Chevrolet withstood a titanic amount of grief, suffering the slings and arrows of the Camaro faithful (as well as many in the enthusiast press) when it torpedoed the 35-year-old pony car in 2002. After years of keeping the Camaro afloat despite foundering sales, Chevy felt it needed to cut the storied but antiquated F-body loose.
The besieged automaker went on to suffer the added scourge of watching Ford Mustang sales—buoyed by that car’s first complete redesign since 1979—swell to fill the void. For Chevrolet and its fans, this took some of the luster off their best news for 2005: Chevy outsold the Ford brand for the first time in 19 years.
Now the folks at Chevrolet have finally given Camaro loyalists something to celebrate. Perhaps inspired by the Mustang’s success, or even the booming interest in classic American muscle, the Bow-tie bunch has deemed conditions again conducive to a resuscitation of its pony car. And while the Camaro exists solely in concept form for now, we expect a production version to follow, by 2009 at the latest. (Those who think that’s too long should consider that even mighty Toyota took three years to turn the FJ Cruiser concept into a production model.)
Chevy used the Detroit show to officially unveil the concept car, but if you’re one of the thousands that frequent any number of enthusiast message boards on the Web—including AutoWeek.com’s own Combustion Chamber—then you’ve already caught buzz about the car, perhaps even peeked at leaked photos of the clay model.
Fuzzy internet pics of clay mockups, however, don’t do justice to the real thing.
Under the car’s bulging hood sits a Corvette-derived 6.0-liter LS2 V8, tuned to crank out 400 hp and anchored to a Tremec T56 six-speed manual transmission. The engine also makes use of cylinder-deactivation technology to increase fuel efficiency. Chevy expects the Camaro to achieve 30 mpg on the freeway.
Handling duties fall to a four-wheel independent suspension, with MacPherson struts up front, a multilink design in back and progressive-rate coil springs and gas-pressurized dampers all around. It’s basically a derivative of the General’s Australian-built (and briefly canceled for export here from Down Under) Zeta rear-drive platform, which we expect will underpin a future Pontiac GTO as well as other U.S.-bound GM vehicles.
The show car sits on a set of flashy concept-specific wheels, 21-inch alloys up front wrapped in 245/30 rubber, with 305/30R-22s putting the power down in back. All four wheels house four-piston calipers gripping 14-inch vented disc brakes.
There is more than a hint of 1969 Camaro in the car’s lines, especially along its beltline and in the grille. The echoes come as little surprise, and not only because many consider the ’69 model the best-looking of the first-generation car. Ask Ed Welburn, GM vice president and design chief, what sits in his personal garage, and the first car he mentions is his yellow and black ’69 SS.
“I wanted to capture the spirit, the essence of [the ’69 Camaro],” says Tom Peters, director of design for GM’s global rear-wheel-drive performance cars. “But I am not a proponent of ‘retro’ design.” A barb aimed at Mustang? Probably.
Peters says he was more interested in distilling the essence of the ’69 car and infusing that into the concept.
“What are the powerful, passion-filled cues that made it desirable back then, make it exciting and desirable today, and I bet you a donut in 20 or 40 years will also be pretty neat to look at?” Peters says he asked of his design team. “I want you to sketch the meanest street-fighting dog you can sketch.”
Between its low, wide stance, flared fenders and prominent grille, the Camaro indeed has the presence of a street fighter. And it looks every bit the successor to the ’69 without being a complete rehash.
Peters admits he also took the liberty of sprinkling the car with a few Corvette cues; understandable, given he was the chief designer of the C6. Much of the Vette’s contribution lies in the Camaro’s rear, wrapping around to the quarter-panels.
We think it’s a winner of a design, inside and out. But what do the message-board mobs have to say about the car? A brief sampling found many more yeas than nays, though, admittedly, the malcontents proved much more fun: “It looked like a bad Hot Wheels car”; “a bit too much Batman for my taste, but a definite improvement over the Mustang”; “the best thing that GM can do with this mess is to start all over. They would do better by copying another one of Chrysler’s cars like they did with the HHR.”
Peters knows all about the Internet chatter and doesn’t sound the least bit concerned over the negative stuff floating in cyberspace.
“Times have changed. Obviously there are different customer expectations, there are more competitors out there, there are technical advances that all had to be factored into not only the design but the function as well,” he explains. “The function drives the aesthetic in a way.”
If the Camaro drives as well as it looks, then GM may have a winner on its hands. And with Dodge showing a Challenger just down the hall, it seems we may have an old-fashioned, pony-car donnybrook brewing.
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