The 1989 McLaren-Tuned Pontiac Grand Prix Is Somehow Both The Worst And Best Of ’80s GM

The United States and the United Kingdom. Two best friends separated by an ocean of water and a common language. Despite our landscape being peppered with buildings older than your entire country, I’ve always thought the UK felt much closer to the US than it does to mainland Europe less than thirty miles away. Probably not surprising, seeing as about eighty years ago all your available young men flew over and squired all our available young women. Latterly, you’ve given us regular-season NFL games and in return we’ve given you James Corden. No, keep him, you’re welcome.

It’s easy enough for any one of us to buy a ticket, jump on a flying death tube, and about ten hours later emerge frazzled and possibly intoxicated in each other’s country. I’ve been to the US a dozen times over the last quarter of a decade, and I always felt much more at home there (here? I’m confusing myself now) than I do in my own country. I’m not sure what this says about me, but the ease at which this can be accomplished says a lot about how the broad strokes of business and pop culture are exchanged between us.

For cars, it’s a bit harder – literally and metaphorically – to make the same leap. In the fifties and sixties, you fell in love with our windswept two-seater sports cars, and certain strata of American high society took to swanning about in a rickety upscale SUV named after a fashion magazine. But because the American market is concerned with such trifles as value for money and build quality, British cars in the US have remained an acquired taste. We’re a nation of classist snobs, so American cars in the UK have always been considered a bit downtown: gaudy fingertip-steered barges for people who think it’s acceptable to be seen in public wearing a bolo tie (although in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out my regular footwear rotation contains a pair of black suede cowboy boots).

The majority of American cars that wash up on UK shores are the usual clichés: Mustangs, Camaros, Firebirds, Corvettes, and the like. Every so often though, something pops up that just beggars the question: what in the name of eight-dollar-a-gallon gas is THAT thing doing here?

It Cost $7 Billion Dollars

Such car had me spitting out my breakfast beer in disbelief this morning. As I doomscrolled and steeled myself to face the horrors of another day, what appeared in my feed was one of the greatest examples of General Motors mediocrity as has ever graced England’s green and pleasant land: a 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix. My understanding had been these cars limped out of the factory with a pre-grunged interior and faded plastics mounted on the skewwhiff, yet here shining out from my phone screen was a mint-condition example available for ten thousand of English pounds. Even more shocking, it’s the ASC/McLaren turbo version. If I didn’t already have a temperamental red 2+2 coupe (yes, it’s broken down again stop sniggering) I’d be all over this like a $99 dollar tuxedo. Strap in, this is going to get a little button-y.

The sixth generation Pontiac Grand Prix was one of the first cars to use the ill-fated GM W-body, an all-things-to-all-GM-brands attempt to build the majority of their volume sellers on a single FWD platform. With a staggering 7 billion with a B dollars devoted to the project – in mid-eighties money, mind you –  the idea was to try and wean customers out of bulky, old-fashioned rear-wheel drive cars and into modern, fuel-efficient front wheel drive cars. GM factories would stamp out W-body variants by the hundreds of thousands, the various divisions having their versions differentiated by a simple nose and tail job – badge engineering at its worst. The problem was the market was rapidly changing, and CEO Roger Smith’s technology-led reforms were going down within GM like last week’s leftover burrito. When the W-bodies stumbled into showrooms in 1987 with the Grand Prix, Buick Regal, and Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the new machines were allegedly losing $2,000 per car sold. Bloody hell.

But It’s A McLaren You Can Afford

What we have here is an ASC/McLaren Grand Prix from 1989. This wasn’t another long-distance transatlantic production line like that other Roger Smith folly, the Cadillac Allante. McLaren in this case referred not to the Woking-based company whose primary business back then was churning out F1 winners, but instead a US-based offshoot of McLaren that only shared a name with the racecar constructor. In partnership with the American Sunroof Company, a small but credible coachbuilder, this McLaren already had some experience juicing up Fox-body era Capris and Mustangs. With the future of the rear wheel drive performance car looking a tad uncertain in the late eighties (the Probe was originally going to be the new Mustang, remember) it probably seemed logical to turn their attention to the latest front wheel drive tire devourer.

The 1989 Grand Prix had received a few upgrades from the launch 1987 version. Chief among these was swapping out the 2.8-liter V6 boat anchor for a bigger 3.1-liter version, giving a whopping 10 bhp increase, for a total of wait for it, 140 bhp. Wow. Control of all this American firepower fell to a four-speed sludgematic, and the ‘89s came equipped with ABS to make your inevitable understeering trip into a ditch a bit slower. Needless to say, there was room for improvement which is where ASC/McLaren got the spanners out. The de rigeur method to increase engine power in the eighties was to bolt on a turbo, so that’s exactly what they did. On the outside, the ASC team looked at the controversial plastic cladding and perhaps thought it needed more of that – so they fattened up the fender flares and redid the front and rear fascias. Then, having decided that wasn’t enough plastic, they added cooling louvres to the hood. Lower and stiffer suspension pieces were added to sharpen up the handling and fill out the bodywork better as well.  So unlike a lot of factory hot rods, the upgraded ASC/McLaren Grand Prix (try saying it after ten Busch Lights) wasn’t all hat and no cattle: Power went up to a respectable 205 bhp, zero to sixty went down to around seven seconds, and the top speed was 128 mph.

