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Cars

Discourse that dominates

The Skylark Drive car club used to keep minutes and call order, but then they agreed that all they really want to do is chat about their Buicks.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published September 30, 2005

They drive big, powerful cars, but they have one of the most easygoing car clubs in town.

They have monthly meetings, but nobody takes minutes or anything like that. Nobody runs the meetings or sets an agenda; the members just sit around and talk cars while they're eating dinner. They don't even have a president, just someone who reluctantly calls himself the club's "director."

"We used to do minutes but finally we just said, "This is no fun, let's just sit around and talk about our cars,' " said Fernando Alvare, the aforementioned director. "Sometimes we stick to one topic, sometimes we have a few topics. Mostly we just talk about anything that comes up. It's a blast."

One thing the club does have is an uncommonly evocative name: Skylark Drive. It's open to anyone who owns or has an appreciation for any kind of Buick, but the vast majority of club members drive the Buick muscle cars from the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

Many people don't think of Buicks as performance machines, but starting in the mid '60s Buick produced some of the hottest cars on the road.

The Gran Sport, which was essentially a Skylark (but later became known as the Century Gran Sport when the Skylark was discontinued) came first, from 1965 to 1975.

"In the '60s, everyone tried to follow Pontiac's lead and put big engines in mid-sized cars," Alvare said.

From '84 to '87, Buick produced the Regal Grand National, which could blow away just about any other car on the road.

The Grand National went out with a bang. The last 500 cars, a limited edition dubbed the GNX, was one of the fastest production cars ever.

"They were the fastest cars produced in 1987," Alvare said. "Faster even than the Corvette. That's what made them famous. Everybody who's ever driven one of those cars is impressed with its speed and handling. To this day, there are all kinds of shootouts between the Grand Nationals and Mustangs."

It was internal politics at General Motors that doomed the hot Buicks, Alvare said.

"GM wanted the Corvette to be its fastest car," he said. "It was sort of the signature fast car for GM."

Alvare has always been a Buick guy, and owns four Gran Sports himself - a '71, a '72 and a '73, all street-legal, and a '70s GSX track car.

"My dad was a Buick guy and I followed in his footsteps," Alvare said. "But I always liked the performance end."

In 1991, Alvare heard about a fledgling high-performance Buick club founded by one of his car buddies, George Nenovich, and another Buick-head named Dennis Wheeler.

Instead of giving the club a typical, bland name, such as "Buick Club of Tampa Bay," they had decided to use the name of the street Wheeler's parents lived on: Skylark Drive. It said it all and it sounded cool.

The club's actually the Florida chapter of the Gran Sports Club of America, which is based in Valdosta, Ga. Even though Skylark Drive can recruit members from anywhere in the state, almost all of its 32 members are from Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.

The club's big event is a monthly meeting at a restaurant called Foxy O'Toole's on Park Boulevard in Pinellas County.

In the early days of Skylark Drive, the meetings were pretty formal, with some calling for order and going through an agenda, and someone sitting there taking minutes. But club members soon realized that what they wanted to do was to discuss automobile issues, and they didn't need agendas or minutes to do that.

"We did that stuff in the early days, but it was a waste of time," said Nenovich, the co-founder of the club and still an active member.

So these days, meetings are just free-flowing discussions about any Buick-related or even car-related subject that comes up.

"We have dinner or a snack or whatever you want to call it, and it's mostly who bought what, who sold what, guess what I found in a junkyard, that kind of thing," Nenovich said.

Besides the meetings, club members keep in touch through a newsletter, one of the few bits of formality the club still engages in.

"It sort of takes the place of minutes," Alvare said. "When there's any club business it's in the newsletter. It used to be monthly but now it's quarterly."

There are a few planned club activities, including an annual members-only car show, and cruising trips to car shows in Dade City, Plant City and Kissimmee.

Even though the club is informal, it's a pretty dedicated group, and it's not unusual for them to pitch in as group to lend labor, tools and expertise to another member who's hit a snag in a project.

Dues are $20 a year, and members are supposed to join the national Gran Sports club for an extra $30. Nobody actually checks to make sure everyone has done that, Alvare said, but most Skylark Drivers find national memberships worth the price anyway.

- For information about Skylark Drive, call Alvare at (813) 973-3047 or go online to skylarkdrive.com.

[Last modified September 29, 2005, 09:21:10]