Long reads on the people and decisions behind the numbers.
Origins
GM said no before the Mustang made it say yes.
Bunkie Knudsen had earlier seen an early Chevy II-based sporty-car clay and turned it down: “the one thing we don't need right now is another car.” GM was cautious about proliferating models beyond what it thought the market could absorb.
Read the storyThe name
A disputed French-slang story, a 14-city press conference, and a line that stuck.
Chevrolet announced the name at a press conference at Detroit's Statler-Hilton Hotel on June 28, 1966. It was notable at the time for connecting journalists in 14 cities simultaneously by phone line, which Chevrolet later described as a first-of-its-kind teleconference. Pete Estes opened by joking that everyone in the room was a charter member of the “Society for the Elimination of Panthers from the Automotive World” (SEPAW), and that this would be SEPAW's first and last meeting. Then he announced it: Camaro.
Read the storyGM engineering
The same people, and the same engines, moved between them for sixty years.
The Camaro was built to fight the Mustang, but its closest relationship was always with another Chevrolet. For six decades the same designers, engineers, racers and engines moved back and forth between the Camaro and the Corvette, and the traffic ran both ways.
Read the storyDealer-tuners
A small-town Pennsylvania Chevy dealer talked the factory into building his cars for him, and a prototype from that deal just became the most expensive Camaro ever sold.
Don Yenko wasn't a random hot-rodder with a parts catalog. He won SCCA national championships in B Production in 1962 and 1963 and raced Corvettes at Sebring and Daytona. Born in 1927 in Bentleyville, Pennsylvania, he ran the performance side of the family's Yenko Chevrolet dealership in Canonsburg, and he already knew exactly what a car needed to win.
Read the storyDealer-tuners
A Chicago dealer with a backwards K on its sign sold 427 Camaros the factory wouldn't build, and the name is still on shop doors sixty years later.
Yenko usually gets the headline, but Nickey Chevrolet may have gotten there first. The Chicago dealership was putting Corvette 427s into brand-new Camaros within months of the car's September 1966 introduction, about two years before Chevrolet agreed to build 427 Camaros itself through the COPO system.
Read the storyDealer-tuners
Berger Chevrolet ordered about fifty COPO 427s in 1969, and it is still building performance Camaros a century after the family business began in 1925.
Most of the great Camaro dealer-tuner stories end somewhere in the 1970s or '80s. The shop closes, the name goes quiet, and maybe someone revives it decades later as a nostalgia act. Berger Chevrolet in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just kept going. The same family has run it for five generations, through the COPO years, the Berger SS and the modern COPO race cars.
Read the storyRare & unverified
Chevrolet never offered a Z/28 convertible in 1968. It built one anyway, for the man it needed to convince.
Every catalog record of the 1968 Camaro agrees on one thing: the Z/28 package came on the hardtop Sport Coupe only. Chevrolet built 7,199 of them that year, most in the last third of the model year, and every one of them required the aluminum-case Muncie four-speed and power front disc brakes. There was one exception, and unlike most Camaro legends it left a paper trail. It started life as a sales pitch.
Read the storyWhat's next
GM is reported to have approved a successor. It has never said so publicly, and that gap is the story.
General Motors has not announced a next-generation Camaro. As of September 2026 there is no official statement, no image and no published specification. What there is instead is a steady and increasingly detailed run of reporting.
Read the storyHomologation
A builder’s later recollection, period racing categories and the Camaro’s separate Trans-Am program.
In 1963 Bill Thomas was building a car to beat the Cobra. The Cheetah came out of a small shop in Anaheim, California, and it had a quiet friend inside General Motors: Vince Piggins, the Chevrolet performance man who would rise to head of product performance, was covertly supporting the project. Chevrolet had officially withdrawn from racing. Piggins spent the next decade finding ways for it to race anyway.
Read the storyDealer-tuners
When GM quit racing, one man became the brand's unofficial presence, and built the cars the dealers put their names on.
The dealer-tuner Camaros are filed under the dealerships. Yenko. Nickey. Dana. Baldwin-Motion. Those are the names on the badges, in the auction catalogs, on the fender stripes.
Read the storyDesign
Two GM styling vice-presidents later called the Camaro a compromise. One of them said he couldn't remember what it looked like.
The Camaro was designed under project XP-836 in Chevrolet Studio 2 at the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, before it had a name; internally it was just the F Car. Nearly sixty years later it is one of the most admired shapes in American car design, which is not how two of the men who signed it off remembered it.
Read the story1972
A 174-day strike shut the only Camaro plant. A retrospective reprinted in GM's archive says about 1,100 unfinished cars were scrapped over the cost of meeting the next model year's requirements, and production hit its lowest figure for eighteen years.
On April 7, 1972, the UAW struck GM's Norwood, Ohio assembly plant, stopping Camaro and Firebird production. A report dated October 10 in The Militant's October 20 issue described a 174-day strike and a settlement negotiated in Detroit on September 27. Settlement did not mean the whole workforce immediately returned.
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