How many appealing vehicles can you name that were only sold for one year?
Even the Edsel lasted three.
Here’s one that came – and went – as fast as it went: the 1991 GMC Syclone.
Zero to 60 in 4.3 seconds .
And that was back in ’91 – when a new L98 (Tuned Port Injection) Corvette needed a languid-seeming 5.3 seconds to make the same run. Even the exotic ZR1 Corvette, with its DOHC V8, needed 4.4. seconds to do what the Syclone did in fewer.
Nothing American could touch the Syclone in a straight-up drag race – and few things foreign (including Ferraris) could match it, either. Car and Driver magazine famously road-tested one against a then-new $122,000 Ferraris 348ts.
The truck won.
Despite costing about $100k less than the Ferrari.
It wouldn’t be until 2002 that GM built something quicker than the Syclone. And that car – the ’02 Z06 Corvette – was just barely quicker (0-60 in 4.2 seconds).
So, how come this phenomenal performer was such a brief blip on the radar?
Well, for openers, it was a truck.
A small truck.
And – let’s be blunt – a cheap truck.
Well, the truck it was based on certainly was. And it’s hard to turn Motel6 into the Ritz – no matter how nicely you dress up the individual rooms.
The Syclone was, when all is said and done, a hopped-up GMC Jimmy. And the Jimmy was the GMC-badged version of the lowly Chevy S-10. Which was the successor to the even lowlier Chevy Luv.
The Syclone, then, was the truck-equivalent of a really quick Pinto.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But people – most people – will take (and pay for) the slower Corvette.
Early models of this utilitarian pick-up were powered (if you want to call it that) by sump pump fours that struggled to develop double-digit output (82 hp from 1.9 liters, rocked up to 94 hp from 2.5 liters by 1990). The top gun (pop gun?) Jimmy option was a 2.8 liter, 125 hp V6.
Suffice to say, it was an unlikely platform for a performance truck. And probably a really bad idea for a successful (sales-wise) performance truck.
Except in one respect.
It was light.
The ’91 S-10 that served as the donormobile for what became the Syclone had a curb weight of about 3,300 lbs. As it turns out, this is virtually the same curb weight as a 1991 L98 Corvette. And much lighter than a full-size truck such as a ’91 C/K 1500 – which weighed about 1,000 pounds more.
The first rule of going fast is to weigh less than the other guy.
So going with the Jimmy as the starting point for a serious sleeper – a turbocharged, all-wheel-drive Saturday Night Special – was sheer brilliance, if the object of the exercise was to not just bitch-slap known performance cars like the Car & Driver Ferrari 348, but to do it to them before the saw it coming. The Syclone was like a Pinto with a Boss 429 crammed under its hood.
Who’d a thunk it?
Who’d a suspected it?
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