CamaroFacts

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Where the stories cross

The Camaro shared engineers, engines and a design chief with the Corvette, and it exists at all because of the Mustang. Here are the crossings we can document, each with a link to the other half of the story on its own site.

Eight places the histories touch

Trans-Am: Penske's Camaros against Bud Moore's Mustangs

MustangFacts tells its Trans-Am story with the Camaro as the rival that forced Ford's hand. After "a frustrating 1969 season against Penske's Camaros," Bud Moore's team came back in 1970 on Firestone tires the company had improved at Moore's urging, and took the manufacturers' title, in what MustangFacts calls "Mustang's cleanest factory-backed answer to Camaro in the pony-car road-racing wars." Chevrolet had the Camaro, AMC had the Javelin, and Ford needed the Mustang to win in public.

So the story has two sides. MustangFacts tells the Bud Moore side; the racing history tells the Penske/Donohue side: the 1968–69 championships, "Team Unfair Advantage," the acid-dipped "Lightweight" Z/28.

One thing to keep straight when reading the two together: Penske and Donohue left the Camaro for the AMC Javelin for the 1970 season, so Bud Moore's championship Mustangs were up against Javelins that year, not Camaros, even though the same team and driver had been in a Camaro the year before. MustangFacts gets this right (it ties "Penske's Camaros" to 1969), but moving between the two sites it's easy to assume the rivalry ran unbroken into 1970. It didn't.

Did you know

  • Trans-Am never crowned a drivers' champion in 1970, but the tally is famous for how close it was. Re-scored with the 1971 points system, Parnelli Jones's Bud Moore Mustang beats Mark Donohue's Penske Javelin by one point, 142 to 141. The manufacturers' table was wider: Ford 72, AMC 59, Chevrolet 40.
  • The Camaro's 1970 rival was a leaner Ford. Ford cut its racing budgets by about 75 percent, dropped Carroll Shelby's team and put the whole Trans-Am effort in Bud Moore's hands. The team still won six races and took three seconds in eleven rounds, which Moore's own team history calls Ford's most convincing championship ever.
  • Bud Moore's first Trans-Am season, 1967, was with Mercury Cougars, not Mustangs. His team won four races and missed the Over 2.0-liter title by two points, finishing ahead of Chevrolet, whose Camaro was in its debut year. The series table read Ford 64, Mercury 62, Chevrolet 57.
  • The 1969 season opened at Michigan in the rain with a scoring error that first gave Mark Donohue's Camaro the win. Bud Moore and Parnelli Jones protested and Jones was declared the winner. RACER adds the legend that insults were hurled at Penske over it, hardening his resolve to win the title.
  • The 1969 rivalry was also a tire war. RACER says the Firestones on Bud Moore's Mustangs beat the Goodyears on Penske's Camaros, especially in the wet, until Donohue tested Firestone's new tire late in the year and found it faster. Both teams also chopped their radiator supports to make the noses smaller and lower.
  • Chevrolet's strength in 1970 was depth, not factory muscle. At Elkhart Lake in July, Rich Taylor counts 24 Camaros and five Mustangs among 36 starters, with only five factory cars among the 25 finishers. At the Riverside finale, 20 of 35 starters were Camaros against six Mustangs.
Sources for these details

MustangFacts: racing reference

Roger Penske: Corvette first, then Camaro

Penske's career started with a Corvette, not the Camaro. VetteFacts' Guldstrand chapter covers Team Penske's very first race, the February 6, 1966 Daytona 24 Hours. The No. 6 Sunoco Corvette, driven by Guldstrand, George Wintersteen and Ben Moore, won the GT class by 27 laps, famously running the last hours of darkness with flashlights taped where the headlights had been. That chapter ends with Guldstrand bound for Le Mans in the Dana Chevrolet L88 Corvette, the next crossing below.

A year or two after that Corvette debut, Penske took his Sunoco-sponsored effort to Trans-Am with the Camaro and Mark Donohue: the 1968–69 championship program. Corvette endurance racing first, then Camaro road racing, then decades of everything else.

