What Type Of Car Was In The 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show?

The highly-anticipated Super Bowl 2025 halftime show kicked off with artist Kendrick Lamar perched on top of a vintage car — one that is immediately recognizable to his fans, and that remained a focal point of attention during the event. The vehicle featured during the early part of the performance is the limited-edition 1987 Buick GNX, the same car that appears on the cover of his sixth album, "GNX," which got a surprise release in November 2024.

Lamar first shared images of the vehicle on one of his Instagram accounts in March 2024, showing it on an enclosed trailer presumably shortly after it was delivered, as well as a shot of the driver's side interior, a look under the hood, his reflection in its glossy black exterior, and what appears to be a photo from his childhood featuring a remote-controlled Buick.

The model is one of only 547 that were produced, and it holds special meaning for the wildly successful artist. GNX stands for Grand National Experimental, and when it was first released in 1987, Car & Driver described the car as "an axe-wielding barbarian lying waste to everything in its path." It's no surprise to hear, then, that Buick designed the rare variant to take on the Corvette, underscoring its impressive racing pedigree.

It's obvious to anyone paying attention that the classic car has a special meaning to Lamar: he was born in 1987, and his father drove him home from the hospital as an infant in a Buick Regal Grand National, a model closely related to the GNX. In fact, Lamar expressed his desire to own a black Grand National in the lyrics of his song "TV Off" released as part of the "GNX" album, and given the role this vehicle played in his early life, it's no surprise he gave it center stage at Super Bowl 2025 in front of a massive audience.

Though his album "GNX" was still several months away, Lamar teased its existence — and one of its central themes — in a post on his "jojoruski" Instagram account, where he first revealed that he'd purchased the classic car. He said, "Aye life get real tricky. No matter where you at with it. I never pick and choose what stories to relate to. All of them is relative. Like my momma say tho. Different strokes for different folks. A good ol saying can snap you back into reality sometimes. But in the moment of confusion, the best thing you can do is find a gnx. Make you realize the only thing that matters in life is that original paper work. That TL2 code. 1 of 547."

The Buick Regal was used by Darrell Waltrip to win two consecutive NASCAR Winston Cup championships, one in 1981 and the other in 1982. The first official Regal Grand National model was introduced by Buick to the world in 1982 at the Daytona 500, capitalizing on the popularity spurred by Wilstap's victories.

The Regal Grand National was produced by Buick from 1982 until 1987, when the automaker brought the model to an end — but not before giving it a proper send-off with the beastly GNX variant. The latter limited-edition model sports a 3.8L supercharged, intercooled V6 engine outputting 245 horsepower (though some reviewers pushed the number as high as 300 during testing at the time) with a speed cap of 124 miles per hour. The model offers quicker acceleration than the Grand National, among many other things, taking around 4.7 seconds to go from 0 to 60.