Happy Thursday WebRiders, Big_Blocker here for another installment of Muscle Car of the Week. Sorry about the absence of last week’s post, however as it was Thanksgiving, I was stuffing my face with turkey rather than stuffing your faces with muscle car history. As I was looking over the previous installments I discovered I may have been holding something back unintentionally, yes, I have yet to post about any sort of Camaro. I am determined to fix this mistake and so this week we will look at the very first, 1967 Chevrolet Camaro SS.

As many of you know, by 1967 the muscle car wars were heating up in a big way and the Big Three were constantly combating each other for a bigger piece of the youth market pie. Ford had already cut out a monstrous piece of that pie two years earlier with the 1964 Mustang and GM had been playing catch-up ever since. Chevrolet designers were on a mission to create a pony car that would not only compete with the Mustang, but also be able to out-perform that meager 289 by adding some serious horsepower options.

The designers chose the new Nova unibody platform and added all new sheetmetal to give the first gen Camaro that sexy look. In order to help sales, the Camaro was offered with several performance and appearance packages that could be checked off on the dealer order sheet. One of which was the Rally Sport package that was designated RS and featured a blacked out grill with hidden headlights similar to the 1968 Dodge Charger. The big performance package however was the Super Sport or SS package that was also found on many other Chevrolet models at the time including the El Camino, Impala and Nova. The SS package for the Camaro offered a variety of big-horse V8 engines ranging from a 295 horsepower 350 to a fire breathing 375 horsepower 396 powerplant. The 415 pound feet of torque in the 375 horsepower version was key in launching the car from zero to sixty in just under 6 seconds and helped it achieve a 1/4 mile time in the mid to low 14’s.

A possibility for some Camaro buyers was a hybrid of the RS and SS package that allowed for the badging and aesthetics of the RS package with the horsepower of the SS package. So popular was this RS/SS option that a convertible Camaro RS/SS (like the one pictured above) was chosen as the pace car for the 1967 Indianapolis 500. In fact, there were a limited number of Indy 500 pace cars produced by Chevrolet and sold to the general public that are well documented by enthusiasts and worth a ridiculous amount of money. Some of these cars were offered with 350’s and some with either a 325 hp or 375 hp 396 motor. The move was a brilliant one overall because as soon as consumers saw the hot new Camaro leading one of the most famous races of all time they flocked to Chevrolet dealers and bought them up. All in all about 34,000 SS models were sold in 1967 with RS models racking up 65,000 cars sold.

Hope you all enjoyed a look at the Chevrolet pony car that had some serious kick to it. Big_Blocker out.