Whether or not it was cheating depended on whose side of the story you believed — winner Bobby Allison, or virtually everybody else at Daytona that Valentine's Day. Nearly all the General Motors teams in NASCAR were campaigning the 1982 Buick Regal, but there was one persistent problem that nobody could engineer a fix for: The rear bumper, which had to sit at the same level as production Regals, hung so low that it caught air coming off the belly pan and acted as a drogue chute behind the car. Four laps into the race, Allison's rear bumper unexpectedly broke completely off the car, fluttering into the air over turn four.
Accusations ran rampant — some said it was held on with flimsy tack welds "the size of turkey turds" while others claimed Allison was intentionally bumped by Cale Yarborough. It didn't matter. With the bumper torn away, Allison's Regal pinned its ears back and flat-out disappeared. The question then wasn't whether he would lead the race, but by how large of a margin. 196 laps later, NASCAR certified Allison's win over the protests of other racers. The story of "bumpergate" has become so intertwined with the '82 Daytona 500 that the introduction of a special-edition Buick before the race is often forgotten. A car that GM hoped would generate excitement for Buick by celebrating its motorsports involvement. A car that Buick designers named after the Winston Cup series' predecessor: the Grand National.
Though they looked like high-performance machines, the first Grand Nationals began life as stodgy Regal coupes that were plucked from the assembly line in Pontiac, Michigan. In batches of fifteen, they were trucked down the road to Cars and Concepts in Ann Arbor, where the cars were disassembled and underwent the conversion process. The sides of the Regals were masked off and sprayed in a silver two-tone. A front air dam was fitted underneath the Buick's chrome bumper, and a rear duckbill was stuck onto the trunklid's trailing edge. Bolstered seats from GM supplier Lear Siegler replaced the standard velour park bench, and Buick's "Power 6" badges found their way onto the fenders and wheel centers.
Far from the powerhouse the name Grand National conjures, the first cars were equipped with only one engine: a frumpy, emissions-choked 4.1-liter V-6. Making an unremarkable 125 horsepower, the 4.1 was supposed to offer the power of a V-8 and the fuel economy of a V-6, but Americans never twigged to it. The Buick's V-6 was, however, shared with Cadillac during its nadir, as an option for customers who didn't want the woesome V-8-6-4 engine.
After disappearing for the 1983 model year, the Grand National returned for 1984, dechromed and relieved of all of its body moldings. Every inch of the exterior was finished with liberal doses of jet-black lacquer. The headlamp surrounds? Black. Window trim? Black. Grille? Surprise — black. Introduced during the same summer as Return of the Jedi, people quickly dubbed the Grand National "Darth Buick", and the name stuck inside the halls of GM's ad agency. When Chevrolet's equally sinister Impala SS debuted in 1994, it was followed by the tagline, "Lord Vader, Your Car is Ready."
The 1982 model's 4.1-liter V-6 had been replaced by a smaller, 3.8-liter cousin that was dressed with sequential fuel injection and a non-intercooled turbocharger. With 15 psi from its Garrett AiResearch T3 turbo — a kissing cousin to the unit Ford was strapping on the Mustang SVO — the "hot air" V-6 threw 200 horsepower and 300 lb-ft of torque at its four-speed Turbo-Hydramatic transmission. In a July, 1985, road test by Car and Driver, that power was adequate to eke out 0-to-60 in 7.5 seconds and a quarter in 15.7 seconds at 87 mph. If those numbers don't rock your world, you're not alone. In the same article, David E. Davis, Jr. called the Grand National "a performance car that [isn't] really all that fast."
It really wasn't all that fast for 1985, either, as Grand National received naught but a few cosmetic updates. And that's where the Grand National's story could have ended; as an amusing footnote of a trim package on a sister car to the Olds Cutlass and the Chevy Monte Carlo. It could easily have been consigned to the same pile of history as the Citation X-11 and the front-drive Electra T-Type: standouts of their time, which now are largely forgotten and loved only by a small contingent of old-car queers.
Then the 1986 Grand National rolled up, told the footnotes to get stuffed, and barked second as it peeled away. The only mechanical difference between the '86 Grand National and the previous year was the addition of an air-to-air intercooler, and it's a difference that changed the car from an also-ran into the business. Power went to 235 horses, torque went to 330 lb-ft, and Chevrolet's marketing department went apeshit. The 1986 Grand National was now more powerful than any American car on the market, violating GM's long-standing rule that nothing — ever — was allowed to outgun the Corvette. Buick's pandering "official" estimate had the car running high 15s but trapping at 97.3mph, which in the real world puts the Grand National deep into 14-second quarters.
