Rodley Motors will bing you a weekly installment outlining the history of the Chevrolet camero from 1967 to the present day.

General Motors found themselves wrong footed by the Mustang when it was introduced in April 1964. Chevrolet designers were just putting the finishing touches to a reskinned Corvair for 1965 and believed that its engineering sophistication was what the public wanted. Ralph Nader ended all that when he published his book ‘Unsafe At Any Speed’ in November 1965. Ford had sold 1.3 million Mustangs before the Camaro was even put on sale in 1966. A small, in-house team under Irv Rybicki started the design in August 1964 and management go ahead was given for the new ‘F’ car in early 1965.

The Camaro was a remarkably clean design with few of the unnecessary adornments usually incorporated in car design of the time. Influenced by the ‘Coke Bottle’ theme, which was popular with GM designers (leading to the Corvette), the design was good enough to influence William Towns, when designing the Aston Martin V8 a decade later.

From the outset the Camaro was designed to be better than the Mustang. Its semi-unitised construction with front subframe mounted by rubber biscuits gave a wider track than equivalent Mustangs as well as a quieter ride, and the flexibility to upgrade to larger engines, even before the late 60’s horsepower race began in earnest. The use of the Chevelle rear axle gave the Camaro a wider rear track than initially planned. All but the high performance models were equipped with monoleaf rear springs, and axle wind up was not totally eliminated until staggered shock absorbers were instigated for the 1968 model. One problem which manifested itself quite early on with the convertibles was the tendency to shake under certain conditions. Harmonic dampers were found to be the answer when installed in the boot – chassis engineers termed these ‘cocktail shakers’. The famous Chevy small block was available in several states of tune, from a 327 CID two barrel, to a very quick 350 CID four barrel, which came as part of the SS350 package.

The Camaro was launched on to the U.S. market in 1966 (as a ‘67) with a plethora of options and variables, and 220,906 1967 models were sold of which 25,141 were convertibles but only 602 Z/28’s.

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