Throwback Cars: What Is a Buick Grand National and Why Is It So Fast?
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What Is a Grand National and Why Is It So Fast? The Story Behind Buick’s Intercooled Turbocharged LC2 V-6!
From the March 1999 issue of GM High-Tech Performance: The 1986 and 1987 Buick Regal Grand National set the performance bar high in the 1980s, not with a V-8 but with a turbocharged intercooled V-6.Jim McCrawWriterJohnny HunkinsWriterHot Rod ArchivePhotographerJesse KiserPhotographerEric McClellanPhotographerMay 02, 2024
The following story originally appeared in the March 1999 issue of GM High-Tech Performance magazine, which I edited between 1995 and 2002. The story’s Detroit-based author, Jim McCraw, was a Motown insider who regularly rubbed shoulders with the Big Three’s elite, including many division heads and CEOs. The story is unique because it’s the only one of the few original accounts that relates the development of the Buick Grand National and its potent intercooled, turbocharged, fuel-injected LC2 V-6 engine as told by the folks who dreamed, designed, and built it. All of the Buick employees involved are retired and many of them have since passed on. This is their story! —Johnny Hunkins
Buick, the old-time, old-line, old-man’s car company established by the wily Scot, David Dunbar Buick, was the first American auto manufacturer to offer turbocharged V-6 engines. Starting in 1978, turbos gradually were expanded into nearly all Buick car lines, finishing in spectacular fashion in 1987.
This is the original red 1983 GN prototype that Rollin “Molly” Sanders presented to the heads of Buick. For the most part, the car was not accepted, but the general idea did make it. Molly designed this beauty after taking delivery of a stock Regal.
The entire Buick turbocharged engine program and all the great cars it produced had its roots in a single car built in 1975 for a Flint, Michigan, Explorer Scout troop project. Buick engineer Don Baker, who was involved in the Scout troop, asked experimental engineering boss Jack DeCou for some help with the project, for which he had already obtained a free Garrett AiResearch turbocharger. The Scout project car was built, and drew the attention of Lloyd Reuss, Buick’s chief engineer. Needless to say, he was very interested in what he saw under that big, flat hood.
“Molly” Sanders painted it red and had the special interior made. Unfortunately, Buick wasn’t too receptive to the color or interior, but it did love the concept. Notice the mesh wheels on the right side and the turbine wheels on the left side—indicating the design considerations in motion.
From that one-car beginning, the program grew like Topsy. There were Indy pace car programs, then production prototypes, and by 1978, Buick Motor Division was in the turbocharged engine business, including CART IndyCar racing, for 10 glorious years.
The turbocharged Buick 3.8 V-6 has had a long and illustrious career, powering over 100,000 Buicks and a host of other GM vehicles over the past 20 years, including the famous 1989 Pontiac Turbo Trans Am.
Here it is: the only known photo of the single prototype of the 1982 GN. This photo was taken as the car sat on the back lot of Cars and Concepts, the primary designers and finishers of the car. Only 215 were made, and about 20 were actually turbocharged.
In 1976, things started to get serious. Based on the success of the Explorer Scout project, the 1976 Indy 500 pace car was a Buick Century with a turbocharged V-6 engine, a four-barrel carb, high-flow cylinder heads, a dual exhaust system, a front air dam and a rear spoiler. Only a handful were built, but by doing this, Buick went public with its 231 Turbo concept before millions of people, and that pace car program paved the way for what was to follow.
Related: Five Buick Regal Grand Nationals Surface at Mecum Auctions Indy!
Opening Salvo
In 1977, Buick redesigned the crankshaft to fire at even 120-degree intervals. This was a midyear change, so some odd-fire and some even-fire V-6s were made during 1977. The even-fire V-6 engine retained the same bore spacing as the odd-fire version, so the bores were not centered over the rods. The engine had to be specially balanced to compensate for this, and soft motor mounts were used to smooth things out even further.In 1978, Buick introduced the Turbo 231 on the LeSabre Sport Coupe and the Regal Sport Coupe, in both two-barrel (LC5) and four-barrel (LC8) configurations, with a specially calibrated three-speed automatic and special rear axle ratio (a 2.73:1, when 2.29 and 2.56 axles were common for highway fuel mileage).
