonizing over the decision. The basic Carlo’s position in the market, while an important and proper one for Chevrolet, is not within radiotelescope range of the perfor­mance market. Would a racerized ver­sion turn off the regular buyers and at the same time extract yawns of indiffer­ence from the performance fringe? One overriding statistic is that the average buyer of domestic cars is now 47, a doz­en years older than the average Japa­nese-import buyer. If the Motor City doesn’t hurry up and find a younger au­dience, its steady customers are going to fade into the social-security ranks and then die off. The fact that young people buy the performance cars was a big fac­tor in the decision. And the fact that they might be predisposed to yawn if the SS didn’t deliver performance in full measure was a big factor in the thor­oughness of its transformation.

The SS has been assigned a five-liter, four-barrel V-8 with 175 hp, up 25 from the standard Carlo V-8. It has a com­pression ratio of 9.5:1, the highest Chevrolet offers, backed up with elec­tronic spark advance and a knock detec­tor. Breathing is improved with a racier camshaft and a high-capacity exhaust system that uses a pair of two-inch stain­less-steel pipes feeding a wide-mouthed Corvette-style catalytic converter. Dual two-and-a-quarter-inch tailpipes and mufflers lead to an outlet at each corner of the back bumper, just like the real muscle cars of the old days. No wimpy pipe dumping under the side of the fender just behind the rear wheel; that’s for the old folks’ Carlo.

The drivetrain is similarly biased to­ward performance. Only an automatic transmission is available, but it has a high-stall-speed (2025 rpm) converter that also includes the lockup feature. The axle ratio was raised to 3.42 from the stock Carlo’s 2.29.

Chevrolet’s F41 sport-suspension op­tion is standard on the SS, with further tailoring that includes unique calibra­tions for the springs and shock absorb­ers, plus one-and-a-quarter-inch front and seven-eighths-inch rear anti-sway bars. Wide Goodyear Eagle GT tires, P215/65R-15s, are mounted on 7.0-by-15-inch styled steel wheels.

The result of all this mechanical sub­stitution is way too much whoopee for even the Gray Panthers. The engine has genuine lunge, and the shocks are there to remind you that life is not all smooth roads. The exhaust makes a roar that is full-on by the time you get to the double-nickel—it actually sounds more like an exhaust-noise synthesizer than the real thing—and will drive anybody over the age of 27 crazy in about four minutes.

Noise aside, the SS is rather fun. The trans kicks down hard enough to spin the tires if you catch it just right, and it will hold first gear right up to the 5500-rpm redline, dual exhausts blowing like crazed hair dryers all the way. The stiff­ish suspension allows enough axle hop to make fast driving over broken roads interesting, but not enough to worry you about getting sideways. The SS ac­tually seems quite nimble; with the big bars keeping the roll angle down and the quick (12.7:1) power-steering gear for snappy course corrections, you can pretend you’re a NASCAR good old boy trying to stay one lap ahead of the revenuers. As heavy-class performance cars go, this is the real thing.

Chevrolet didn’t stop there, however. It’s fascinating to see how much effort was directed toward making the SS look like the real thing, as such would be de­fined in the middle Eighties. Most of the Carlo luxury cues have been stripped off the exterior. Gone is the stand-up hood ornament, the deck-lid script, the wheel-lip moldings, and the rocker-pan­el strips. Even the molding at the bot­tom of the rear glass is gone. Same with the rear-license-plate accent. Any chrome that’s left—door handles, win­dow surrounds, bumper inserts, etc.—has been blacked out. A narrow, multicolored tape circles the body at bumper height, and “Monte Carlo SS” logos stick to the doors and the deck lid. The plan was clearly to Porsche the glitz right out of the old Carlo. If they could just get the nose down about three inches—the spoiler wouldn’t be at half-mast then, and some of the daylight in the front fender openings would go away—they’d have a pretty convincing package.

At least on the outside. Open the door and you’re confronted by the same blend of artificial blue and white that greets you when you lift the lid on blue­berry yogurt. Bench seat, door panel, dash, steering wheel, it’s everywhere. The SS does get gauges and a 6000-rpm tach, but otherwise the interior offers the same broad expanses of plastiwood and other high-performance fitments that make the standard Carlo such a hit.

The interior seems to be the only as­pect of the SS that the target market doesn’t warm to. Just to check its intu­ition, Chevrolet sneak-previewed a pro­totype at the Miami Auto Show last fall and asked hard questions of 158 atten­dants selected for a survey. They gener­ally thought it was a man’s car, liked the blackout trim, and took a dim view of the interior colors. Most significant, those who said they would consider buying the SS had a median age of 29, compared with a median of 38 for show attendants who wouldn’t consider buying the car. To Chevrolet, that sounded like pay dirt.

After seeing the survey results, Bob Stempel said: “We’re going to be watching very closely to see how popu­lar this car really is. If it goes, we might just do a few more things with it.”

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com