Note: I write up driving impressions of virtually every car I photograph within a couple of days of the drive, so everything is fresh in my memory. Occasionally, because of the constraints of format (i.e., Buyer’s Guide) the prepared text doesn’t run. Now, thanks to the joys of the blogosphere, it can.
It’s always exciting to hop into something new to drive: At this point, I’ve been in enough A-body GM cars and B/E-body Mopars that I largely know what to expect: not a lot of surprises. So an opportunity to drive something as uncommon as a 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado GT is most welcome.
And uncommon is right. It’s not every day that a 400hp front-drive coupe appears in the pages of Hemmings Muscle Machines, as it does in Matt Litwin’s Buyer’s Guide piece for our October 2013 issue, on sale imminently. Unless you’ve had experience with one – and my Toronado driving experience has been admittedly limited – there’s no way to expect what you would get out of a two-and-a-quarter-ton puller like this for-1970-only GT.
Starts with the ambience: not massively sporting, it should be said, even by 1970 standards. The interior is largely the same as others of the nameplate, with the same filigree here that you’d find in other Toronados of the period, down to the barrel speedometer that’s been around since 1966. It’s huge in here – and the flat floor and the notion that the interior is a color both help with the illusion that it’s even bigger than it is. How big is it? Your gorilla-armed scribe couldn’t crook his left elbow in the window sill and still touch the steering wheel with his fingertips. You can choose having your left arm out the window, or on the wheel, but not both.
There’s a bucket seat to give you a hint of the sporting intention, but it’s formless, and the naturally reclined position means you need to scoot the seat up to reach the wheel. That steering wheel tilts and telescopes, but feels no fatter than what you’d get on a lesser Toronado. Nothing here is screaming sporty – there isn’t even a tach hidden somewhere in the instrument cluster.
Shut the door behind you – it’s large, but not as heavy as it looks. Turn the key, and idle adds a note of menace under its breath, but nothing so boy-racerish as a Cherry Bomb cackle. Hard acceleration produces subdued sounds, and acceleration from the 400hp 455 isn’t as sharp as you might want from the Rocket division, but the OM-code transaxle shifts hard, particularly up the 1-2 shift, as if it’s been given a shift kit. (It hasn’t; it just shifts like that.) And here’s an odd feeling: The weight doesn’t seem to shift rearward as you accelerate. Obviously, that defies the laws of physics, but when you get going, you’re not thrown back in your seat; you simply move forward smoothly.
It’s at a steady 70 MPH cruise in the desert where we start to understand what the Toronado GT is all about: This is a steady-state cruiser of the highest order. The ride has eschewed all wallow. It’s firm without being crashy, and in a wide sweeper at rather more than the posted speed limit suggested, there was no body roll that we could feel. None. It cornered flat, thanks to (or in spite of, we’re not sure) steering that is quick enough, but gives no indication that it’s connected to anything, like the front tires. You could happily steer with your index finger only. You’d expect at least a little bit of lean to help the outside tire bite, but no. It fits into the old “corners on rails” stereotypes we try to avoid. Stability, unflappability, call it what you like, but we suddenly had a hankering to fill the tank and drain it dry, just to see where we’d end up.
The interior and suspension felt posh enough at cruise – the seats didn’t threaten to throw you out of them in the turns, despite their lack of contouring – but call upon it to pilot through some of the gently banked turns that our interstate highways have to offer, and its prowess comes to the fore. Whether you like the evolutionary changes that Oldsmobile made on its first-ever Toronado or not, it’s hard to deny that, even in its day, the Toro had presence. In this way, it’s a spiritual successor to Chrysler’s original letter-series 300s: plenty big, plenty powerful, with a suspension that belied the stereotype for cars of its marque and a presence that demanded respect.