Equipment included a boost light and a raised hood center on the Regal Sport Coupe. The bigger LeSabre Sport Coupe had a front fender “Turbo 3.8 Litre” badge, and a special ride and handling package. The four-barrel version was offered in California and at altitude for its better smog performance, starting January 1, 1978.
The Sport Coupe with the two-barrel draw-through turbocharger setup made 150 horsepower at 3,800 pm and a very serious 245 Ib-ft of torque at 2,400 rpm. Only 2,700 were produced, and the two-barrel version was dropped soon after. The four-barrel package made 165 horsepower at 4,000 rpm and 265 Ib-ft of torque at 2,800 rpm. All told, Buick made more than 30,500 turbocharged cars in its first year.
1979: Buick Stakes Out Turbo Territory
Model year 1979 was the year of the first great turbo expansion, with the Regal, the Riviera S-Type, the Century Turbo Coupe, and the LeSabre Sport Coupe all using variations of the 231 turbo. The 1979 four-barrel engine had 175 hp, an increase of 10 over the 1978 car, with improved cylinder heads and exhaust system. It used an 8:1 compression ratio, with 1.7-inch intake valves and 1.50-inch exhaust valves under a Rochester Quadrajet four-barrel carb, with dual exhausts and a 3.08:1 axle ratio. The suspension featured big springs, big shocks, and big stabilizer bars on all models of Sport Coupe. Some 21,400 turbo cars were produced for the 1979 model year, according to Buick sources.In 1980, the 3.8 turbo was available on the Regal Sport Coupe, the Riviera S-Type, the LeSabre Sport Coupe, and on all Century fastback coupes and sedans. The Regal Sport Coupe was produced in a volume of 6,276 cars in 1980.
The Birth of the GN
The Buick Grand National was introduced at a ceremony preceding the Daytona 500 on Feb. 10, 1982, with Buick boss Lloyd Reuss and PR director Tom Pond presiding. Buick had won the Grand National championship in NASCAR in 1981, so a commemorative car was built to honor the accomplishment.That first Grand National was a silver and black T-top Regal, with “Grand National” and the stylish Buick “6” emblem on the front fenders. The package also contained blackout trim and grille, a front air dam, rear spoiler, special seats, charcoal trim on the dash, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, a 4.1-liter, 125-hp V-6, 3.23 axle, GT suspension, and heavy-duty engine and trans coolers. The car carried a $15,490.06 price tag and was built for Buick by Cars & Concepts in Brighton, Michigan. Only about 215 were made, according to Buick internal documents of the period. But then things changed for the better.
Rollin “Molly” Sanders became involved with the GN project. Molly was the founder and president of Molly Designs, in Huntington Beach, California; he was the man who designed the famous “6” logo for the Buick turbo cars, designed the production Grand National graphics, the production Grand National package, the SCS Skyhawks, and the T-Types.
Molly told GMHTP: “Our mission was to get younger people to come into the Buick showrooms, so we had to get rid of the whitewalls and the squeaky wire wheel hubcaps. Herb Fishel called me and said ‘Can you do me something for my group so they have a flag to salute, a logo they can rally around?’ In those days, before computers, I used to do everything by hand. I made up an 18-inch equilateral triangle out of Masonite with 1x2s on the back to hold it away from the wall, and then painted it black. Then I painted the numeral 6 logo on it. I picked the colors to represent the spinning turbine, the heat of combustion, and the 6 to represent a lowercase ‘b’ for Buick. I took it to Detroit on the red-eye in a pink pillowcase I carried over my shoulder, and Herb Fishel couldn’t believe it when I got off the plane with that pink pillowcase. We had a presentation, and they bought off on it.”
The only known photo of the 1982 Buick Grand National prototype’s interior.
