SHE’S A HONEY
We speak flippantly, fondly, or derisively of ‘Yank tanks’, but there was a car — a Cadillac, no less — linked closely to that expression for a reason other than its accepted meaning.
It wasn’t all bad in 1941. Although much of the world was suffering the tumult of war, the US still prospered. Many of her citizens suspected that they would eventually be drawn into this tragic conflict and probably guessed that it would not be over any time soon. This would result in car production being severely reduced, but, in the meantime, car sales boomed. Cadillac, along with most other marques, enjoyed record sales: up more than 19,000 over 1940.
More than 29,000 of these sales came from the new Series 61 Cadillac, which replaced the La Salle, terminated after a 14-year reign. The La Salle had become too good a car for the money and had eroded sales of the higher profit-margin Cadillac. The Series 61, with its widely copied fastback styling (Bentley, for one) proved to be the best-selling model in the 1941 Cadillac range.
New face, new engine, new transmission
For the first time since 1927, all Cadillac models were powered by the same engine, and what an engine it was: first choice for bootleggers, hot rodders,