Why. Why Is This Here?

The original list price for the standard 1989 Grand Prix SE was around $25k, and according to Car and Driver the ASC/McLaren conversion cost $5k extra on top of that – equivalent to $72k in 2024 greenbacks. Now, a lot of American cars end up in the UK thanks to the large contingent of US armed forces still based here (we’re all irresistible to Americans, what can I say?), but it’s hard to believe any of them were daft enough to pay the thick end of $30k for a fucking Pontiac Grand Prix. What I’m wondering then is which British subject, having a post-pub flash of inspiration mind back in 1990, looked around at all the UK market offerings, thought “hmmm it’s all a bit too tasteful and sophisticated for me.” And then placed a long-distance phone call to Billy Bob’s Pontiac, Swamp Boat, and Bullshit Emporium in Sweat Bowl, Florida to get a Walmart BMW put on the next boat to the UK?. Let me walk you through some of the alternatives that were available at that time, ripped straight from the back pages of the March 1990 issue of Car magazine:

Audi Quattro, £32,995

BMW 325i, £17,975

Ford Sierra RS Cosworth, £21,300

Lancia Delta Integrale, £20,350

Lotus Elan SE, £19,950

Mazda RX7 Turbo, £21,999

Nissan 200SX, £16,997

Toyota Celica GT4, £22,380

In 1990, the exchange rate was much more favorable than it is these days. Back then, you would have got $1.70 for each of your £1 sterling, giving our Pontiac a UK price equivalent of about £18k. But on top of that you would have had to pay to ship it, then import duties, and finally Value Added Tax on the lot at 15%. You would have been going blind in paperwork for a month getting the blessed thing registered and made road legal, making the entire endeavor more expensive than all the above cars bar the Audi. And a lot more hassle. So why? The only possible explanation is the original owner had a thing for tactile controls, namely buttons. Because on a button-per-dollar metric, this Grand Prix is outstanding value.

How Many Buttons? All Of Them

I’ve mentioned before how the GM interior design team liked using two buttons when one would do but look at this thing: haptic fetishism taken to its illogical extreme. I found a historical listing from four years ago for a similar car on BaT, and the owner reckons it has 137 of them. One hundred thirty seven. I’m glad they counted them because I wasn’t going to. Hell, there are eleven on the steering wheel alone. Punch the horn in anger and you’ll end up tuning the radio to static and blasting the speaker cones out the doors. And in what interior design manual does it suggest putting the fader on the steering wheel is a banner idea? It’s bonkers. Good job there’s no airbag here, because in an accident you’d be getting a full spread of low-grade GM plastic shuriken embedded in your face.

That’s not the end of the electronic eccentricity either. There’s a heads-up display to make you feel like a fighter pilot and nestled in the center console of some kind of digital compass-cum-trip-computer thing, but it doesn’t contain enough digits for everything it’s trying to display. Both the driver and the passenger can get comfy in the every-which-way power-adjustable seats, but only one of them at a time, because both seats share controls. The pod-mounted wiper and lighting controls on either side of the instrument panel are more perplexing than Evangelion fanfiction: I watched Mr. Regular try to figure them out multiple times and I’m still confused. There’s a five-band graphic equalizer with the bands adjusted by rocker switches. Aren’t these supposed to have a minimum of six or seven bands? Perversely the instrument cluster itself is ANALOG. Was there only one small baggie of LEDs and seven-segment displays per car, and once they were all used up, that was it? And what’s that cylinder of numbered reels in front of the passenger for? A combination lock for the glove compartment? This truly is an interior of dreams and madness my friends.  This feature overload was meant to present modernity in the face of increased European and Japanese competition but all it’s serving is ergonomic bewilderment. BMW would have been laughing their asses off at this thing.

I Need It.

Nevertheless, the person who imported this 1989 (registered in 1990) example must have loved it, because they kept it for 33 years. According to the advert it’s never been out in the rain (it must never have been out in that case because it rains here whenever the day ends with the letter Y) and everything still works. This is important because although the old saying goes a GM car will run worse for longer than most cars will run at all, it’s always the electronic parts that age out. The mileage is listed as a tick under 50k, but slightly worryingly the DVLA (the UK equivalent of the DMV) website lists it as not having had an MOT since 2015, although a new one is part of the purchase price.

Despite the Radwood stink pervading out of every gap in the interior trim I absolutely adore this car. Considering its rarity (the advert says only 749 were made – I could find no evidence to counter or support this figure) I can even forgive it the color. The US and European markets are so much more homogenized now – we even get the Mustang over here in right-hand drive – so the time when American cars were forbidden exotics only found in warm photographs nestled in the pages of Car and Driver are long gone. Compared to a BMW or a Sierra Cosworth this Pontiac makes no sense whatsoever, so whoever imported it all those years ago, I salute you. It’s a brash, trashy, low-rent, low-profile-shod contraption, a concentrated shot of the shiteosity that Roger Smith was infecting GM with at the time, and I cannot help but find that sort of earnest hopelessness endearing. And I do love American cars. Especially the magnificently crap ones.

David
Matt
Jason, can you DM me the company credit card details please?

All images courtesy of Fairmont Sports and Classics, Essex, United Kingdom.

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