The 1982 Regal Sport Coupe, with 175 horsepower at 4,000 rpm and 275 lb-ft of torque at 2600 rpm, was produced with a volume of 2,022 cars. Ironically, the first with the Grand National moniker was not commonly powered by the 175-hp turbo engine found as an option in the Regal Sport Coupe, but the lesser 4.1-liter naturally aspirated V-6. (Some turbo Grand Nationals were purported to be made, although the quantity is probably fewer than 25 units. This is because the turbo option for the ’82 GN was not announced in press literature.)
The continuing turbo engine evolution saw new 10mm metric bolts for accessory mounting holes on the cylinder heads and a new mounting boss on the rear of the block for the knock sensor.
The Regal Sport Coupe disappeared in 1983 in favor of the Regal T-Type, of which 3,732 were produced (Buick now had five T-Types at dealerships). With a 3.42 rearend and a raft of new parts, including Computer Command Control, Electronic Spark Timing, and computerized EGR added to the turbo package, the engine was uprated to 190 horsepower at 1,600 rpm with 280 lb-ft of torque at 2,400 rpm.
Sequential Is the Word for 1984
The great turbo expansion came again in 1984: The Regal T-Type got sequential EFI with a set of single-shot injectors, black and silver paint, a closed-loop electronic wastegate control, and computer-controlled coil ignition (CCCI) with no mechanical distributor. On the V-6, the turbo system was relocated to the rear of the engine. Buick offered a 20th Anniversary Riviera 4.1 and a LeSabre Grand National model, complete with fender badges and no trim, in black or white.The first production Grand National since the special fleet in 1982 was the 1984 Regal Grand National, with 200 horsepower, 300 lb-ft of torque at 2,400 rpm, a new four-speed automatic overdrive transmission, a 3.42 rearend and 215/65R15 tires. It was sold in black only, with no chrome body trim and a very special interior. The 1985 model was primarily a holdover of the 1984 model with the exception that the rpm peak of the hp rating was extended to 4,400 (up from 4,000 rpm in 1984).
Molly Sanders says Buick had cleared the use of “Grand National” with NASCAR, which owned the moniker, and that Buick Design had done the earlier silver and charcoal Grand National concept vehicle with huge BUICK logos on it, much too conservative and too dressy for its purpose. Molly complained to Fishel that the car was wrong for the job and asked for a Regal to be shipped to his shop in California.
Molly designed the original Grand National concept car in red, not black, after visiting stock car racing legends Junior Johnson and Banjo Mathews. These meetings took place in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Herb Fishel in attendance. Fishel just told Molly, “Surprise me,” so Molly designed the car to have red paint, gray steel wheels, a gray interior with a red stripe, and very little else. “I got rid of the chrome and the badges, made up the little Grand National badges out of vinyl because we didn’t have time to cast them, blacked out the trim because they couldn’t do body-color trim back then, chopped the springs, had some steel wheels welded up with different offsets for the front and rear, painted the wheels gray, did the whole interior in gray, black, and red, and sprayed the car with an old Buick red from the ’70s.”
Fishel and Sanders presented the car at Buick HQ in Flint. “It was a goosebump deal,” Molly says, “with NASCAR footage, lights, music, and the car behind the movie screen on a turntable. Lloyd Reuss brought a bunch of GM heavies up from Detroit for the presentation. Reuss was so impressed that he had another meeting with another group of GM executives in the afternoon. [He] called Herb Fishel, and told him, ‘I want that car to go into production as soon as possible. Get it handled.’ The car turned into a black car about a week later because red was Pontiac’s signature color. They kept my interior just as it was, and the logos.”
