A Year for Sports Cars

If a contest were held among Detroit's 1964 models, the prize for the styling quirk of the year would probably go to Buick and Oldsmobile. When they tried to put a forward-facing third seat in the rear of their Special and F85 station wagons, the seat wound up perched on top of the rear axle-up so high that there was not headroom enough for a midget. General Motors' solution: raising half of the roof into a vista dome, a move that gives Buick and Oldsmobile the distinction of having the first station wagons styled like a Scenicruiser Greyhound bus.

Adopting a Trend. Among the rest of Detroit's 1964 models, the changes are not so dramatic. Automakers have had two good sales years in a row, and they are wary of monkeying too much with what seems to be a good formula.

But Detroit has happily succumbed to one trend: the growing U.S. love of sports cars. Noticing the eagerness of customers for making the family car look as much like a sports car as possible with such extras as bucket seats and floor gearshifts, the automakers are speeding ahead with more straightforward sports cars for 1964.

At the New York World's Fair next April, Ford will introduce a four-passenger sports car that will cost less than $2,500 (v. about $4,500 for the Chevrolet Corvette and Studebaker Avanti, already on the market); it will have the long hood and short rear-end characteristic of Britain's top-selling sports cars. Chevrolet expects to be in the showrooms late next spring with a rear-engine sports car built on the low-priced Corvair chassis with a sleek, sloping rear end (called a fastback in Detroit). By then, the aggressive Pontiac Division also intends to be out with a sports car of its own, named the Tempest GTO to ride on the prestige of the red-hot Italian Ferrari's GTO.

Finally, by the beginning of the 1965 model year, Chrysler will have its own sports car ready for action.

Into Intermediate. General Motors figures that it has another trend spotted in the sales success of Ford's inter mediate-sized Fairlane, which is in a niche between the compacts and standard-sized cars. G.M.'s Chevrolet Divi sion is readying an elegant, all-new intermediate car that it is tentatively calling the Chevelle. Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac will upgrade their compacts to intermediate size, making many of their parts interchangeable with those of the Chevelle. Ford, on the other hand, is apparently tired of the trend it started: it will drop the intermediate Meteor from its Mercury lineup and give the Fairlane only a minor styling uplift.

Some of Detroit's 1964 offerings will be changed simply because their styling has been around too long. The four-year-old Falcon will lose its rounded look for more angular lines, and the Comet will look sleeker and longer. The plump Thunderbird will be completely restyled to give it le .n-looking body lines. The Rambler American will grow four inches, look more like the larger Rambler models. Chrysler's Imperial will resemble the Lincoln Continental-and Detroit is hardly surprised. After all, new Chrysler Stylist Elwood Engel came from Ford, where he was largely responsible for the Lincoln.

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