I don't know what all the hype is all about but there were nothing special about them other than the engine thats it. I worked on these cars at the dealer back then and I can tell you they had problems when new. Yes it was faster than other G body's but not the most attractive one and especially the granny speedometer and the small led tach and boost gauge that you can barely see when it was sunny out thats just my opinion. Driven the GNX when new it was faster than the GN and i liked the way it launched from a dig but going over bumps it felt like you were in a dump truck because of its rear suspension but its more of a quarter mile car and deserves respect . My son asked my one day how come i didnt buy a 1987 GN, my answer i was happy with my 85 442 and they way it looked but if i needed more power for the street i took out my 71 super bee 440 six pack and had fun. GNX will always be top dog since it was a limited edition. CK80 is correct there were other cars that are faster, you could walk into a chevy dealer and order a 1987 callaway corvette RPO B2K
This is my recollection as well. When I ordered my 85 442 in September of 84, there were 3000 to be made with approx. 3300 Olds dealers. That means <1 per dealer. I didn't know anything about allocation back then. But the dealer I got mine from got a gray 442 in that November, while mine didn't get built and delivered until February 85. When I did get my car, I couldn't have been happier. For a dealer to be allocated 2 meant they had to be doing some sales.
A lot of people don't remember the 83/84 H/Os and 85 442 when new, but they had a mule-kick from 1st to 2nd gear and depending on the driving surface, would chirp the tires, or try to send you sideways in slick conditions. One would bring a smile to your face while the other might bring a stripe to your underwear. I knew of one story the guys at the dealership was telling me about why they had a barely used 83
H/O on the lot in 84 was because of the bang shift transmission was too much for a middle-aged woman, so she traded it in for a "regular" Cutlass. In 86, they toned that shift point way down.
I digress. A friend of mine loved my then-new 442. He was so disappointed to find out it was too late for ordering a 442 as the window had closed. Again, being young and dumb, we didn't understand the dealer could locate one if one was around somewhere. You have to remember in the mid-80s, there was no interwebz or phones capable of measuring your unborn baby's pulse rate...things were slow and we had to watch the news or read newspapers to know what the hell was going on, which meant we were at minimum 12 hours to a full day behind the actual news.
So, since my friend couldn't get a new 442 and didn't want to wait until the 86's came out, I told him we should visit a Buick dealership to check out a GN. So we do. There were 3 brand new 85 GN's sitting out in the sun, side by side. Murderer's row. He ended up buying one. IIRC he paid around 15K for it minus some sort of discount. And another friend bought one of those Mustang GT 5.0s......hahaha. Those were the heydays of the 80s right there. We had a lot of fun watching me lose in my underpowered 442 when we raced each other. As mentioned, the GN started out flat, but about 15 feet later, BAM! Warp speed. But when we drove around in the GN, for whatever reason the suspension on that thing seemed more like a buckboard on the bumps than a sleek machine in comparison. The 442 rode a whole lot better than the GN. My car seemed tighter, even with having T-tops.
The consoling factor to me in all this is while those other guys eventually wrecked their cars and killed them, I still have that rock-stock, underpowered and wreck-free 442 in the shop with 60K miles on it, waiting for me to go through it and restore it to its former glory, with its shitty lacquer paint and all. I win in the end. haha Just kidding.
The only thing about that GN my buddy hated was the mandatory cooldown period before shutting it off. So if he was in a hurry, he had to arrive at least a couple of minutes before he had to be there. Interestingly, the GN's actually got better in 86/87 while the 442 got a little bit of what little performance they had sliced off in 86/87.
Sorry for the wall of words. GN's are desirable then and they are desirable now. Nostalgia rules the day. They're great looking cars, all black and sinister-looking, and deserve the place that history has notched out for them. Most of the cars you can buy in the relatively same price range (inflation adjusted) today can outdo a GN or at minimum keep up. But as many has pointed out, the aftermarket follows the money. And from that perspective, there isn't anything super special about the limited run H/Os and 442, MCSS's and 2+2 G-body cars that can hold a candle to the popularity and potential of that little V6 with a hair dryer on it. Everyone has their favorites, and I'm thankful that there were enough G-body variants to have a choice. I still think they should have made a Malibu SS.
