The Answer to Ford's Innovative Mustang, the 1967-1969 Chevrolet Camaro

With the automotive world understandably giddy over the Chevy reintroducing the Camaro to the Bow Tie lineup, it seems like a good time to revisit the car that inspired it -- the first-gen F-body design, introduced for 1967. Take a look:

WHAT'S GOOD
Clean Bill-Mitchell-era styling that still looks sweet, generous room for big-block V8s, practically unlimited aftermarket support.

WHAT'S BAD
Same dollar-store equipment that plagues most late-'60s muscle cars -- thin plastic interiors, crude live-axle rear suspension, weak brakes.

BEST REGULAR-PRODUCTION VERSIONS
Super Sport with optional 396-ci big-block V8, or Z-28

RARE STUFF
Indy 500 Pace Car editions, '67 Z-28, and special-order '69 ZL1 "COPO" version with 427-ci aluminum big-block V8.

ORIGINS

Kicked by the horse
Yep -- history always seems to repeat. Just as today's Camaro concept is an answer to a wildly successful Ford Mustang, so it was during the first Camaro's development.

Okay, granted Chevy was already thinking of doing its own sporty coupe when Ford was cooking up the Mustang. But it took 120,000 or so Mustangs to be sold in just four months to actually push the Bow-Tie guys into action. (At first they honestly thought their quirky rear-engine Corvair might do the trick -- ha ha!)

Having had their collective rear-end handed to them by Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca's Mustang, Chevy in August 1964 initiated a crash program to build a sporty 2+2 that was more conventional than the Corvair, one which could accept a wide array of different engines and options. To save money, General Motors' bean counters decreed that Chevy's new pony car had to share most of its major components with the redesigned Chevy II (Nova) compact that would debut for '68.

Plow-horse genes, thoroughbred offspring
The resulting Camaro was a trim, sporty design, built on a platform that was sort of a unibody hybrid -- unit construction from the firewall back, with a hefty bolt-on subframe carrying the engine and front suspension.