The Grand National's G-body platform already had a date with the hangman, though, so despite moving over 20,000 examples in it last year, the line at GM's Pontiac assembly plant shut down after the 1987 production run. One of those cars was driven home from the dealer and parked in a northern Illinois garage, rolling over only 30,000 miles in fifteen years, when Ken Heslinga of Streamwood, Illinois bought it in 2002. With a tick over 40,000 miles on the clock now, Ken was kind enough to loan us his Grand National so that we could try to draw a bead on the Darth Buick's appeal.
At first blush, the Grand National is a muscle car. It certainly has the cojones to back up that claim — if all the tolerances were right from the factory, the turbo Buick could run fast enough down a dragstrip that NHRA rules would require the driver to wear a helmet.
Brake-torquing the car from a stop light, the cabin is filled with a straining V-6's moan until the turbo comes online. Then the shriek of compressor blades accompanies the howling of the blower inhaling untold CFM of air in great, heaving gulps, and the whole ensemble hits the resonant frequency of the frameless side windows, which pitch and slap against their weatherstripping in a way that focuses the sound waves at a locus two inches behind the eyeballs. This is naked aggression of the sort that was once Detroit's stock in trade.
Let off the brake and the Positraction — Positraction! Axles had names! — rear end grabs the pavement by its scruff and the car lights off. It's said the transmission shifts from first to second around 40 mph, but damn if it's perceptible; between the noise and the elephantine torque plateau, acceleration arrives in one great lump.
At the next light it dawns that the interior, in its forms and functions, harks back to the years before Roman Polanski was a wanted man and Popes were Polish. Its right angles and upright binnacles are Brutalist architecture rendered in leather-print vinyl. The cluster holds a rectangular speedometer, just like the one in an old Delta 88, and 55 mph is highlighted in a guilting shade of orange. The tach is relegated to a two-inch horizontal graph on its lower right-hand side. A crotch vent is a holdover from when A/C was a seldom-checked option. Every control came from the factory with a half-inch of slop in it, as if screws were purposely left loose, and was labeled with a white paint that sloughed off if glanced sideways. It's a muscle car in the sense that muscle cars combined the thrust of a Saturn V booster with all the craftsmanship of a third-world plumbing system, but the Grand National resists being pigeonholed that readily.
Is it a sports car, then? The Grand National rides on the same platform as the Pontiac Bonneville and Chevy El Camino. They share same front control arms and solid axle and body-on-frame construction and lazy steering gear with the assist cranked up so high that it had finger-slide inputs perfected twenty years before the iPhone. On smooth roads the Grand National grips well enough, but introduce a bump mid-corner and the live rear axle comes alive, doing its damnedest to check out what's happening at the front of the car. All 3460 pounds of the Grand National may corner like an aircraft carrier, but who cares? Power-on in the exits and the car surges forward on a wave of its own broad-shouldered thunder. It's not a sports car if your definition of a sports car is a Lotus Esprit; the Grand National is a car made fleet by horsepower.
Perhaps, then, the Grand National is a luxury coupe; Buick's answer to Ford's Thunderbird or whatever K-Car Chrysler was squandering brand equity on that year. It certainly has the kit: The Lear-Siegler seats, there not to cosset occupants so much as to keep them from smashing into the backlight on takeoff, are finished in handsome black and gray velour. The rectilinear dashboard houses optional automatic climate control and an in-dash cassette player. Windows move along their tracks with the help of electric motors and the door locks pop at the touch of a button. This was all heady stuff for the '80s, when even midlevel cars charged extra for a right-hand mirror. The argument holds water until looking farther down the Buick dealer's lot in 1987, at the Rivieras parked in a neat line.
"Power and looks," wrote P.J.O'Rourke in his April, 1986 review in Automobile, "do not explain the Grand National's personality. It doesn't have a good personality, exactly. It doesn't have a bad personality. What it has is a lot of personality. And, like a person with a lot of personality, it can be hard to put your thumb on exactly what the Grand National is." Too plush to be a muscle car, too brash to be a sports car... We've established what the Grand National isn't. But what, begs the question, is it?
It is daft but brilliant. It's a brick shithouse built from Waterford crystal. It exemplifies the strain of paradoxical American loopiness that gave us turbocharged minivans, stick-shift Cadillacs, and nearly everything from AMC. It invites everyone who straps in to speed when no one is looking, seek out fresh asphalt to tag, and roll around in the mud and come up stinking. The Grand National is always up to go out and trample someone; all it asks is that you lump your laws of civil conduct, your code of ethics, and all of your piss-poor bubblegum rules before getting in the seat. It is proof that GM may not have built a good car in the Grand National, but they certainly put together a great one.
Motive would like to thank Ken Heslinga for the use of his 1987 Buick Grand National for this story.