Did you know

  • Even at the height of his Camaro success, Penske wasn't being paid by Chevrolet. With GM officially out of racing, factory help came through back channels, which is why AMC's offer of a three-year deal, reported at $2 million, was so tempting when Penske left the Camaro for the Javelin.
  • AMC's contract with Penske reportedly let it cancel factory support if Mark Donohue wasn't winning. After Mid-Ohio in June 1970 AMC threatened to use the clause; two weeks later Donohue won at Bridgehampton in the rain, the Javelin's first Trans-Am victory.
  • Penske's Camaros stopped on Corvette-spec brakes, which Hagerty says were better than the Camaro's own but still needed fresh pads about every other fuel stop. In his book Unfair Advantage, Donohue wrote that the team could fuel, change four tires and swap front pads in under two minutes, roughly half a Ford team's time.
  • Penske's first Sunoco Z/28 (chassis 7N163378) won Chevrolet's first Trans-Am race at Marlboro in 1967. It was then sold to McNamara Racing and raced in Germany, where Dr. Helmut Marko drove it in 1969.
  • Team Penske's Corvette chapter was bigger than one Daytona win. At the 1966 Sebring 12 Hours it entered a Sting Ray (Wintersteen and Ben Moore, 9th overall) and a Corvette Grand Sport for Dick Thompson and Dick Guldstrand, which retired after 65 laps.
  • Penske's 1969 Camaro was less of a sure thing than its record suggests. RACER, drawing on Donohue's The Unfair Advantage, says the redesigned car started out awful and ended only about as good as the 1968 car; the vinyl roofs hiding a too-thin roof and the 20-foot fuel rig were disallowed mid-season.
Sources for these details

VetteFacts: people

Dick Guldstrand and Dana Chevrolet: one dealership, two famous cars

Dana Chevrolet, the Los Angeles-area dealership owned by Paul Dombroski and Peyton Cramer, built roughly 50 427-powered Camaros between 1967 and 1969 with Dick Guldstrand as lead engineer. That was years before the factory COPO 427 program existed.

The same dealership, the same year and the same engineer turn up on the Corvette side too. VetteFacts' Guldstrand chapter puts it this way: "By 1967 Guldstrand was managing the Dana Chevrolet High-Performance Center in Southern California... Peyton Cramer ran it. And in 1967 they decided to do something that no dealership had any business doing: enter the 24 Hours of Le Mans." Their L88 Corvette ran 171.5 mph on the Mulsanne before its engine failed around half-distance.

That makes it the most concrete crossing on this page: one dealership and one engineer, documented independently on both sites, with two completely different projects in the same year. The Dana 427 Camaro is here; the Dana L88 Corvette at Le Mans is on VetteFacts.

Did you know

  • The May 21, 1967 Mont-Tremblant 4 Hours, where Guldstrand and Tom Payne won in the Dana Camaro, is often called a Trans-Am race. The Camaro Research Group says it wasn't an official Trans-Am event until 1968, and no Bud Moore Cougars, Shelby Mustangs or Penske Camaros showed up.
  • On October 4, 1970 Dick Guldstrand started the Trans-Am finale at Riverside in a Ford Mustang, a private car prepared as an engineering project by Chaffey College students. It retired with engine trouble. Racing Sports Cars lists him, at 43, among the field's oldest drivers.
  • Dana's Le Mans push was led by Peyton Cramer, who already knew the race from Shelby American, where Hagerty says he took part in the 1964 GT class win and the 1966 overall victory. Another Shelby veteran, former Shelby American sales manager Don McCain, later worked at Dana too.
  • Le Mans wasn't Dana's only L88. It also ordered a Marina Blue L88 roadster, raced as #92 at Las Vegas, Santa Barbara and Riverside, the only Marina Blue L88 convertible. Chevrolet built just 20 L88s for 1967 and 16 are accounted for today.
  • The Dana Corvette that led its class at Le Mans in 1967 is the only mid-year Corvette ever to run the 24 Hours. Hagerty says the 427 threw a rod through the block just shy of the 12-hour mark; Corvette Magazine, retelling Guldstrand's story, says a broken piston wristpin ended it after the car had led the class for nearly half the race.
  • Guldstrand was an engineer first. According to Vintage Racecar's obituary he studied engineering at UCLA, began in Midget and sprint cars, took up the Corvette in 1957 and opened Guldstrand Engineering in 1968, a shop that became synonymous with high-performance Corvettes.
Sources for these details

