Buick Grand National 1987 Turbo intercooled

Buick’s 1987 Grand National sounds like a joke until the numbers show up: a turbocharged, intercooled 3.8-liter V6 that hit 60 mph faster than a Lamborghini Countach according to Car and Driver’s own testing. The critical intercooler upgrade only arrived in 1986, permanently separating early Grand Nationals from the versions collectors chase hardest today. See what made this blacked-out coupe one of the decade’s biggest performance surprises.

Very clean 1987 Buick Grand National sunroof coupe. These 80s GM turbo collector cars are FAST and fast appreciating in value…

Car and Driver strapped their test gear to a 1987 Buick Grand National and watched it hit 60 mph faster than a Lamborghini Countach, a genuinely absurd result from a mid-size GM coupe most people assumed was just a blacked-out Regal with a bow-tie allergy. Underneath that menacing all-black paint sat a turbocharged, intercooled 3.8-liter V6 that traded cylinder count for boost pressure, and by 1987 Buick had finally sorted out the calibration well enough to genuinely embarrass contemporary V8 performance cars wearing far more prestigious badges. A single year earlier, the same basic car existed without the intercooler that made all the difference. What changed between the non-intercooled Grand Nationals and the version that could hang with a supercar?

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The Intercooler That Changed Everything

Buick’s Grand National ran without an intercooler through the 1984 and 1985 model years, but the critical upgrade arrived for 1986: an air-to-air intercooler added to the turbocharged LC2 3.8-liter V6, fundamentally separating the earlier cars from the 1986 and 1987 intercooled versions in both real-world performance and today’s collector hierarchy.

Numbers That Embarrassed Bigger Engines

With sequential electronic fuel injection and the added intercooler, the 1987 Grand National’s turbocharged V6 was factory-rated at 245 horsepower and 355 lb-ft of torque, arriving at a low 2,000 rpm, enough for Car and Driver to record a 4.9-second 0-60 mph run and a 13.9-second quarter-mile, numbers that outran plenty of contemporary V8 performance cars.

A Six-Cylinder Beating V8 Royalty

The Grand National’s speed became something of a running joke in period road tests, precisely because nobody expected a turbocharged V6 mid-size GM coupe to out-accelerate cars carrying far more prestigious nameplates, yet it did, repeatedly, on public record.

The GNX Took It Even Further

For buyers who wanted more, Buick partnered with ASC and McLaren to build the limited-production GNX, a specially reworked Grand National with revised turbo and intercooler hardware, rear-suspension changes, unique 16-inch wheels, and Stewart-Warner gauges, rated at 276 horsepower and 360 lb-ft, though only 547 were ever built.

Why Values Keep Climbing

Clean, documented examples of the intercooled Grand National, like the sunroof coupe pictured here, have become some of the fastest-appreciating collector cars from the entire 1980s GM lineup, driven by a combination of genuinely rare survivors, a factory performance story that still sounds implausible on paper, and a fanbase that only seems to grow with each passing year.

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