Say what you will about Kendrick Lamar’s polarizing halftime show at the 2025 Super Bowl – while it was sufficiently criticized as underwhelming and boring, fans of the rap artist like it – but auto afficionados liked the use of the 1987 Buick GNX in his intro.
GNX is the name of his 2024 studio album. Its significance is that the Lamar’s father drove his infant son home from the hospital in the car on June 17, 1987. I know that because of stories online that surfaced following the halftime show.
Christine Mitchell – a.k.a. The Car Lady – posted on social media about her excitement seeing the car. Others posted comments echoing that emotion. She told me she hosted a Super Bowl party and was the only person among the group who knew about the GNX. She didn’t know specifically why the GNX was part of show, so I told her.
“I was in the car business, and the year it came out I was the Prom Queen,” she told me. “It was the best car for its time and everybody wanted one. It was better than the Camaro. Better than a Corvette. It was a fast car and you could still fit four or five people comfortably. It was the hottest ride you can buy in 1987. It signified everything that GM was hoping it would be.”
I wanted to find more about the car and its history and located some information about it from a 1987 article in Car And Driver magazine. The article was titled Buick GNX, Death Of A Barbarian.
“If you are looking for precision and sophistication in a car, don’t even consider the Buick GNX,” the article began. “In a world of sleep shapes and refined manners, the GNX is an ax-wielding barbarian laying waste to everything in its path, for better or worse through the forces of civilization are winning. The GNX and its Regal Grand National stablemate, won’t be pounding the streets to rubble much longer. The rear-drive Regal will be put to the test at the end of 1987 and its turbocharged and intercooled 3.8 liter V-6 engine will start pushing up daisies as well.
“As a farewell incarnation to the rear-drive Regal, which has been in its current form since 1978, some of the drag racers at Buick decided to give the Grand National one last tweak before relegating it to the boneyard of automotive history – a swan song if you will, one last meteoric burst before the flame dies for good. To expedite the procedure of pegging the needle completely off the Richter scale, Buick turned the project over to the Automobile Specialty Company and McLaren engines.”
First of all, that’s a fine piece of writing.
Buyers of the car were told they could pick any color as long as it was black.
The price of the car at the time was just under $30,000 U.S. or north of $71,000 in current terms (just over $100,000 Cdn).
Perry Lefko is the Content Manager of The Car Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected]. Feel free to forward any story suggestions or comments.
