The Philadelphia Eagles may have won Super Bowl LIX by a shocking margin, but Kendrick Lamar stole halftime. His meticulously planned halftime show involved fastidiously choreographed dancing, some crowd favorites, and of course, a deceptively spacious Buick GNX.

Kendrick Lamar stormed the field at Super Bowl LIX using a Buick GNX to carry his army of colorful dancers

The Buick GNX owes its more recent appeal almost entirely to Kendrick Lamar. Before he placed a GNX right in the center of the field at Super Bowl LIX, Lamar released “GNX,” a 2024 studio album paying homage to the car he holds so dear. 

For starters, the California rapper rode home from the hospital in 1987 in a Buick like the gleaming GNX in his halftime show. Well, almost. His father’s car was a Regal, the base building blocks for the up-muscled, limited-run GNX. Paired with a shared birth year, Lamar and the GNX are quite the match. 

As Lamar performed “Bodies,” the vehicle did its best classic car-turned-troop-carrier act, practically exploding with dancers. Of course, if you know anything about a 1987 Buick GNX, it seats five on a good day. It certainly doesn’t seat dozens of athletic dancers. Not even with a spacious trunk.

We have Shelley Rodgers to thank for the GNX illusion. Rodgers was the art director behind the show, and she had a monumental task from the very start. “That car was not easy to find, especially since he dropped his album,” Shelley Rodgers told Wired. “We could have just used his [GNX], but I don’t know that he would’ve liked it after.” Still, Rodgers and her team pulled it off, turning Lamar’s album namesake into a Super Bowl centerpiece. 

Beyond the pageantry of Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, the Buick GNX is itself, a show-stopper. When the 300-horsepower, McLaren-powered GNX first hit the streets as a swan-song Regal, testers coaxed it to 60 mph in under five seconds. That’s nearly as fast as a modern Ford Mustang EcoBoost. Not bad for a 38-year-old Buick.