1987 Buick Regal Grand National and GNX: A Farewell Built to Beat the Corvette

Road & Track traced the GNX to a plan hatched at the 1985 Indianapolis 500 between Buick and McLaren Engines. By the time John Lamm's report ran in June 1987, the plan had a working shape: American Sunroof Corporation, McLaren's parent company, would take Grand Nationals ordered by Buick dealers and turn them into something harder. The Buick men who told the story to Hagerty three decades later started it from the other end. Chief engineer Dave Sharpe recalled that once the rear-drive Regal was to give way to front drive, he asked, "Why don't we do something really special as a farewell?" The 1987 model year was that farewell.^1,2

The car being retired was at the top of its game. For 1987 Buick rated the intercooled, sequential-fuel-injected 3.8-liter turbo V-6 at 245 hp at 4,400 rpm and 355 lb-ft at 2,800 rpm, SAE net, and fed it through a four-speed THM 200-4R automatic with a lockup converter and a 0.67 overdrive top gear. Over-Drive Magazine's production table lists 20,193 Grand Nationals among 89,746 rear-drive Regals, a little more than one car in five. The same table prices the Grand National at $15,136 against $11,562 for a V-6 Regal coupe and gives it a 3,385-pound shipping weight. Nobody needed a McLaren to make this car interesting; the question in 1987 was how to end it.³

Buick's own answer for the mass of buyers was quieter than the GNX and, in its way, more revealing. A 1987 dealer brochure for the WE4 Turbo T package explains that Grand National sales volume could not exceed 33 percent of Regal turbo engine production, and that the Turbo T was created to sell turbo cars beyond that ceiling. The brochure does not say who set the cap or how it was measured. What it describes is a Regal with the turbo V-6, Gran Touring suspension, the Grand National's black appearance, gray cloth buckets, a console, a tachometer and boost gauge, T emblems on the front fenders, a 3.42 final drive, and P215/65R15 Goodyear Eagle GTs on 15x7 aluminum wheels. Buick claimed 0.84 g of lateral grip and an EPA estimate of 17 mpg city and 24 highway.

The Turbo T is where the year's counting gets difficult. Over-Drive lists the WE4 row at 3,155 pounds of shipping weight, 230 fewer than the Grand National, and its table note says 1,547 of the 4,268 turbo Regal coupes were WE4 cars. The same note says the 20,193 Grand Nationals include the 547 GNXs, and that 1,035 Regal Limiteds carried the turbo V-6. The GN/T-Type website gnttype.org, drawing on Steven Dove's facts-and-figures book, prints the same five numbers but treats the GNX and WE4 as separate lines, which yields its total of 27,590 turbo cars, the figure Wikipedia repeats. The two readings differ by exactly the 547 GNXs and 1,547 WE4s, 2,094 cars in all. Neither compilation names the Buick record behind it, so neither total can be called settled: the dispute is whether a GNX also counts as a Grand National, and whether a WE4 also counts as a turbo Regal coupe.^3,4,5

The GNX itself was a small-team project, and Hagerty's account names the team rather than one inventor. Mike Doble, Buick's advanced concepts manager, remembered his boss Tim Logsdon's charge: "We want to build a Grand National to end all Grand Nationals." Don Runkle, who ran engine engineering, recalled telling his group that the turbo Regal had to beat the Corvette, and Sharpe set the target as faster than a Corvette from 0 to 60 mph and through the quarter mile. General manager Ed Mertz, whose brief was to position Buick just below Cadillac, admitted to "some consternation" over how the car fit the division's premium image. ASC and McLaren did the rear suspension, the body modifications and the die work; McLaren brought experience with the ceramic turbine.^2,6

The hardware followed the brief. General Motors lists a Garrett AiResearch T-3 turbocharger, dual mufflers, a revised turbo Hydra-matic 200-4R, 16-inch black mesh wheels, a serial-numbered dash plaque and a hood with no emblem. Road & Track added the details that mattered to a driver: a ceramic turbine wheel, a revised intercooler, boost raised to 16.0 psi in first and second gears against the Grand National's 15.0, a Panhard rod and a longitudinal torque bar at the rear, Goodyear Gatorbacks listed as P245/50VR-16 front and P255/50VR-15 rear, Stewart-Warner instruments, fender vents, and all-black paint. The 124-mph rev limiter stayed.^6,1

How much power it made depends on whose paper you read, and that dispute stays open. Road & Track reported figures off the dynamometer of 300 bhp at 4,400 rpm and 420 lb-ft at 2,400, which is a magazine's report, not a factory rating. Secondary sources give a rating of 276 hp but disagree on the rest: gnttype.org and Wikipedia have 360 lb-ft at 3,000 rpm, while Over-Drive has 276 hp at 5,000 rpm and 400 lb-ft. Until a Buick document settles it, the factory rating stays an open question. Buick's own acceleration claims were plainer: 0-60 mph in 5.4 seconds and a 13.4-second quarter mile at 104.0 mph, against 6.9 seconds and 15.7 at 97.5 mph for its Grand National figures.^1,4,5,3

Road & Track suspected those claims were conservative, because its own earlier Grand National test had already run 0-60 in 6.0 seconds and the quarter in 14.7 at 94.0 mph. Its time with the GNX was informal: a well-used prototype at GM's Mesa proving ground, 5.6 to 5.7 seconds to 60 and a best quarter of 13.8 seconds, with the speedometer reading in the 104-mph range. Those numbers belong to that prototype on that day. Doble later said the GNX beat a Callaway Corvette "on every run" in straight-line and quarter-mile testing; the article prints no times, so that stays his recollection.^1,2

The production figure grew in the telling, and Doble explained why. The first plan was 200 cars; Buick then chose 500, for the Indianapolis 500 and the Daytona 500. Road & Track, writing before production, still said only 500 would be built and expected a sticker of $26,000 to $28,000. Doble's account is that only 47 dealers met the performance criteria for Buick's Select 60 group in 1986, that Mertz promised each of them an extra car, and that ASC/McLaren found a way to build them. General Motors puts the final count at 547 and the original MSRP at $29,290, against $18,295 for a heavily equipped Grand National; other sources give $29,900. Measured against Over-Drive's 20,193 Grand Nationals, the 547 GNXs amount to under 3 percent.^2,1,6,5,3

The Grand National also reached further north than its US counts suggest. The gnttype.org import table lists 3,578 Regals shipped to Canada for 1987, 1,695 of them WE2 Grand Nationals, plus 280 cars with a Canadian Y56 T package on the base coupe body. The site does not say whether the Canadian Grand Nationals are already inside the 20,193 figure, so they are best read as their own count rather than added to anything.⁴

The GNX did what its builders said it was for. Doble recalled that every car was sold before the first was finished, so there were no press cars and the two prototypes did the press rides; he added that buyers paid $10,000 over a Grand National's sticker and that some cars later sold for $80,000 to $90,000. Sharpe summed up the purpose: "The objective was not profit but strictly to make a big splash." Lamm, in 1987, counted it among the special-interest cars of the future. The rear-drive Regal ended with its most extreme version, and nearly four decades later General Motors was still telling the GNX story and still putting the count at 547.^2,6