NEW PRICE! Most desirable 6-passenger Touring Sedan. Spectacular original interior, excellent paint and chrome, recent carburetor rebuild, new radiator & tires. Powerful CCCA Full Classic ready to tour.
This Touring Sedan shows about 48,000 miles and we believe that’s an authentic reading. It certainly looks and feels like a low-mileage car: tight, smooth, and confident. Today it wears correct Lancaster Gray over Carlsbad Black, another available combination, and the factory-style two-tone paint really accentuates the all-new body design, making it look even longer and lower than it already is. Gaps are excellent, the doors close with ease, and even Buick’s massive side-opening hood snugs down tightly. It also appears that as long as the trim was off, it was important to restore it, so the chrome was re-plated and the stainless was polished. The grille, hood ornament, and parking light fixtures are excellent, which is not easy because of the pot metal used in their construction, but this car shows you what you get by using good base stock. Someone, somewhere invested a lot of money in the cosmetics on this car.
The interior appears to be mostly original, and here you can see the reflection of the original color scheme, as it is code 908 tan and green Bedford cord. Still, it works well with the neutral back and silver paint job and there’s really nothing that’s quite as nice as a factory interior. We believe the woodgrained dash and window sills have been restored, the headliner is newer, and seat belts were added, but it certainly looks like the rest dates to 1941 and remains in outstanding condition. Beautiful engine-turned dash panels were used throughout the 1941 Buick line and all the beautiful cream-faced gauges are fully operational and show bright markings with no cracks. The steering wheel has a few minor stress cracks but is otherwise excellent, and it appears that everything but the clock works—even the Sonomatic AM radio pulls in stations loud and clear! Back seat occupants are treated to a living room on wheels, perhaps the very best place to be in this car, offering a foot rest, robe rail, a separate heating system, and custom ashtrays built into the armrests. Seat belts were added for touring safety and the spacious trunk is big enough for a week’s worth of luggage for the whole family. This car also includes a full-sized spare and jack assembly.
There was a quiet horsepower race in the 1930s, but in 1941, Buick’s 320 cubic inch straight-8 engine was the king of the horsepower hill. Thanks to innovative “Compound Carburetion” and overhead valves, it was fairly high-tech for its age and with 165 horsepower on tap, it out-muscled just about anything else you could buy. The dual Stromberg carburetors work in series, using the front carburetor at idle and low speeds, and the rear carburetor coming online as more throttle is applied, much like a modern 4-barrel carburetor. That makes tuning easy and this car always starts quickly and idles well, even when it’s ice cold. Some of that is thanks to recent rebuilds on both carburetors, as well as a full tune-up and the addition of a switchable electric fuel pump (it runs just fine without it). You’ll also see that there’s a brand new radiator up front, a custom unit that neatly replicates the original and blends invisibly with the rest of the engine bay and keeps this big engine nice and cool under all conditions.
The transmission is a standard 3-speed manual with steering-column-mounted shifter that offers light shift action for such a big car. Likewise, the clutch is light and easy to modulate and with 4.20 gears out back, this car eases away from a stop with effortless ease. Even more remarkable is what an awesome high-speed cruiser this is, capable of running at 60 MPH all day in surprising silence. Buick’s all-coil suspension working with a torque tube for the driveshaft means that it’s unflappable and thanks to the massive 139-inch wheelbase, it just ignores pavement irregularities. Bumps sound far away and with a recent set of 750R16 Diamondback Classic wide whitewall radials on the original 16-inch wheels, it’s just a fantastic road car.
These extraordinary cars have been hugely under-valued in the past, but I think that‘s changing today, particularly given that restoring one of these cars is an astronomically expensive undertaking. This is a beautifully finished example of the most desirable body style and it is 100% ready to tour. 90 Series Buicks are also CCCA Full Classics, so it is eligible for all the big events, and if my experience is any barometer, you’ll be very pleasantly surprised to find that they attract a lot of attention at events because they’re so rare (only 1231 Model 91s were built). So please, before you tell me that the price is too high or that you’d rather have a Packard or something more “exclusive,” come drive this incredible Buick. I’ll bet that you, like just about everyone else who has climbed behind the wheel, will fall in love and insist on taking it home. At the very least, I can promise you will be impressed by just how well it drives.
For more details and photos, please visit www.HarwoodMotors.com