VetteFacts: Guldstrand, Dana and the L88

Don Yenko: already named on the Corvette site

VetteFacts already introduces Don Yenko, from the Corvette side of his career: "The L88 existed at all partly because racers pushed for it. Don Yenko — the Pennsylvania dealer whose name would soon mean the wildest Camaros and Corvettes in America — helped convince Chevrolet to homologate the package so his Tulsa-backed Sunray-DX team could go endurance racing."

The Camaro side, including the Yenko Super Camaro, the 1969 COPO 9561 order and his death in 1987, is in Yenko's full biography here.

Did you know

  • Yenko's Corvette work began with a win. The Sunray DX team's L88, prepared by Yenko and driven by him and Dave Morgan, took its class at the 1967 Sebring 12 Hours in its first outing, finishing 10th overall. The same car won the class again at Daytona in February 1968, again 10th overall.
  • When Chevrolet couldn't finish his 1968 L88 order in time for Daytona, Yenko pulled a Rally Red 435/427 convertible off his Canonsburg showroom floor and built it into a race car with an L88 engine, M22 four-speed, roll bar and fuel cell. With Peter Revson it finished fourth in class.
  • Yenko's Corvette sponsor and Roger Penske's Camaro sponsor ended up in the same company. Sunray DX merged into Sun Oil in 1968, and Hagerty says its motorsports program ended in 1969, absorbed by Sunoco's, which already had a race team of its own run by a fellow named Roger Penske.
  • Yenko's Sunray Corvette was set to run the 1968 24 Hours of Le Mans, but civil unrest in France pushed the race from June to September. By then Sunray DX had been acquired by Sun Oil, and Yenko and his Sunray teammates never got to compete.
Sources for these details

VetteFacts: people

Bill Mitchell: one design chief, two cars

VetteFacts has Bill Mitchell's whole GM career: his rise under Harley Earl, the Sting Ray and Mako Shark years, decades of leading Corvette design. The chapter that belongs to the Camaro is here. As GM's design vice president from 1958, Mitchell personally oversaw the Camaro's original styling in Chevrolet Studio 2, and later dismissed the production car as a compromised "committee car." That story is in the designers who disowned it.

Did you know

  • In his oral history, recorded in August 1984 for the Edsel B. Ford Design History Center, Mitchell named the executives he blamed for the first Camaro's compromises: Cliff Goad, Jack Gordon and Fisher Body's Bud Goodman. He said they each told his studio to shorten this and change that, and it became a committee car.
  • The car that might have beaten the Mustang existed in clay. Irv Rybicki's team built a four-seat sporty coupe in a warehouse across 12 Mile Road by June 1963. Mitchell walked around it, called it a damned good-looking car and had Bunkie Knudsen brought over, only for Knudsen to pass.
  • Mitchell was prouder of the second-generation Camaro. In the same mid-1980s interviews he credited the 1970 car and its Firebird twin, which ran about ten years, to having the right dash-to-axle and cowl height. Wikipedia's list of his landmark designs names the 1970-81 Camaro, not the 1967-69 one.
  • Not everyone at GM accepted the committee-car label. John Schinella, who worked on the first Camaro, told Hagerty the team put its heart and soul into it, and that Bunkie Knudsen regularly came by, liked the direction and thought it cleaner and more shapely than the Mustang.
  • Mitchell's successor shaped both cars' next chapters. Irv Rybicki became GM's design vice president on August 1, 1977, and led the design of the 1982 Camaro and the 1984 Corvette. In retirement Mitchell called the new fourth-generation Corvette bland.
  • Mitchell's Corvette side involved a $1 sale. In 1959 he bought the Corvette SS mule for one dollar after GM shelved its racing program, agreeing to run it as a totally private effort without Chevrolet's support or nomenclature, which is why it carried a new name, Sting Ray.
Sources for these details

