Car News and Reviews - Car News Today
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A Look Back at the Camaro Z28 |
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Friday, 11 January 2008 |
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From 1967 to 1969 Chevrolet produced a showroom car which was designed to be race ready. This was the Camaro Z28, which has become one of the best beloved cars among muscle car collectors for its interesting history as well as for the excellent design that went into making it one of the most powerful muscle cars of its time and its class. Let’s take a look back at the Chevrolet Camaro Z28 and see how it came to be made and what it has under the hood.
The driving force behind the creation of the Chevrolet Camaro Z28 was Chevy’s desire to win the Trans-Am racing series championship. The Sports Car Club of America has started the famous race in the late sixties and the two chief competitors in the Trans-Am championship were seen to be Ford and Chevrolet. In 1966, the year of the first Trans-Am championship, Ford won the race with the Ford Mustang, which managed to beat the Chevrolet Camaro to the market by over two years.
The specifications of the engine classes allowed into the Trans-Am race favored the Ford Mustang from the beginning. Two classes were permitted – one which was for engines which were under 121 cubic inches in displacement, and one which was for engines that had less than 305 cubic inches in displacement. The smaller class was well suited for a variety of foreign cars, while the Ford Mustang and Chevy’s soon to arrive contender would compete in the higher class which also supported a wheelbase of a 116 inch maximum and a 2800 pound minimum weight.
Chevrolet did not have an engine which was the right displacement for the race at first, but the engineers at Chevy realized that if they combined the Chevy 283 cubic inch V-8 crankshaft and the Chevy 327 cubic inch engine block they could create a new engine which would be practically perfect for the specifications of the Trans-Am. The resulting engine was a V-8 which had a displacement of 302.4 cubic inches. Other parts which were added to the engine included a high-rise manifold, a race engine camshaft, dual exhausts, cylinder heads from the Corvette and a Holley four barrel carburetor. Chevrolet put everything that they had into the original Camaro Z28 to make the best racing machine in its class.
To ensure that the resulting car would be able to be sold on the showroom floor, special considerations were made to conceal the race car aspects of the vehicle – the name was made the Camaro instead of the original design name of “Cheetah” and the horsepower of the Camaro, which was actually somewhere between 350 and 400, was rated for the market at 290 so that insurance companies would not have qualms over covering it.
How did the Camaro Z28 fare in the Trans-Am championship? After spending a year in track development during 1967, the Camaro Z28 was successful with championship wins over the Ford Mustang in 1968 and 1969, proving the Chevrolet had what it took to win the Trans-Am!
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