Junkyard Find: 2000 Pontiac Grand Prix Daytona 500 Edition
General Motors created quite a few NASCAR-themed special-edition W-bodies during the first decade of our current century, complete with plenty of plastic cladding and racy-looking decals. Ordinary W-bodies clog up every junkyard in the country, and so it takes something special for me to deploy my camera on a W.
This very-rare-but-not-so-valuable Grand Prix Daytona 500 Edition showed up in a Denver-area yard, and I photographed it last week.
The pace-car replica version for 2000 got brightly colored decals, special Daytona 500-embroidered seats, cool-looking aluminum wheels, and a decklid spoiler (the latter two items have been removed from this car).
Naturally, there’s an automatic transmission, but at least this car came with the supercharged 3800 V6 pumping out 240 horsepower, which made this car reasonably quick for its era. These Eaton blowers have become so commonplace in junkyards that most of them go to the crusher; everybody in the country who wants a $50 supercharger already has several stashed in the garage.
More than 200,000 supercharged miles on the clock.
Wide-track is better!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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I still have the "USA OLDS" 2002 Intrigue GLS. With just over 81,000 miles ( and lately in storage with eleven more cars as I now work remotely), the flickering headlamp issue has happened a few times, the CPS did fail about three miles from home and the 3.5 V6 has held up very well.
Crazy that it even lasted 200K miles. I had this exact model and actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was very quick for it's time. So I just googled this car with "0-60" and one of the articles popped up from the famous Doug Demuro. "Remember When We Thought the Pontiac Grand Prix GTP Was Fast?"
I literally LOL'd... ok well it seemed fast. Mine only lasted around 105k miles before the ac system seized and my mechanic buddy got it freed up enough for me to trade it in. I did search for it several years later and it was resold from a private dealer in GA (I was in FL) and it had several appearance changes so it still ran and changed hands at least a couple more times. good for it! lol