VetteFacts: C2 (1963–67)

Larry Shinoda: a two-marque link with an unverified Camaro attribution

Shinoda (1930–1997) is a solid, well-documented link between the Corvette and the Mustang. Under Bill Mitchell in GM's "Studio X," he was central to the 1963 Sting Ray and the Mako Shark concept that shaped the 1968 Corvette. He then followed Bunkie Knudsen to Ford, where his first project was the Boss 302 Mustang; he stripped its chrome. The Corvette Hall of Fame inducted him in 1998.

His Camaro connection doesn't hold up the same way. Secondary accounts tie Shinoda to the RPO ZL2 cowl-induction hood, but no document anyone has produced establishes that design credit. It's on this page because it's so widely repeated, not because it's established, and it stays unresolved.

Shinoda isn't the only person who crossed between the two cars. Bill Mitchell oversaw styling for both. Tom Peters was C6/C7 Corvette design chief and also contributed to the fifth-generation Camaro's revival. John Heinricy, a career Corvette engineer and racer, co-engineered the third-generation Camaro's 1LE and later helped make the Alpha platform viable for the sixth generation. Inside GM the two were never really separate engineering cultures; the same people moved between them for sixty years.

Did you know

  • Shinoda saved the Boss 302 styling prototype from the crusher by buying it for $1. Decades later a Mach 1-bodied Mustang that sat in an Illinois farmer's barn for almost 30 years was matched to it: an order form from September 1968, supplied by Mustang VIN expert Kevin Marti, shows Ford's design center leasing a Mach 1 to "L SHINODA" with the same VIN.
  • Two steering wheels tie that Mustang to a Corvette. The Boss prototype's Momo wheel carries the initials LB and a #1 on one spoke; Shinoda's personal split-window 1963 Sting Ray had a matching wheel marked LC. Hagerty reads them as Larry's Boss and Larry's Corvette, and says Kar Kraft called the Mustang Larry's Boss.
  • The "Boss" name has a second origin story. Hagerty says Ford managers wanted to call the car the SR2, but Shinoda convinced them that boss, then slang for something good, would appeal to youth. Boss may also have tipped a hat to Bunkie Knudsen, the version usually told.
  • At Ford, Shinoda's brief covered all high-performance and show vehicles, not just the Boss 302: the Boss 429, Torino Talladega, Cougar Eliminator, King Cobra, Cyclone Spoiler II and the Mustang and Torino pace cars. The Mustang Club of America inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1995.
  • Shinoda's post-Ford career looped back to Chevrolet's world. His own Livonia, Michigan studio designed racing transporters for Roger Penske and the logo of the National Corvette Museum, and he sold a body kit for the fourth-generation Corvette.
  • The Camaro Research Group's report on 1967-69 hoods credits no designer for the ZL2 cowl-induction hood and counts 10,026 cars ordered with it. The claim that Shinoda began developing the hood in May 1967 traces to forum posts quoting an unnamed article.
Sources for these details

VetteFacts: people

A shared engine: the LT-1 350

The 1970–72 Camaro Z28's LT-1 350 was the same engine family introduced in the 1970 Corvette. In 1970 Chevrolet rated the Camaro's version slightly lower, 360 hp against the Corvette's 370, for exhaust-system reasons despite near-identical hardware. The gap closed after that, with both cars rated 330 hp in 1971 and 255 net hp in 1972.

