Dealer-tuners
Chicago's 427 shop that beat Yenko to it
Nickey Chevrolet was stuffing big-blocks into Camaros before the ink dried on COPO — and the name is still on shop doors sixty years later.
Yenko usually gets the headline, but Nickey Chevrolet may have gotten there first. Founded in 1925 by brothers E.J. and Jack Stephani, the Chicago dealership grew into one of the country's biggest high-performance parts operations, and — working with Bill Thomas Race Cars for engineering help — is credited with building the very first 427-powered '67 Camaro, offered in graduated Stage I, II, and III states of tune, years before most other dealer-tuners had caught up.
Nickey's real business wasn't the showroom floor; it was the mail-order counter. By the late 1960s the dealership's parts department was reportedly answering fifty catalog and mail-order letters a day from hot-rodders who'd never set foot in Illinois — a genuinely national performance brand running out of a single Chicago storefront, decades before the internet made that normal.
Nickey closed in 1973, a casualty of the same insurance-and-emissions climate that killed off most of the dealer-tuner era. But the name never really died: it was revived as Nickey Performance around the 2010 fifth-generation Camaro launch, still using the original Stage I/II/III naming on modern builds. The blue '67 SS pictured here — hood up over a big-block, “nickey camaro” script on the fender — was photographed at a 2026 car show, a reminder that the shop's identity is still being built on, not just remembered.