For the best news in the American car World

Classic Gold - Oldsmobile Holiday Coupe

No, it’s not a show queen. This one is a keeper, now entering its 24th year with the same owner, and how nice it is to feature something that may not win prizes at a show with the bonnet up, but which the kids have forbidden dad from ever selling. Despite the lived-in patina, it makes regular appearances at Wheels Day and Rally of the Giants from its home in Kent, which means the odd snapshot has found its way into Classic American before: if you spotted it in the June 2010 issue, give yourself a point for observation. Have another point for a long memory if you recall it from the June 2002 issue...

If you’ve grown up with a 1957 Oldsmobile Starfire 98 Holiday Coupe as the family pet, you’re unlikely to want to part with it, so the kids’ reaction is understandable. We’d have a hard time saying goodbye too; the 1957 offerings from Oldsmobile and Buick shared very attractive lines and had some sheet metal in common. Look beyond Tri-Chevys and you find that GM was on a hot streak across the board.

For one thing, take a look at those hips! We often think of the ‘Coke bottle’ look as being something found on Sixties cars, but the associated kick-up of a car’s waistline was everywhere in the mid-Fifties, perhaps never more pronounced than on the ’57 Oldsmobiles and Buicks. This 98 Holiday Coupe makes the best possible use of the feature thanks to its two-door pillarless ❯ body – the doors finish in the notch just before the hip rises upwards. The four-door models had the hip halfway down each rear door, which was less satisfactory, though it did a decent job of making the sedans looks like two-door coupes.

There’s another reason this 98 looks so elegant – the wheelbase is four inches longer than the 88 series cars, which are otherwise extremely similar, while the overall length grew by eight inches to a shade over 18 feet. Any two-door car that long is going to look pretty slinky if it’s done right, and the 1957 Oldsmobiles certainly were.

They started at less than $2500 that year, which doesn’t sound a lot for something called a Golden Rocket. But that deceptively top-of-the-range name was actually given to cars at the other end of the price list, the basic 88 Series. The name was shared with a somewhat sci-fi concept car seen in 1956 when most of the marketing work for the ’57 model year was done, so while Olds couldn’t bring itself to build a bubble-topped dream machine with a self-raising roof panel and swivelling seats, it could at least use some of the glow from the show car to draw attention to the ’57 road models.

One look at this fantastic machine should tell you it didn’t really need much help. The Oldsmobile ‘look’ had evolved steadily, with a nice progression from the 1954 models, when the bonnet line came down level with the top of the front wings, right the way through to the slightly over-cooked ’58s, with their quad headlamps and exhuberant parallel trim stripes.

The Golden Rocket 88 was the entry level, with the less exciting-sounding Super 88 residing on the next step up at around $400 more for each model. The big leap (around $700 more than the Super 88) was to the longer, heavier Starfire 98, which was offered in fewer body styles: just the Holiday Coupe we have here, the convertible and the four-door sedan in either ‘post’ format or the pillarless ‘Holiday’ form. The lesser Olds added a ‘post’ coupe to that line, plus station wagons for the first time since 1950.

The engines that pulled the Oldsmobile family in 1957 were standardised across the range, with a small footnote: the 371cu in Rocket V8 made 277bhp @ 4400rpm via its four-barrel carburettor, and this was deemed enough to power all the models in the range. But enthusiasts could raise this figure to 300bhp with the triple two-barrel J-2 package for a bargain $83, while those rare few ordering new factory cars for conversion to strip or track use in 1957 were offered a still more pokey version of the J-2 V8 with a rated output of 312bhp, though for the $395 asked for this option, you have to suspect the real difference was somewhat greater.

Raw power is a fair way down the list of features that got this car together with its long-time owner, Robert McVicar, 23 years ago. Robert is somewhat unusual among classic American car owners in that he works for a major city law firm and races an old Jaguar XJ-S, but the origin of his passion for American cars is something he’s bound to have in common with many of us. “I used to go and watch drag racing at Santa Pod in the Seventies, and of course when American Graffiti came out in 1973 it had a lasting effect,” says Robert. “I’ve always loved American cars and in 1988 I asked Luxury & Power (the now defunct London classic American car specialist) to find me one of three things – either a ’57 Buick, a ’57 Oldsmobile or a ’58 Chevy Impala.” Ah yes, like the white one in American Graffiti. But we know which way the story went. “They found this car in Virginia, and it was in a bit of a state, so it went straight off for body and paintwork and some new chrome when it arrived in the UK,” says Robert.

That tells us a lot about America’s classic car scene back then. There was no eBay or Craigslist and the first classic car price boom was still to peak. There was no automatic assumption that anything made before the Eighties was a classic... indeed, it wasn’t uncommon in the more rural parts of the States to see a Fifties model still smoking around as a daily driver. ’59 Cadillacs and Tri-Chevys, yes... but ’57 Oldsmobiles? You had to track them down; they weren’t lining up in concours condition in Hemmings. Find an edgy one and you might as well buy it – there wasn’t much choice.

Enter Robert’s right-hand man throughout his adventure with American classics, Steve Bantleman. Steve has handled the refurbishment and service of all of Robert’s classics since then, and that’s a list which includes various other fantasies fulfilled: a ’63 Olds Starfire, a ’68 Firebird and currently a ’67 Mustang in restoration. That’s the thing about being a successful lawyer – you might have the financial freedom to indulge in a few nice cars, but you can forget about going home at lunchtime on a Friday to rebuild the brakes for an MoT.

Steve’s only real change to the car was its paint, and even that is very close to the ❯ original. That shade had been somewhat muddier and a nice Harvest Gold does the car no harm at all. Indeed, some 25,000-plus miles over more than two decades mean the paint has been done again since then. That may not be massive mileage when broken down year by year, but all classics spend phases off the road under repair as well as on it. You don’t need to rack up mega-mileages to enjoy the kind of regular use that makes life with a classic such a joy – trips to the shops, school runs or just journeys into the office now and then suddenly seem a lot more attractive in the Holiday Coupe.

This one was built on the very first day of production for the 1957 model year, back in October ’56. The range was officially introduced on November 9 that year, with plants all over the US contributing numbers: Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Delaware, Kansas City and this car’s point of origin; South Gate, deep in Los Angeles, just north of Compton. It was ordered with minimal options because so much of what you wanted was standard on a 98: power windows, steering, brakes and the Jetaway HydraMatic transmission.

You also got a dazzling choice of paint and trim, something for which Oldsmobile became well-known. The word ‘cloth’ does no justice to the extraordinary gold, cream and floral patterned fabrics that cover the interior of this car. It looks as if it belongs among a tumble of silk cushions and exotic concubines in a Bedouin prince’s tent.

Unlike most tents, there’s a radio in here, an expensive $121 box to tick, but one which really completes the experience in so many American cars of the Fifties and Sixties. Some music doesn’t sound right unless it’s coming out of an oval speaker via an AM signal – though some other music sounds better via the FM receiver that Robert now has wired up in the car, so this very original-looking old cruiser isn’t immune to a bit of progress.

Otherwise, Robert’s just keen on keeping it all together. Steve has had the car recently to fix a few minor mechanical ailments like gearbox seals, and Robert sighs with the admission that he’ll probably end up asking Steve to do another body and paint refreshment at some stage, but in the meantime, keep your eyes open at shows this summer for what is still (we think – we know you’ll tell us if you know otherwise) the only 1957 Olds 98 Holiday Coupe in the country. It’s a lovely old thing and deserves to be seen as much as it deserves to be used.