The paint shop is a smaller but concrete link: the 1968 Camaro took several exterior colors straight from the Corvette catalog, including Corvette Bronze, LeMans Blue and British Green (added that January).

Did you know

  • The LT-1 shared more than a name. Its camshaft (part 3972178) was made in 1970 for the Z/28 and the 1970-72 Corvette as a stopgap between the Duntov and 30-30 cams, and it is regarded as the last factory solid-lifter cam Chevrolet developed.
  • Torque matched too: both 1970 engines were rated 380 lb-ft. The 1971 figure of 330 hp was a gross rating, and in 1972 both engines carried their 255 net hp at 5,600 rpm, with 280 lb-ft at 4,000.
  • Though the LT-1 is remembered as a Corvette option, most went into Camaros. Between 1970 and 1972 Chevrolet built 16,170 Z/28s (8,733, 4,862, 2,575) and 4,977 Corvette LT-1s (1,287, 1,949, 1,741), so about three of every four LT-1 cars wore a Camaro badge.
  • The Z/28's heavy-duty brakes were a Corvette hand-me-down. RPO J56 was a Corvette option first; the 1967 Camaro version, on 205 of the 602 Z/28s, used Pyroceram heat insulators on the caliper pistons. Chevrolet also sold Z/28 calipers machined for Corvette metallic pads and released a blueprint for teams to machine their own.
  • Corvette paint kept turning up on Camaros. Three colors overlapped in 1967 (Tuxedo Black, Ermine White, Marina Blue), five in 1968 and seven in 1969, when Camaro's Hugger Orange was the Corvette's Monaco Orange. In 1968 the three January additions covered 5.7, 9.4 and 6.0 percent of Camaro production.
  • In Chevrolet's own Camaro power-train charts the Z/28's engine isn't called an LT-1. The February 1970 chart lists it as the Turbo-Fire 350 V-8, option RPO Z28, rated 360 hp at 6,000 rpm and 380 lb-ft at 4,000; the 1971 and 1972 charts do the same.
Sources for these details

VetteFacts: C3 (1968–82)

Bunkie Knudsen: in both companies' origin stories

Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen stands at the start of both companies' pony-car stories. As Chevrolet's general manager he reportedly turned down an early Camaro-precursor clay model, before the Mustang revived the project. He was later passed over for the GM presidency, which went to Ed Cole, the same executive who revived the Camaro and offered John DeLorean the Firebird compromise.

In February 1968 Knudsen left GM to become president of Ford Motor Company. There he was directly responsible for the Boss 302 and Boss 429 Mustangs, until he lost an internal power struggle to Lee Iacocca roughly eighteen months later. He said no to an early Camaro, then yes to the Mustangs that answered it.

Did you know

  • TIME's account of Knudsen's firing in September 1969 says he ran Ford practically at plant level, haunting the design center from as early as 7:15 a.m. He ordered a grille change on the 1970 Thunderbird so it resembled a Pontiac. His 1968 pay was $580,952.
  • Knudsen picked the 1971 Mustang. He visited Gale Halderman's studio and chose a design nearly six inches wider than the old car, partly so a 429 would fit between the shock towers. The car debuted August 20, 1970, almost a year after Henry Ford II dismissed him.
  • At Pontiac, Knudsen brought in Pete Estes from Oldsmobile as chief engineer and hired John DeLorean away from Packard as his assistant, with the assignment to create high-performance Pontiacs. The Bonneville and the wide-track Pontiacs came out of that effort.
  • Knudsen was no longer anywhere near the Camaro when he quit GM. He had been an executive vice president since 1965, running GM's overseas, industrial and defense operations, and rumors at the time tied his departure to losing the presidency to Cole.
  • Knudsen's exit had a punchline in Ford circles. He was dismissed September 11, 1969, and Lee Iacocca did not become Ford's president until December 10, 1970. Henry Ford I's line "History is bunk" was turned around to "Bunkie is history."
Sources for these details

MustangFacts: stories