Rick Seitz, Turbo Buicks And The XK-1: How Did A Common Love For Compact GMs Inspire The GN-Powered Prototype?!

For those of you who have followed my previous writings with Power Auto Media, you no doubt know that Rick Seitz and myself both share an obsession with GM high-tech.

It seemed like during the time that me and Rick were writing about Grand Nationals and T-Types, it fell under the category of what some would call, "niched automotive." But really what it was was that Seitz had a knowledge of everything "turbo Buick." His was, in fact a knowledge that far surpassed my own regarding GM turbo cars.

In reality, it would not have been hard for Rick and myself to write a book. The working title: "Turbo 6: GM's 'Little Engine That Could.'" For all anybody knows, that hypothetical book of General Motors history may have never sold a single copy.

But if Rick Seitz, with his childhood knowledge of turbo Regals, would have been the author, then that book may have became among New York Times' bestsellers, or at least in regards to fuel-injected, GM performance.

With that, I am proud to endorse Rick Seitz and GM EFI magazine, for without Rick and the crew, along with Martyn Schorr and others, that very knowledge of "Turbo-6 Madness" would have never found its way into my career as an automotive journalist, especially in the realm of high performance.

Speaking of GM's "little engine that could," it seems that there is a time and place to re-evaluate that historic platform. And in my humbled opinion, none of us would have ever known the potentialities of compact motor performance in America, were it not for GM's experimentations with turbo performance from the late 1970s into the early '90s. Why? Because anyone who ever lived during the '80s and '90s knows that Japan's automotive market was the one, back then, that reigned supreme.

What does have to do with General Motors? The truth of the matter is that by the time the EPA started cracking-down on smog prevention during the '70s, that craft which we call the "horsepower war" was brutally being chopped-down. And all of a sudden, Buick became a "teenager" for the first time in their car building history!

Not only this, but Buick, the "banker's car," started going through puberty in a way no one, not even Jon Moss, could've seen coming. Buick's voice started changing like Peter Brady, and they grew hairs where they never had them before! Oh, and by the way...Elon Musk did the same thing with Tesla Motors; figure that one out!

So...Buick decided to go hog wild and mess the whole thing up. How else, but by turbocharging the life out of a car that our grandparents used to drive, either to church, bingo or both. But we don't need to expand upon the history of the Grand National again, really! Because "puberty" is not really something that's exclusive to any one genre or decade.

Come to think of it, a lot of us are going through it in our '30s and '40s. You know who else is going through "puberty" in 2015, if not ideologically?! The physically-challenged community! Again, figure it out...America's government cracks down on the muscle car movement; Jon Moss and Buick made the Grand National. Oil tycoons raised the prices of gas; Elon Musk and others started Tesla Motors...see the connection?!

So you take some guy in a wheelchair. He's at the drag races, he's sipping a beer and he's mobbing some nachos. This same person thinks to himself, as he watches every door-slammer go by on the tarmac, about how he may become part of the horsepower game. That same guy in a wheelchair may go, at a later time, to his dad and some of their mutual, motoring buddies.

A lot of these guys, disabled or not, are hardcore into GM muscle anyway, so the conversation in the garage may arise about stuffing dad's LS1 motor into the wheelchair. Or perhaps these same guys may have gotten a little stoned, drank a little too much or whatever, and started seriously considering what it would be to take the disabled guy's wheelchair, bolt a 9-inch rear up to it and retrofit it with the small-block in question.

For myself, it seemed like a straight-out outlandish idea to even suggest, but even Google's search engine was able to draw the connection between "car," "sand rail" and "power chair." In a similar spirit, anyone who's ever followed wellness gurus, Aaron Baker and Elliott Hulse know what binaural beats are; synchronize some of those the right way, and the resulting frequency resembles a Buick 3.8 motor.

With this synchronization of wellness and automotive intact, the project that this document is proposing is the creation of the "XK-1," the world's first Buick V-6 powered, tubular power chair. Featuring a custom-sectioned, Quickie F55 frame, retrofitted for all-terrain tires, the XK-1 would feature 6-inch-wide tires in the front, along with 14.5-inch-wide meats for the rear. From both ends of the unit, the XK-1 would be equipped to run both on and off-road.

The idea is to have the F55 frame sectioned and reinforced to handle either a stock or turbocharged, Buick 3.8 V-6. The V-6 throttle and chair steering would have to be simultaneously controlled by adaptive electronics, it may have to be retrofitted on to a pre-existing, small car chassis, such as an MG or Triumph, and it would have to be mated to a TH400 overdrive transmission, allowing for smooth-and-automated gear shifts.

As of right now, something like this simply does not exist. But the reason for open-sourcing the idea online is so that the vision, the very awareness of the idea itself, may be raised significantly.

I know, probably just as well as Mike Alexander or anyone else from GM EFI, that "Shadetree mechanics" like Paul Huizenga and Rick Seitz have the know-how to pull off the wackiest of hot rod builds. But how would our world change, how could it change, were a person in a wheelchair to pull up at SEMA with a Buick V-6 behind them?!