1986: Intercooling to the Rescue
For 1986, Buick was facing ever-greater competition from the Corvette, the Camaro, the Firebird, and the Mustang GT for the title of world’s quickest street car. In 1985, the word came down from Don Runkle, Buick’s assistant chief engineer, who now runs the whole GM Saginaw division, that Buick was going to have the quickest car GM made, bar none. Runkle told his small seven-person turbo intercooler project group (including Harold Hadley, Steve Ives, Jeff Lane, Ann Moss, Jim Royer, and Ron Yuille) that they were to work as quickly as possible, with no budget, to make the car quick, fast, and reliable.An anonymous insider told GMHTP: “We had no budget. Another guy was over-budgeted, so they transferred his funding to us, and we ended up with a budget surplus. The only way we were going to get more speed was to get more air into the engine and, given the outlet temperature of the turbo, the only way to do that was with an intercooler. We tried water injection, too, but the water injection system durability got to be such an issue that we decided not to go with that. We thought the Garrett intercooler was the easiest, best way to get more power into the engine. Since we were so short of time, we just used a very large intercooler and ducting, and it worked really well to keep the charge temperatures down. Mr. (Donald) Hackworth was generally supportive of the program at that time, when he was general manager of Buick, so we were given a lot of freedom and help to make the thing as quick as it was, because management wanted to see us achieve it. The volumes were pretty low, and there were piece-cost issues, but the person who bought the car wanted some excitement. We played some advertised horsepower games with Chevrolet, being 5 horsepower more than their V-8—235 versus 230—and then when they upped to 240 the following year, we upped to 245, which is what we really had in the first place. It was a lot of fun.”
1987 Buick Regal GNX. Photo courtesy Scott Lachenauer.
The fun included making up a load of bumper stickers for the rear bumpers of GNXs that read “I brake for Corvettes,” which the Corvette group didn’t like at all.
Prior to production, the calibration of the 1986 intercooled engine was reengineered down to 235 horsepower at 4,000 rpm and 330 lbs.-ft. of torque at 2,400 rpm. Buick built 5,512 Grand Nationals and 2,384 T-Types, along with just over 100 LeSabre Grand National models that year, as the final practice session for the biggest and best year ever.
Denny Manner, former Buick chief engineer for powertrain, credits his colleagues Ron Yuille, Jeff Lane, and Dave Sharp for the last generation of Grand National hardware and software. Mike Doble, the head of Buick Specialty Car Group, is credited with the leap from the Grand National to the GNX.
Buick GNX engine. Photo courtesy of Scott Lachenaur.
Manner told us, “We did the blocks, the cranks, the rods, and the pistons, but they did the calibration and setup, and they managed the small group that did the intercooled versions. The GNX program was farmed out to McLaren. Dave Sharp commissioned McLaren to modify the production Grand National into the GNX, and that was done as a retrofit at McLaren’s shop in Detroit. They took a production Grand National and modified it with a different rear suspension, a different turbo, a different intercooler. There were different chassis things done, different transmission calibrations, and so on. They were only supposed to build 300 of them.”
The 1987 GNX went way beyond any Grand National or T-Type before it. There were only 547 GNXs made, and they have become some of the most highly sought-after muscle cars in history. The 1987 GNX package contained another new version of the 3.8 turbo, with 276 horsepower at 4,400 rpm and 360 lb-ft of torque at 3,000 rpm, a much-improved Garrett turbo with a ceramic impeller and a custom GNX cover, an improved intercooler with special heat-rejection coatings, and its own separate serial number, better hydraulics in the transmission for firmer shifts and an auxiliary transmission cooler mounted behind the grille. There were fender flares on each wheelwell, and those were filled with 245/50x16 front and 255/50x16 rear tires mounted on 16x8 black mesh wheels. They were all black and completely unadorned.
1987 Buick GNX rear. Photo courtesy of Scott Lachenaur.
The GNX rear suspension included lower control arms, no upper arms, a torque arm setup, and a Panhard rod for better traction, and there was even a GNX graphic on the differential cover. The body carried functional air exhaust louvers on the front fenders, GNX emblems front and rear, and a serial number plaque on the dashboard that had a special GNX analog instrument cluster with Stewart-Warner gauges.
