The Buick GN was junk. $30K, back in 1987. Cheap plastic interior, cloth seats, crappy black paint and steel wheels. The heavy "G' body was a lousy platform. The tri-angulated 4 link rear end, was a disaster. It caused a twist in the chassis and could not get traction or launch straight(G body shuffle). The 1987 GNX added ladder bars, but it still sucked. The under rated, 225hp early 90's V8, $16K Mustang GT's could beat them or easily keep up. The one guy I knew, that owned a GN, blew the motor(head gaskets, aka too much boost). He added NOS to the new motor and soon melted the pistons. Wicked?
As with some other posts where you come across arrogant and condescending, but the worst part is you spout non factual information. You do have a few correct facts thrown in there. But not many.
I'll stay away from subjective personal preference words like wicked and you can stay away from one's like junk. As those are opinions and not fact.
The Buick Grand National or GN as commonly referred to was not $30,000. They were sitting in the dealers at $17,804. The actual MSRP was right at 16,xxxbut by the time you saw them sitting there with the window sticker on them they were right around $17,000.
So there is correct fact number one.
Maybe you mixed that up with the GNX that you mentioned later. Those were 26,000 - 28,0000 with most people paying 28,000 unless they were a GM employee. Of course that's only if they ordered them early before the word got out what they were and the dealers started charging more for them.
That's fact number two.
Grand Nationals did not have a triangulated 4-link suspension.
GNs had the same plain old solid rear axle that every basically every other G body (you got G body right) had.
The GNX add a longitudinal torque bar coming across the back of the vehicle, a special differential cover with mounting points on it and a panhard bar.
This changed the traditional rear wheel drive car squatting action under torque to a rear-end raising up and getting excellent traction under torque.
This suspension tutorial would be fact number three.
Paint was black, you got that right too. It was lacquer and they did have some problems with cracking. You almost got the wheels right. 86 and 87 were steel wheels with turbo six centers. 84 and 85 were aluminum wheels but nobody really wants those.
As a side note, who am I kidding here. Do you even know the difference between 84-85 and 86-87? Go ahead, I'll wait while you Google it.
They were rated at 225 horsepower by some so you got that one right too although those were joke ratings and hardly anybody stayed at 225 very long. Actually I think the production specs were 245 for 87 and 276 for the GNX.
However in the very next sentence you said a Mustang GT could beat them. That's the biggest joke of all time.
There is no stock Mustang GT EVER not even after you blow up the crummy transmission and then the second Borg Warner T5 transmission and then put a Tremec in it.... can ever beat a stock 86 to 87 Grand National.
Once again, maybe your experiences with an 84-85 but for most of us those don't really count.
That's a big fact number four.
Head gaskets did blow on Grand Nationals dr. When you over boosted them. They were intentionally designed this way with only 2 fewer head bolts.
The engineers designed it this way to be the weak link so you wouldn't just keep building boost and pressure and snap the crankshaft in half or crack or flex the block.
The people that blew head gaskets were the people that started modifying things but didn't know what they were doing and modifying the wrong way.
Very, very few if any people added NOS to Grand Nationals.
It would be an absolute waste and a joke. Why pay even back in the day $45 for a minute and a half of juice boost when you have unlimited amount and time of boost already under the hood.
Grand Nationals an NOS was never a thing.
That would be fact number five for you.
I am an opinionated sob and will tell you when something is my personal opinion for whatever reasons or if I have no reasons but.....
I can damn well guarantee you that if I say something is true or a fact, you can take that shit to the bank.
Back in the day when these cars were new and running the streets, I chased down and raced them and the Mustangs. I hated the 5. 0 Mustang, mostly their owners, with a passion.
I have lost count of how many times I have done a smoking U-turn through four lanes of traffic to go chase down a Mustang whose car look like he thought he was bad.
They were far fewer Grand Nationals on the road but I chase them too.
I was an equal-opportunity offender. Every time we would get next to a Grand National we would roll down the window and point at the emblem on the side of it and when we had their attention we would say... "I don't see anything Grand about it"
Then we would dust them. The owner is always wanted to race from a 20-25 mph roll because that was their peak. They had a lot less off the line..
That was totally fine with me. I was running a highly built car on the street and had no problems dusting them no matter how they wanted to run.
So enough adjacent topics of my stories but if you're going to spew things as fact, get your facts straight.
I won't go out around quoting how many 92 Cobra Mustangs they made because I frankly don't know. I just know some of them had a little snake on the side and they were rated at like 10 more horsepower.
The beauty of the Grand National and any other 86 and 87 Turbo Regal for that matter and for the 89 turbo Trans Am, was that it was probably the easiest and cheapest car out there to modify to get substantial power and quarter mile ETA games.
At that time you could go out and get a chip for a Camaro or a Mustang and some did little to nothing but you had to start swapping a lot of hard parts to get any performance gains. The Grand National already had so much headroom built into it all you had to do was access that hidden power and you could go quite far.
