What ‘Performance Cars’ Offered The Most Underwhelming Performance?

Let’s face it: a lot of cars have a loud, obnoxious bark but no teeth to actually bite you. All talk, no action. Their looks talk a good game, but their game itself is very, very weak.

Listing malaise examples would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Naturally, anything branded as a “performance” edition from the seventies was pathetic, but relative to everything else on the market in those dismal times they really weren’t that bad. However, post-malaise “sports” models didn’t have much of an excuse to suck, or at least no reason not to be at least significantly better than a cooking variety model.

If you heard that a car called the “OZ Rally Edition” was arriving back in 2003, you possibly envisioned something to kick up dust on Pikes Peak while spinning its fancy Italian wheels. When you realized that it was going to be a version of a Mitsubishi Lancer, your imagination ran wild to EVO-equivalent competition-style cars. It’s understandable that there was a bit of disappointment when we saw what an actual “OZ Rally Edition” turned out to be.

Oh, those are OZ wheels alright; whopping 14-inch meats that fit into the unmodified factory wells with room to spare. They probably could have gone down the 13s and still been able to accommodate the tiny rear drum brakes. Not that you needed giant cross drilled discs with 120 horsepower on tap, or a bit less than half the output of the vaunted EVO. Even the small rear wing was a weak substitute for the Evolution’s big ironing board.

How about a 1986 Buick Century Gran Sport? Sure looks pretty sinister in its monochromatic paint scheme.

That Regal GN-style logo with the arrow-in-a-circle promises force-fed induction for the V6, or so you thought.

Sadly, you don’t get it. No, the Gran Sport has a 150-horsepower, normally-aspirated motor right out of your Aunt Cassie’s Century sedan; the arrow-in-a-circle thing must relate to the steering wheel? That lying logo that they put everywhere, including the headrests, was false advertising.

The gauge cluster tells you how pathetic this “performance” car was. A rectangular cluster like that could have been absolutely anything, yet we got a ribbon speedometer with an add-on hand-held video game LED tach where the column shifter gear indicator would have been (the Gran Sport at least had a floor shifter for the mandatory automatic). There is prominent space being used for a slightly crooked BUICK MOTOR DIVISION “gauge.” I’d forgotten how bad these types of speedometers were with kilometer markings. Poor Canadians, it’s just gloriously bad.

Throwing a supercharged 3800 under the hood, disc brakes all around, and a set of round instruments would have given us a GNX-style sleeper. Instead, we got a snoozer, an accountant in a Darth Vader costume. Come on, this wasn’t 1976; GM had so much stuff in their parts bins at the time, they could have easily made the Gran Sport so much more.

What are some other paper tiger “performance” or “sport” models that have left you wanting? Have you ever owned one yourself? The Autopian is asking!

Top graphic image: Mitsubishi