When most people think of the automobile brand Buick, they think of a doctor's car or automobiles for older people. They do not associate the brand with muscle cars. This changed for a brief four years in the 1980s with the Buick Gran National and Buick GNX.
It started a decade earlier in 1973 with a young Buick engineer named Ken Baker. Ken started a Boy Scout Explorer post, a program focused on older boys and girls, very similar to what Venturing is today, but focused on specific careers. As an automobile engineer, it may be of no surprise that Ken's Explorer post was focused on automobile engineering. During this time the US and much of the world was suffering from a fuel crisis and engine sizes were slashed across brands. His Explorer post was experimenting with getting more power from a small V6 engine by using a turbocharger as forced induction. The results exceeded everyone's expectations. Buick's general manager found out and called in Ken, asking for the details on "the secret Explorer project." Ken thought he was going to get fired, but instead was promoted to be in charge of a team with the goal of putting the design into production. In the coming years, Buick worked to refine the concept and in 1984 released the Gran National. By 1986, the Gran National achieved a then-staggering zero-to-60 mph time of 5.2 seconds, a second faster than that year's Chevrolet Corvette and just 0.1 second slower than a Ferrari Testarossa. A year later and in its last year of production (1987), the Buick Gran National in its GNX form hit zero to 60 in 4.7 seconds. It is important to note that the Gran National was built on the frame of a Buick Regal, which was a mid-sized family car.
Again, this started as a Boy Scouts of America Explorer post project. In Ken Baker's words, "we begged, borrowed, and scrounged parts to build." This did not start as a huge effort by Buick and this was not meant to be a production engine, yet it ended up powering one of the most iconic cars of the 1980s.
Sometimes our experiments lead to great things. It is important that we think outside the box and remain unafraid to take calculated risks. Things only improve when we challenge the status quo and focus on how we can affect change for the better. On my honor, I will do my best