Story by Benjamin Hunting. Photos by Oskar Bakke and Fabian Wester.
I've always been a muscle car guy, but never a Camaro guy. I think at some point in our lives, gearheads into the golden generation of high performance American iron shift themselves into one of three camps: Ford, Chevy, or Mopar, with the remainder scattered to the winds of Oldsmobile, Buick, AMC, and Pontiac. For me, it was Mopar, with images of Chargers, 'Cudas, and Super Bees dancing in my head through my teenage years until it became abundantly clear by the time I got my driver's license that the age of affordable barn finds and 60-point drivers for $3,500 were long since gone.
There was also the element of adventure, or should I say, morbid curiosity: would a team relying on 38-year-old metal be able to make it 5,000 miles across two continents?
When I got the call from the team at AsianDate.com and AnastasiaDate.com to drive their pair of 1969 Chevrolet Camaros from Stockholm, Sweden, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in this year's Gumball 3000 Rally, I was nevertheless intrigued. The prospect of piloting a muscle machine through the narrow streets of some of Europe's most beautiful capital cities was too appealing to ignore. There was also the element of adventure, or should I say, morbid curiosity: would a team relying on 38-year-old metal be able to make it 5,000 miles across two continents?
The answer to that question turned out to be more complicated than I would have thought.
A Runner, And A Racer
Filling out the paperwork to get insured on each Camaro prior to the event revealed that I wasn't the only one who had contemplated the severity of what we were asking our vintage rides to accomplish. “These cars are old, powerful, and quite hard to drive,” was the exact phrasing from our Swedish support team, Ryska Posten, followed by a reminder that a “good (but legal) pace” was required at all times while behind the wheel.
A phone call with an executive from the team's sponsor – and major Camaro enthusiast – Anthony Volpe, further defined the lay of the land. It seems that both cars had been assembled as Z/28 clones with full aero specifically for the Gumball 3000, but using vastly different design philosophies. The red Camaro featured a modern four-wheel disc-brake setup matched with an updated suspension, especially up front, along with a 420-hp, 383 cubic inch small block Chevy V8 under the hood backed up by a five-speed manual transmission.
The yellow car, on the other hand, was bone stock everywhere but the engine bay, where a 540-hp Sprint car 383 c.i. V8 resided. This created an unusual situation: the quickest, most powerful member of our team also had the worst stoppers (with the original drums at the rear), vague manual steering, and a four-speed Muncie gearbox that ensured ultra-high revs at Autobahn speeds. It's almost like a rival had snuck into the shop in the middle of the night and secretly swapped engines in an attempt to send the occupants of the yellow '69 to an early grave. I guess it's slightly less nefarious than snipping brake lines – but not much.
Personality Goes A Long Way - But Not All The Way
I was scheduled to spend my first shift of the rally driving the red Camaro alongside Steve Elstins, the man who had bravely assembled (and then kept alive like some kind of high-octane Dr. Frankenstein) both of the coupes. We pulled out of Oresbro castle amongst a throng of Gumball fans, proving once and for all that the Swedish link to American pop culture extends far beyond Abba. I might as well have been a rock star rattling down the cobblestone streets on my way to the highway, what with the attention being heaped on the Camaro by the four-deep pack of well-wishers that lined the road.
I certainly sounded like one; each of the Camaros had been outfitted with cutouts that dumped just behind the doors, activated by a simple switch under the dash. The sound was uproarious, intoxicating, and punctuated at random intervals by the rising and falling of the Chevrolet's lumpy cam. I asked Steve if he minded running them wide open for the duration of the drive, and he was more than happy to don the radio headsets we had been provided with so that we could, you know, actually have a conversation inside the vehicle.
After the first 10 clicks spent acclimating myself to the long-travel clutch and the limited adjustability of the seats, I realized that the red Camaro was actually a pussycat to drive. The one foible that I could detect was an enormous turning radius (the result of aftermarket control arms up front) that made negotiating narrow European streets somewhat of a sideshow. Other than that, I had no complaints: throttle response was excellent, allowing me to zip ahead in a blast of dynamite cap-level noise and glorious expended hydrocarbons, the brakes were reasonable, and the ride no more choppy than a lowered car of more recent vintage.
