5 Worst Pace Cars of All Time

 

 

                   

By Keith Griffin            

 

This weekend’s John Wayne Walding 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway features a great pace car; the 2014 Chevy SS. That got us thinking about pace vehicles that just don’t seem to fit. What we found were the five worse pace cars of all time. See if you agree.

After all, what role does the pace car really play? It’s a two-minute living commercial for some supposedly hot product with a celebrity passenger along for the ride. Chris Pratt’s a righteous actor with great roles in “Parks and Recreation” and “The Lego Movie,” but he’s not the reason NASCAR fans pack the stands.

Remember our 10 favorite Indy pace cars? This isn’t that. Here is the list, in no particular order, of the top 5 worst pace cars of all time:

2002 Oldsmobile Bravada

Lets take an SUV that has little sport and barely any utility and parade it around the most famous track in America. That seemed to work well for brand.


1990 Chevrolet Beretta Convertible

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. Case in point: the Chevrolet Beretta convertible. Someone should have shown its photo to the designers of the Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet.


2003 Chevrolet SSR

A pickup as a pace car at the Indy 500? Even if it was the Corvette of pickups, it was still a bad idea for a pace car. It may have seemed like a good idea to put a pickup in front of the NASCAR fans, but it wasn’t.


1981 AMX Turbo by AMC

This was a truly heinous looking vehicle designed by AMX to help promote the launch of the 1981 PPG Indy Car World Series. It was ugly, but it did produce 450 horsepower from its turbocharged, fuel injected inline-six 258 cubic inch engine. So it had that going for it, which was nice.


2012 Toyota Camry

What the heck was the Daytona 500 thinking when it selected the most boring midsize sedan on the market as its pace car? Well, OK, it was thinking with its wallet and not its brain, but seriously?