Calibration—that elusive, perfect combination of spark timing, fuel injection flow with the SEFI system, and turbo boost—was what made the intercooled GNX so successful, and there’s a story behind that. James “Gabe” Poplawski, a veteran of 17 years at GM’s proving ground in Mesa, Arizona, recalls how the final calibration of the GNX went.
“I had a Grand National that I had made my own chip for, and it was pretty fast. The McLaren guys brought out their GNX package just before they were going to let some media people drive it, and when they ran it at Mesa, it was about a second slower than their expectations. A Buick guy, Roger Schumacher, told them I had a pretty fast Grand National, so they put my chip in their car and picked up a full second in the quarter-mile. So when they went back to Michigan, they combined my chip and their chip, which was more geared toward meeting EPA standards, and that’s what went into the GNX production cars that McLaren built for Buick.”
Poplawski says they called it “the grenade chip” because if the full-throttle run lasted much more than 13 seconds at 22 psi of boost, the engine would, in all likelihood, expire. Poplawski says that late in the program, Buick found that customers were doing their own calibrations, many of which resulted in over-boost, over-temperature, and exploded ceramic turbo impellers, so Buick replaced the ceramic ones with stainless steel units that wouldn’t spool up as fast but would live longer in the field.
In addition to the low-volume, high-speed GNX, Buick made more than 20,000 Grand Nationals, more than 1,500 Turbo T versions, more than 1,000 Regal Limited Turbos and more than 4,200 base Regals with the turbo option package, for a 1987 total of more than 27,500 cars, the most important and successful being the 547 GNX models.
Only 1,547 Buick Regal Turbo-T WE4 package cars were built in 1987—the lightest and fastest of all the Regal T-Type/Turbo-T/Grand Nationals. This barn find was seen at GBodyParts.com and photographed by Jesse Kiser.
Bang-for-the-Buck Winner
There was also a very special model called the Regal Turbo-T WE4. The all-black, lightweight Turbo-T package had the look of the GN, but without the extra heft. Besides having gas shocks, quick-ratio power steering, and the usual list of power and convenience equipment, the WE4 also had the Turbo-T’s lighter cast-aluminum wheels, aluminum rear brake drums, and aluminum bumper supports. The WE4 was an odd byproduct of the EPA’s mandate for the bulk of a car’s build run to fall within the car's prescribed weight class (called capacity constraint). With the projected sales of the heavier GN being so high (over the allowed limit of 33 percent of total Turbo Regal sales), heavy fines could only be avoided if a lightweight Turbo Regal was produced in sufficient numbers to offset the number of GNs. Thus was born the WE4.
A barn-find 1987 Buick Regal T-Type WE4 languishes at GBodyParts.com in Bethel, North Carolina. Photo courtesy of Jesse Kiser.
The all-black WE4 Turbo-T was lighter in weight than the GN and was, theoretically, the quickest of all the non-GNX Turbo Regals. The WE4 was “flat out, the hottest piece of domestic machinery you can buy,” according to Cars Illustrated magazine. Car and Driver reported that the WE4 Turbo-T was the quickest American car in 0-60 mph it had ever tested. And it was cheaper than a Grand National, to boot.
Production Figures
Between 1982 and 1987, Buick produced more than 114,000 rear-drive turbocharged V-6-powered cars and a substantial number of front-drive Rivieras.The rarest car ever to wear the Grand National name was the 1982 NASCAR commemorative car, with only 215 produced. The rarest turbocharged Grand National was the 1984 model, with only 2,000 produced. The rarest turbocharged Regal was the 1987 Regal Limited, with only 1,035 produced, followed by the 1987 Turbo T, with only 1,547 produced. The rarest Regal Sport Coupe was the 1982 version, with only 2,022 produced. The GNX, of course, is the best combination of rare, quick, and fast. These are the greatest Buicks ever built, and if you have one, keep it forever and will it to your oldest child, because there will never be anything like it again.
