The Superbowl Halftime show holds a grand American tradition of boring old white dudes complaining that they don’t understand popular culture, and the zeitgeist is moving on and leaving them behind. Kendrick Lamar’s stellar performance on Sunday night provided more entertainment than the game, throwing punches at two pedophiles—President Donald Trump and disgraced rapper Aubrey “Drake” Graham. For the opening number of his performance Lamar shared the stage with an iconic piece of American automotive history, the Buick Regal GNX. Or, at least a GNX facsimile.
As difficult as it may be for modern audiences to believe, Buick built a supercar in the late-1980s by slinging a turbocharger under the hood of a midsized family car and cranking up the power. Buick contracted ASC/McLaren to build just 547 units of the “Grand National eXperimental” with power outputs allegedly clearing 300 ponies and 420 pound-feet of torque during an era of smog-choked American Muscle atrophy. It was famously, at the time, quicker than a Ferrari F40 in the quarter mile, tripping the lights in 12.7 seconds. These cars were extremely collectible even when new, and some dealers were charging more than double the car’s intended $29,000 MSRP, which was known as a lot of fucking money in 1987.
Kendrick is famously a GNX fanatic, owning one himself, and naming his sixth studio album, released last November, after the hot Buick. The obsession is a life-long one as Lamar’s father drove him home from the hospital in a 1987 Buick Regal, he grew up listening to hip-hop in the back of that car, and he’d always dreamed of having the best version of his dad’s pride and joy. The car used in the Superbowl performance is not that car.
First of all, the car on stage is barely a car at all anymore. For one thing you can see the car is sitting on a platform with the floors cut out of it, which is what allowed a couple dozen dancers to exit the car through the trunk and doors to join Kendrick on stage. The wheels are the wrong size, the car doesn’t have the GNX’s signature fender flares, and the badging on the front fender is incorrect for a GNX. It would never make sense to build up this stage prop from a real GNX as most of them have been bubble wrapped in rich dude collections for decades and even a shabby one will run you deep into the six figures.
The smoking gun in this argument, however, is the sunroof. While K.Dot was dropping “Squabble Up”, I spotted the way the light hit the roof of the car and noted a raised section where a sunroof would be. When the camera pulled back and the stage lit up, the full aperture of the sunroof was visible. Everybody knows that the GNX was never available with a sunroof.
In an interview with Wired the artists behind the stage fabrication for the show say they located the car “at a mom-and-pop car lot in Riverside, California.”
“That car was not easy to find, especially since he dropped his album,” show art director Shelley Rodgers says. “We could have just used his, but I don’t know that he would’ve liked it after.”
It seems to me that Rodgers and her crew found a real Grand National, but definitely not one of the real GNX. By comparison the Grand National was extremely high-volume with over 20,000 examples built. The average sale price of one of these machines is not inexpensive, but certainly not outside the realm of a Superbowl halftime performance budget. Hagerty says you can expect to pay around $36,900 for good Regal Grand National. So, don’t worry you little freaks, Kendrick didn’t “ruin” anything. You can go back to complaining about DEI, or whatever.