Buick received a complete makeover for 1961 with a cleaner and more conservative look, and there were big changes underneath as well.

Electra 225 Convertible 

Like all the General Motors divisions, Buick came into the 1961 model year with all-new  styling that discarded late 1950s excess for a cleaner, more conservative look. The changes at Buick were engineered by Bill Mitchell, GM’s crafty vice president of styling, who set up a design competition between the Buick production studio and the GM advanced studio.  In his view, the ’59-60 cars didn’t “look like Buicks.”

Accounts differ, but evidently the finished design for ’61 was some combination of the ideas from the two studios, with a bullet nose and overall theme by Bernie Smith of the advanced group. The new design eliminated the knee-knocker windshield/door configuration of prior years, but saw a continuation of ventiports, the fender portholes that were a Buick signature from 1949 to 1957 and then returned in 1960. The tail lamps are much like those on the custom 1960 Electra 225 built for GM executive Harlow Curtice.

Unlike other GM divisions, Buick had resisted GM’s unorthodox X-frame chassis in 1957-60, but then altered course for 1961 and adopted it. (Pontiac dropped it in ’61, while Oldsmobile never did embrace it.) It’s said Mitchell indirectly influenced the decision at Buick by constantly pushing for a lower roofline. The new Buicks were around an inch lower in height, but also four to six inches shorter and several hundred pounds lighter. However, the wheelbase (123-in for the B-body LeSabre and Invicta, 126.3-in for the C-Body Electra and Electra 225) remained almost identical.

To accommodate the X-frame chassis and a lower floor pan, the traditional torque tube, a familiar Buick feature since forever, was abandoned in favor of an open driveline. A two-piece driveshaft with a carrier support and a double-cardan, constant-velocity joint in the middle sent the power to a new rear axle assembly with three-link suspension. This, via a pair of converging lower trailing arms and a single, adjustable-length upper arm. The Twin-Turbine (formerly Dynaflow) automatic transmission and the Nailhead V8s—364 and 401 cubic inches—were carried over without significant changes.

(A double-cardan universal joint, which is simply two conventional yoke-type joints in tandem, achieves constant velocity motion by placing the two inner yokes in radial alignment so that the velocity changes of the two yokes cancel each other. This requires precise location of the input and output elements in the same plane, hence the adjustable upper control arm to correct the pinion angle.) 

LeSabre Estate Wagon

While Buick’s reputation was built as a premium make, for decades it was the low-priced models that made up the bulk of the division’s sales volume. The ’61 model year was no different, as the base model LeSabre accounted for 60 percent of the brand’s full-sized sales. What’s more, the brand’s new compact Special contributed more than 31 percent of the total volume of not quite 300,000 cars. (See our feature on the Special here.) Buick was still battling back from its disastrous performance in the 1957-58 economic downturn, and it wouldn’t return to its pre-recession sales levels until 1964.