Turbo Buick Movers and Shakers
Former Buick chief engineer, Buick division general manager, and president of General Motors Lloyd E. Reuss recalls the early turbo program fondly. “When I went to Buick engineering as chief engineer in 1975, I had an engineering review of all the things that Buick was doing. In that review, Ken Baker, who was running Buick research and development, told me about the turbocharged V-6 he had built. I drove it and discovered what a good performer it was.“We had a whole new team in place at Buick, and one of our assignments was to get our sales volumes back. After reviewing all the projects we were working on, we developed a strategy built around the V-6 engine, the 3.2-liter, the 3.8-liter, the 4.1-liter, and the turbocharged 3.8. I told the press then that the V-6 was the engine of the future. We developed a whole series of programs to do the even-fire crankshaft, then the turbo, with the Indy pace car. We put a V-6 in every car we built, including the new front-drive Riviera in 1979. Word somehow got back to the corporation that we were going to put a V-6 in the new Riviera and the corporation told us we couldn’t do it, until they drove it. The public viewed V-6s as economy engines, but the turbo provided us with the excitement we needed. Turbocharging was an important marketing tool for us, and the Turbo Regal was the car that provided a marketing advantage.”
Reuss credits the turbo program for pushing technology, including sequential electronic fuel injection and the first use of a knock sensor setup at GM (coupled to a vacuum advance and boost-retard mechanism to preserve the engine). “Delco Electronics developed the knock sensor for us and that allowed us to go into production with the turbo,” Reuss says. “Without it, we would have been blowing holes in pistons.” Reuss went to Chevrolet in 1984, but not before the distributorless ignition system, the computer control system, and the Grand National powertrain were in place. Reuss says he has no regrets, except for Indy. “We won the pole lots of times, and we entered lots of Buick-powered race cars over the years, but I regret that we never actually won the Indy 500.”
Jim Ramsay, who was then creative director at McCann-Erickson, Buick’s ad agency, says, “The turbocharged V-6 engine program was a wonderful marketing tool, and we took maximum advantage of it in the advertising. Lloyd Reuss recognized it for what it was and made it an integral part of Buick, a legitimate challenge to the power of the corporate 350 small-block engines. Don Hackworth, who succeeded Reuss as general manager, was the one who took it racing in CART IndyCar competition. It was used in a dune buggy, it was used as the basis for several HOT ROD magazine project cars, and it was used to power a number of hot rods.”
Joe Negri, who now runs the road racing and Indy Racing League programs at GM Motorsport, worked at Buick longer than any other person involved in the turbo program (from 1967 until 1991). Negri points out that the program didn’t always go well. “I did all the early development on the two-barrel and four-barrel versions, including power development and emissions,” he says. “We had to figure out a way to meet emissions with the poor light-off of a catalytic converter, which is tough to do with a turbo. We had to run high exhaust temperatures and run real lean to avoid putting out a lot of hydrocarbons before the catalytic converter got up to temperature. [We] chose a catalyst that would light off quickly. The things we did to meet emissions didn’t affect the horsepower, but they did affect drivability more than anything. We ended up with a pretty good driving package. The California cars were much tougher. Once we figured out the engine liked the four-barrel, we dropped the two-barrel to get rid of the restrictions.” Negri stayed at Buick right on through, working in advanced engines, special products group, specialty vehicles, Buick motorsports, the T-Types, fuel injection, the Grand National and GNX eras, and went to Motorsport in 1991.
Negri recalls, “Ed Roelle, who worked for me, did the special vehicles, including the Grand National and GNX, working with Molly (Sanders) and the rest of the team. We had a lot of discussions about the Grand National being in the same retro spirit as the old Gran Sports, the GS 400, and the GS 455 Stage I, with their quickness and styling. The TV ad that we did for the Grand National used the [George Thoroughgood] music Bad to the Bone to set the tone for what we were doing. It didn’t run much on TV. There were some people who weren’t too enthralled with it.” —Jim McCraw
3.8-Liter Buick “LC2” Turbo V-6 Production
Same here! It sux that they stopped making them, because they were starting to affect the Corvette's sales.