1956 Chevrolet Bel Air Sport Sedan

We've had a 1956 Chevy sedan on these pages before, but it was a Chevrolet 210 pillared sedan. Pillarless hardtop styling was becoming all the rage in Detroit in the Fifties, though.

For 1955 you could get a hardtop Sport Coupe, at least in Bel Air form, but all the four door variants had B-pillars. That changed in 1956 when a pillarless Sport Sedan became available for both the mid-market 210 and the top-of-the-range Bel Air.

The Onyx Black 1956 Bel Air Sport Sedan in the photo was snapped in May of 2017 using a Leica D-LUX 3.

1956 Chevrolet 210

Few cars are as iconic as the classic "Tri-Five" Chevies, the full-size models from Chevrolet in '55, '56, '57. While the Bel Air, especially in its 1957 coupe form, gets all the ink, the 150 and 210 were the most numerous.

The 150 was largely intended for fleet sales and quite spartan, but the 210 was basically the standard variant; the Bel Air was as deluxe a Chevy as you could buy in those days, but most of its options could also be had on a 210.

The 210 could be had with either the 235 cubic inch "Blue Flame" OHV inline six, rated at 140 SAE gross horsepower, or the (still relatively new) OHV small block "Turbo-Fire" V-8 in one of three states of tune. The base V-8 had a 2-barrel carburetor and 170 horsepower, or a buyer could opt for the 205 horsepower single 4-barrel "Power Pack" or the dual-quad 225-horse "Super Power Pack", complete with a lumpy Duntov cam.

Road & Track tested a 1956 Chevy 210 2-door with a 205 horse Power Pack V-8, a three-on-the-tree manual transmission, and 3.55:1 rear end and it returned a 9.0 zero-to-sixty time and dispatched the quarter in 16.6 seconds at eighty miles per hour. The 4-bbl small block would push the 3,380 pound shoebox all the way to 111 miles per hour before being defeated by the built-in headwind.

Price as tested was $2,064, which comes to just short of twenty-four grand in constant dollars.

This Calypso Cream 1956 210 pillared sedan would have been somewhat slower, and was photographed in September of 2021 using a Hasselblad Lunar and Sony Zeiss Vario-Tessar T* 16-70mm f/4 OSS zoom lens.

1956 Pontiac Chieftain

Last September, northbound on College Avenue, there appeared a 1956 Pontiac Chieftain hardtop coupe. I think this one is in Bolero Red and Rodeo Beige.

1956 was the second year of this body style, a platform-mate to the famed "Tri Five" '55-'57 Chevies.

The 1955 Chieftain and Star Chief debuted Pontiac's first in-house V-8 motor, dubbed the Strato Streak. The '55 version displaced 287 cubic inches and could be had in 173, 180, or 200bhp flavors, the latter with a 4bbl Carter carburetor.

For 1956, Pontiac lengthened the stroke of the Strato Streak, bumping the displacement to 317 cubes. The base 2bbl version was rated at 192 SAE gross BHP and 4bbl versions could be had in 216 and 227 horsepower variants. Pontiac also sold some two hundred cars with 10.0:1 compression ratios and dual quad carbs, intended for NASCAR and drag racing. These boasted a claimed output of 285 gross horsepower and were kind of a big deal at the time, outmuscling even the most potent '56 Corvette motor, the 240hp 265cid Small Block Chevy.

A period test in Motor Trend of the four-door sedan with the 227-hp Strato Streak resulted in a 0-60 time of 11.4 seconds and a quarter mile of 18.1 seconds at 76mph, with a measured top speed of 106.

These photos were taken using a Nikon D7100 and 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR zoom lens, which is pretty much my favorite crop-sensor Nikon setup.