Veteran and Vintage Chevrolet
Automobile Association of Australia

South Australian Branch

Each month the club endeavours to feature a members vehicle. We want to see your car here, so put pen to paper and submit to the editor. All articles received with open arms. The editor is always pleading for more feature articles, so how about helping him out and putting pen to paper. Please note this is not a Chev (we're not totally biased) - but the Ed desperately wantsneeds  your article.

Smile, you are in a Camaro

This beauty could be the Chevy that saves GM. :- JAY LENO

Need to know

CHEVROLET CAMARO SS

VEHICLE, Performance coupe

ENGINE, 6.2-litre V8 OUTPUTS: 318kw at 5000rpm and 553Nm at 4600rpm

TRANSMISSION: Six-speed manual, rear-wheel drive

PRICE: $US3I,795 ($135000 as Performax conversion)

ON SALE: Now

I RECENTLY put up a report about the new Chevrolet Camaro on jaylenosgarage.com and with in a few days I had 61,000 hits for the car. A few weeks earlier we showed a video of a Type 37A Bugatti and that got 10,000 hits.

Now, to my way of thinking, the Rugatti is a way more exciting car than a Camaro, but not to the average American. Seeing this new version of the car is akin to seeing an old friend after a long time.

Ford’s Mustang and Chevy’s Camaro have been battling it out since the I960s, and with the Camaro out of the picture for the past eight years there have been guys champing at the bit. This is a real loyalty, Guys have Camaro jackets and hats. It’s rock star idolatry.

I have a last-generation Pontiac Firebird, which is pretty much the same as the Camaro. It’s a nice enough car but was made with a lot of compromises. You can see the hump on the floor of the passenger side to fit the catalytic converter. It was an old platform they kept updating until they ran out of steam in 2002.

The latest Camaro is a new car from the ground up. It’s closer to a four-seater Corvette than anything else. It feels very European, When fitted with Brembo brakes and performance springs and shocks, it rides and handles more like a German or British car. The Camaro doesn’t flex or creak. Much like the Dodge Challenger, it’s the classic American road car that finally stops and handles. Of all the recent muscle cars, the one that impressed me most was the Challenger because I wasn’t expecting a lot. 1 thought it would just be a typical American sedan in a shorter body; but no, it’s a real road car. The Challenger was designed while Mercedes-Benz was involved with Chrysler, so it has a proper handling ability. It’s a big, wide, fast car and it makes me smile when I drive it.

Like the Challenger, the Camaro’s styling is uniquely American. You like that or you don’t I happen to like it. There’s not one panel that resembles the original Camaro, but it’s still identifiable as a Camaro.

I belong to a generation that remembers the days when things were styled by hand, so there was a lot more curve and a lot more art. With computers, everything can be surfaced and knife-edged. And styling is hard. It’s rare to see a beautiful car any more.

I like the styling of this, It’s aggressive and you have a really high beltline, which seems to be in favour at the moment To me, the greatest car was the Triumph TR3:  you could drag your knuckles on the ground while driving it But those days are gone forever, for safety reasons. That’s OK, though. I think General Motors has done a terrific job.

Of course it all comes down to the price. It seems like incredible value for money to me: $US30,000 ($33,000) seems to be the breaking point in the US: anything more expensive is a strain for most people. Anything cheaper is obtainable. And for a car that is as well made and structurally sound as this, that’s an impressive price.

GM had 14,000 confirmed orders the first day the Camaro was announced, I think that’s up to 40,000 now. So I think it’ll be the car that saves GM, at least for the time being.

People joke about GM having a new boss, Barack Obama, but I don’t know how much of a car guy he is. Everyone talks about hybrids and green cars but this is like trying to sell women sensible shoes. Buying a car is an irrational act that you try to do rationally, or perhaps it’s the other way around. But there’s a lot of emotion involved in it.

The Camaro makes you smile, The GM guys say some of the government people overseeing GM were worried. Then they came to have a look, saw the Camaro and went crazy, The GM guys thought they were going to look at the hybrids and the battery stuff, but no, they wanted to look at the Camaro. So car guys are car guys.

This is a car that people want. And I think it will do very well.

People buy what stirs them emotionally. And I think what happens now is that people go: ‘Uh-oh, everything’s going to be hybrid in a couple of years so I better get my dream car while l can.”

Plus a lot of people just buy what they want. The green movement is a lot like pornography, only in reverse, if you see what I mean. Everyone’s against pornography but somehow it became it a $US60 billion business. Like wise, a lot of people pretend to be interested in green stuff when they’re not.

The top-end models have a V8 engine, but I think the hot Camaro in the US will be the V6. Some people like the front end of the V6 a little better; they think its a little cleaner, The V6 has 304bhp, which is just about what the fire- breathing last version of the V8 Camaro had when it went out in 2002. So I think there’s some progress there.

If people want a hot set-up they will buy the V6 and put twin turbos or some kind of supercharger on it and have a car that is lighter and more fuel-efficient but with the power of a V8.

The halo car will be the 318kW V8 SS (which comes in two trims) but the V6 will be the car that people buy for lower insurance rates, a little lighter steering, a little lighter overall.

I drove the SS. It’s a beast. Stir the Camaro and it flies. But it also feels lazy over long distances, and that’s a good thing. Take it up to 80mph (about I30kmph) and you look at the rev counter and you’re barely turning 2000rpm. If you want more oomph, that’s easy enough to fix. I got one of the first Dodge Vipers and the first thing I did was put 373 rear-end gearing in it. Oh my god, it was like I’d put a supercharger in it. It picked up another 1.5 seconds in the quarter- mile. It was amazing what it did. And you can do that with these cars. That won’t be a problem.

One of my pet peeves with car magazines is when they bring in someone who’s a car expert— a former Indy driver or Le Mans winner, say — to test a car and they pick holes over tenths of seconds. Most people can’t even crank out the 0-60 time because they’re not professional racers and they don’t want to wreck their car.

- In real-world driving, it’s a nice- handling driver’s car. If you go about 10-15mph over the speed limit — that’s considered moving along pretty good — I thought it handled terrifically.

I’m not a race-car driver, just a guy who likes a car that can communicate well through the steering and gearbox and goes up and down nicely through the gears. So, to me the Camaro is great fun. Whether it can handle the Nurburgring I have no idea. But if you enjoy being by yourself and having fun, it’s a great car to drive.

I liked the Camaro. In the US it’s the same price as a 3 Series BMW except with this you get 318kW and a six-speed auto or manual transmission. To get that in a European car you’re looking at $USl00,000. In this market, I know what I’d go for.

J Leno is a US talk-show host and car collector