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Buick spent two decades disguising some of the fastest cars General Motors ever built as luxury sedans. The 1970 GSX Stage 1 hid a 510 lb-ft big block under a car built for church parking lots, and the 1987 turbocharged GNX blew past that year’s Corvette in the quarter-mile. Here’s how a brand nobody feared became one of muscle car history’s biggest sleepers.
Buick spent most of the 1980s making comfortable sedans and then, in its final year, built a turbocharged six-cylinder that ran a 13.2-second quarter and beat V8s that cost far more. The 1987 Grand National and the 547 GNX units that followed it were the last of the line, assembled in part by an outside performance house, and factory rated at a number almost nobody believed. Read on for what separated a WE4 from a GNX, and what a $35 option got you.