BUICK vs AMERICAN MUSCLE CARS DRAG RACING

Buick rarely gets a seat at the muscle car table, but Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey has spent decades proving that’s a mistake — and this second installment of a Buick-versus-muscle-car grudge series, shot trackside in August 2017, is no exception. One commenter’s blunt reminder that “there would be no Chevrolet, GM, or Chrysler” without Buick sums up why this rivalry keeps getting rematches. Watch to see if the Buick backs up the talk.

Buick doesn’t usually get invited to the muscle car conversation. Mention the brand around a group of enthusiasts and most people picture a retiree’s Park Avenue cruising to church, not something worth lining up at the Christmas tree against a Hemi. Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey has spent decades quietly proving that assumption wrong, one grudge match at a time, and the second installment of this particular series — recorded on an August afternoon in 2017 — is the one that finally made even die-hard muscle car purists stop and check the badge on the door before laughing it off.

Englishtown’s Long History as a Muscle Car Battleground

Englishtown’s Raceway Park, often just called “the Park” by regulars who’ve been going for decades, has functioned as one of the Northeast’s defining muscle car battlegrounds since the 1960s, hosting everything from NHRA-sanctioned national events down to informal Friday-night grudge racing between strangers who met in the staging lanes an hour earlier. It’s exactly the kind of venue where a matchup this unlikely gets taken seriously rather than dismissed outright, because the track’s entire culture is built around settling arguments on the actual pavement rather than in a comment section or a forum thread.

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Why ‘Part 2’ Matters to a Recurring Grudge Series

The video is explicitly labeled as part two of an ongoing series, which matters more than it might seem at first glance. A single grudge race video, no matter how lopsided the outcome, rarely settles anything in grassroots drag culture — rivalries get revisited across multiple meets, with tuning tweaks, new drivers, or fresh cars added to the lineup each time. A sequel implies unfinished business from a prior meetup, and it’s a structure that keeps a small channel’s regular viewers coming back specifically to see how the ongoing story develops from one summer to the next.

Buick’s Forgotten Muscle Car Resume

Buick’s muscle car résumé is genuinely stronger than most casual fans give it credit for, and this video sits squarely inside that overlooked history. The 1970 GS 455 Stage 1 could run with nearly anything General Motors built that year, and more than a decade later the turbocharged Grand National and its notorious GNX variant famously out-accelerated the Corvette of its own era in a straight line, embarrassing Chevrolet’s own halo car in the process. Those two data points alone should be enough to earn Buick a permanent seat at the muscle car table, even if pop culture rarely remembers to offer it one.

‘No Buick, No Chevrolet’ — The Comment That Started an Argument

“Buick is as American as a car company gets. If there was no Buick there would be no Chevrolet, GM, or Chrysler!” read one pointed comment beneath the video, and the history behind that claim holds up better than it might first sound to a skeptical reader. Buick, founded in 1899, is genuinely the oldest continuously operating American automaker, and its early financial success under David Dunbar Buick and later William Durant helped bankroll the founding of General Motors itself — meaning the brand most casual fans dismiss as their grandparents’ car is, historically speaking, the reason several more “exciting” nameplates exist at all today.

What a Grudge Race at a Local Strip Actually Proves

What a grassroots grudge race at a local strip actually proves is fundamentally different from what a manufacturer-sanctioned magazine comparison test measures. There’s no dyno chart circulated beforehand, no spec-sheet argument about curb weight or claimed horsepower figures, no marketing department controlling the narrative — just two cars, a Christmas tree, and a painted stripe sixty feet down the track that tells you almost immediately who actually left the line quicker on that particular pass, under those particular conditions, on that particular day.

Why the Unlikely Pairing Draws a Bigger Crowd

Grudge racing culture at tracks like Englishtown has always rewarded exactly this kind of unlikely pairing over a predictable, big-name matchup between two obvious, evenly matched cars. A Buick against a lineup of expected muscle car opponents draws a genuinely different, more curious crowd to the fence line than watching a Camaro line up against another Camaro for the tenth time that same evening, and that curiosity factor alone is often what keeps a modest, low-production-value video circulating well past its original upload weekend.

Why Low-View Grudge Videos Deserve a Second Look

At only 3,110 views, this video is nowhere close to viral by modern standards, especially compared to the multimillion-view dashcam and compilation content that dominates the platform elsewhere. But raw view count was never really the point of grassroots grudge racing footage like this one. It’s the kind of unpolished, trackside document that keeps regional drag culture genuinely alive between major events, preserved specifically for the small, dedicated audience that already knows exactly why a Buick showing up to a muscle car night deserves a second look rather than a dismissive laugh.

The Grand National — Buick’s Strongest Argument

The Grand National deserves a closer look on its own, since it’s the single strongest piece of evidence in Buick’s favor whenever this argument comes up. Built through the mid-1980s with a turbocharged 3.8-liter V6 rather than a big-block V8, the Grand National inverted every expectation buyers had about Buick at the time — understated black paint, minimal badging, and a factory car that could embarrass contemporary Corvettes and Mustangs at the strip without ever raising its voice. The GNX variant that followed pushed that reputation even further, and both cars remain genuinely collectible today specifically because they proved a Buick badge never disqualified a car from being taken seriously on the strip. That legacy is exactly why a grudge match like this one carries more weight than its modest view count suggests. Anyone who dismisses a Buick on sight at Englishtown is ignoring roughly two decades of the brand quietly beating cars it was never supposed to beat, and the regulars trackside know it well enough to stop and watch rather than assume they already know how the pass is going to end.

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