Despite its modernized bones and easygoing personality, the one thing the red car didn't have going for it was reliability. The trouble started with a fuel stop gone wrong, where 14 litres rather than 14 gallons of high-test were loaded into its tank by support staff, stalling me in my tracks halfway to Oslo. Next up was the spectacular explosion of the engine's distributor cap, which I witnessed from one of the chase vehicles following immediately behind the Camaro as we entered the city limits of the Norwegian capital. Jets of flame and three sonic booms signalled the end of that leg for the bright red ride.
A network of Scandinavian drag racers had the MSD ignition parts replaced by 4 AM, allowing the Chevrolet to line up on the starting grid the next morning, but two days later its flair for the dramatic revealed itself once again as it puked its guts all over the side of the Autobahn, staining the meticulously maintained high-speed motorway with coolant, oil, and what was left of its pride. Game over for the red Camaro, which was loaded on the plane from Amsterdam to Reno by a wrecker, never to move again under its own power.
Pick Up The Pace, Bumblebee
My stint in the yellow Camaro – that harbinger of doom whose race-built engine had survived the constant 240-km pace of Germany's superhighways with aplomb where the red car's street mill had failed – was to take place through California's Death Valley. One of the lowest points on Earth, the stretch of desert that I was scheduled to guide the Chevrolet through regularly saw temperatures that would cook an egg right in your hand, with no need to crack open the shell. In fact, as we departed Stovepipe Wells, our last stop before the finish line in Vegas, the temperature reading in our support van showed 45.5 degrees Celsius. Did I mention that in addition to lacking power brakes, the yellow coupe also failed to offer anything that resembled air conditioning?
Again, at my side was the venerable, although by now exhausted Mr. Elstins, who counselled me to plan my stop as far ahead as I could and avoid over-revving the engine. I kept my eyes on the flat plain that lay before us, one that gradually rose out of the valley on its way towards Sin City; he kept his gaze fixed steadily on the temperature gauge, which began to creep up slowly but surely during an ill-advised creep at 35-mph intended to irritate the local constabulary. Plugs near fowling, the yellow car was given a rest when both myself and the replacement Camaro ahead of us, piloted by Mr. Volpe, was pulled over for “driving too slowly,” no doubt setting a dubious record amongst Gumball participants.
Although not as precise as the red Camaro (rest in peace), the yellow Z/28's more authentic muscle car experience still put a smile on my face. Pitch and roll were evident when cornering through Death Valley's passes, and emergency stops would have been out of the question with the hardware outfitted at each of the car's four corners, but the Sprint-car V8 was more than happy to pull long and hard from down low, and I honestly enjoyed the tiller-esque feel of the Camaro's big wooden steering wheel. This was no resto-rod - this was the real deal – and the honesty and authenticity of the Chevy's demeanour kept a smile plastered on my face well past the Rally's finish line.
Time Machines Over Dream Machines
I learned some important lessons driving these two 1969 Chevrolet Camaros in the Gumball 3000. First, never assume that someone understands the difference between metric system and the imperial system at a fuel stop. Second, when you park a classic muscle car beside a McLaren P1, no one is looking at the Brit. Every time our team rolled into a gas station or a checkpoint we were instant heroes, with the Camaros cutting through the multimillion dollar noise surrounding the Rally to an astonishing degree.
Third, and finally, you're never too old to switch allegiances. Yeah, maybe I'll always be a Mopar guy in my heart, but after spending so much time within a Camaro's metal womb, I would be lying if I said I hadn't carved out a tiny, Z/28-sized parking spot in my dream garage. Call it Stockholm Syndrome.
For more about Ben’s extraordinary adventure and the rolling circus that is the Gumball 3000 Rally, see our full event story over in News & Features.
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