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If you're Jeremy Clarkson or anyone involved with one of the Cannonball Run movies, driving a car into a swimming pool is hilarious. If you're not, it really isn't.
Anyone looking to go for a swim at a certain Harris County, Texas, community pool was--to say the least--inconvenienced when a brand-new 2014 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 was driven into it. This moment of schadenfreude is brought to you by txGarage.
We're in a Barber Motorsports Park garage in Birmingham, Ala., on a brisk morning with pro race-car driver Andy Pilgrim -- along with the Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 and Porsche 911 GT3, the latest, road course-focused street cars for 2014. Cadillac Racing pays Pilgrim to pilot a CTS-V coupe in the Pirelli World Challenge series, but today he is our hired gun to give us top-level feedback around the challenging 2.38-mile circuit.
Pilgrim's résumé boasts wins at the 12 Hours of Sebring, Petit Le Mans and the Rolex 24 at Daytona, in addition to numerous Le Mans podium finishes. And while he has bagged five professional sports-car championships, it's his articulate, detailed feedback about a car's behavior at the limit that's more valuable to us on this day.
Before 1970, General Motors had an edict that restricted cubic inches depending on the bodystyle. Chevrolet’s compact (Chevy II/Nova), mid-size (Chevelle), and pony car (Camaro) could not have anything larger than a 396, while full-size cars and the Corvette could get the 427. Meanwhile, across town at Chrysler and Ford, they were running amuck with 7-Liter monsters like the 426 Hemi and Boss 429.
Knowing that credibility was built on the street as much as on the racetrack (which, by the way, was never sanctioned by General Motors due to a racing ban that began in 1963), the folks at Chevrolet created a way to build a few Chevelles and Camaros with 427s. Instead of offering them as Regular Production Orders (RPO), they were built through the Central Office Production Order (COPO) channel. This channel was normally used for fleet orders like for the phone company, so they were equipped to handle things that were not quite regular production. A little over 300 COPO Chevelles and an estimated 1,000 COPO Camaros were built with the L72 427, which was rated at 425 horsepower.
The 2014 Camaro Z/28 is a lot more than a big engine in a Camaro—it’s a repurposed performance machine with numerous tweaks to call its own. This “Camaro Z06″ (if you will) has a number of aerodynamic mods that help make the it such a stellar vehicle on the track, so Car and Driver interviewed Program Engineering Manager Mark Stielow to discuss how the Z/28′s aerodynamics improve the breed and how it compares with another Camaro with track aspirations, the 1LE.
By Manoli Katakis - Jan 18, 2014 The Achilles Freedom Team of Wounded Veterans must be smiling big right now. Mostly because they received all of the $700,000 proceeds from the first production COPO Chevrolet Camaro for the 2014 model year that was just sold at the Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale, Arizona.
An all-new Chevrolet Camaro is due out next year as a 2016 model, and it is expected to ditch its aging Zeta platform for a newer, lighter one that underpins the Cadillac CTS and ATS. Just don't expect the exterior to change all that much. Below is the current 2014 model.
A new report in Edmunds says the 2016 Camaro will hardly sport the radical redesign that its chief competitor the 2015 Ford Mustang received. Instead, will sport an exterior design that is "evolutionary, not revolutionary," according to an industry source who has seen the new Camaro.
Chevrolet Performance, the high-performance parts division of Chevrolet, has announced that it will increase its contingency payouts to those who race in NHRA-sanctioned events using Chevrolet Performance parts while displaying the brand’s decals.
Says Jim Campbell, General Motors U.S. Vice President of Performance Vehicles and Motorsports, “Chevrolet has a long history of supporting NHRA drag racers and our 2014 contingency program rewards sportsman and Pro Stock racers for top performances. When you race with Chevrolet Performance parts and display our decals, you are eligible for a contingency payout that can be reinvested in your race team.”
