Timing or not, Camaro finally joins ponycar battle
Then there were three.
Ford’s Mustang must have felt isolated when it survived as the only remaining “ponycar†in the once-burgeoning U.S. stable of sporty coupes. It helped when the Dodge Challenger came out, offering an even more striking retro-look to the segment. And all the while, Chevrolet kept showing off preproduction versions of the upcoming Camaro.
Now, eight years after it was first planned, the Camaro is landing in U.S. showrooms and it makes a terrific trio with the Mustang and Challenger to give both aging ponycar fans and younger driving enthusiasts the chance to choose their hot, rear-drive sporty coupe, depending on which marquee they prefer.
As performance fanatics eagerly wait to get their paws on either of the two available V8 SS models, with their fire-snorting 6.2-liter pushrod Corvette engines, real-world customers should abruptly stop at the RS model – loaded with the superbly high-tech 3.6-liter V6 with its overhead camshafts and direct injection.
The V6 is strong and swift and handles superbly, but if you need two sensational reasons to prefer the V6, they are $28,825-$31,040 (the price of the basic V8s, including the Corvette’s Tremec 6-speed manual), and $23,040 (the sticker on the V6 model with its Aisin-designed 6-speed stick). The strong impression made by the V6 on my driving introduction came at my first chance to get behind the wheel of the new Camaro, at a regional introduction at the Abbey Resort in Fontana, Wis.
The resort was a classy cross-section of modern escapism and traditional down-home values – much like the Camaro itself.
The Camaro is the latest of what I prefer to call “future-retro,†because the inspiration is clearly the 1969-70 era ponycars that used to fight it out in Sports Car Club of America, yet after being erased from the scene, their comeback is blessed with high-tech design, safe structural engineering, and updated features.
The question of course is: timing. General Motors is faced with a critical issue of bankruptcy for being caught with outdated technology and a profit-thirsty tendency to make huge trucks and SUVs that were high on profit but low on both technology and fuel-efficiency. When gas hit $4 per gallon, the bottom dropped out of the truck/SUV market, and GM is scrambling for its automotive life to prove it can return to being up-to-date in the marketplace, which is zooming toward a high-tech and fuel-efficient or alternative-fuel future.
So is this the best time to introduce a new muscle-car, even a muscle-car that the dwindling retro-muscle-car folks have been awaiting? Showroom success will tell the tale.
The media raves are rolling in. Motor Trend is running a cover story on its June issue of the Camaro, the Challenger and the Mustang. Surprise! The Camaro won. Of course, Motor Trend chose to use the SS Camaro with its 426 horsepower and 420 foot-pounds of torque, but it chose the Challenger R/T with 376 horsepower rather than the potent SRT8 model that would have matched the Camaro output, and it chose the GT version of the Mustang with 315 horses, rather than the Shelby model which also is Ford’s high-powered specialist.
But enough about comparisons. Driving the Camaro is a pleasant, fulfilling experience. It holds curvy roads with smooth agility, especially for a 3,859-pound car. In fact, the Challenger, which is on the larger Charger platform, and the Mustang also are relatively heavy, when import competitors have gone the way of lighter weight for better fuel economy.
The two models of the Camaro are actually three. Starting at the top, there are two 6.20liter V8 engines, both under the SS badge. The L99 engine comes with a 6-speed automatic and has a cylinder deactivation that can drop it from 8 to 4 cylinders when cruising. It has 400 horsepower at 5,900 RPMs and 410 foot-pounds of torque, peaking at 4,600 RPMs, against a 6,200 RPM red line.
The bad boy is the SS with the stick, because it is the LS-3 V8 and the Tremec 6-speed – both directly out of the Corvette bin. It has 426 horsepower at 4,900 RPMs, and 420 foot-pounds of torque at 4,600 revs, off a 6,600 red line. Surprisingly, the statistics show only a slight edge to the hot one, with a 12.9-second time in the quarter mile against the automatic’s 13.2, while both have 4.7-second runs from 0-60.
Driving both of those cars was fun. The automatic has improved paddle shifters, with the left paddle downshifting and the right device upshifting, compared to other GM cars that allowed both switches to go one way up and the opposite way for downshifting. Chevy is calling it “Tap-shift,†and it works well. The automatic has a high-performance algorithm, with a sport mode that matches revs on downshifts and holds revs to keep the torque smooth in cornering.
The stick, though, makes you feel as though you have been flashed back to one of those hot 1969 Camaros, only with vastly improved tires, wheels, brakes, steering, suspension and body stiffness. The brakes are massive Brembo discs, with the FE-3 high-performance suspension.
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Both cars manage that delicate balance between precise steering-handling around corners, and no noticeable harshness in skimming over road irregularities. That’s another change from 1970, and the three decades after that, when you had a choice of good-handling firmness accompanied by teeth-rattling harshness, or compliant comfort on bumpy roads accompanied by near-rollover squishiness in cornering. Chevy designers did lapse on one count, offering a tiny horizontal hood scoop on the SS. True, it does distinguish the SS from the RS, but, believe it or not, it is phony.
Later, however, I climbed aboard the RS, which offers the same look except for the little badge on the grille. This one is armed with GM’s 3.6-liter V6, a dual-overhead-camshaft gem that came out to power Cadillacs and later other front-wheel-drive crossover SUVs, and trickling down to the Aura and Malibu. The first refinement of the engine is to add variable valve-timing and direct injection, which meters dosages of air-fuel mixture into each cylinder’s combustion chamber that are precisely measured for pressure and combustible temperature. My first experience with that engine was to be impressed more with the added power than with the decreased fuel economy.
In the Camaro RS, that direct-injection V6 is hooked up to rear-wheel drive. Instead of the Corvette and Cadillac CTS-V Tremec 6-speed, the RS gets a different 6-speed stick, this one built by Aisin, a Japanese company that has worked to build some buttery-smooth stick shifts for Mazda, among others. The red line on the V6 is 7,000 RPMs, which easily accomodates the 304 horsepower peak at 6,400 and the 273 foot-pounds of torque, peaking at 5,200.
The V6 runs 0-60 in 6.1 seconds, giving up just over a second to the V8s, which it swaps for improvement of three or four miles per gallon. The V6 RS boasts of EPA fuel economy estimates of 18 city/29 highway with the automatic, or 17 city/29 highway. On our road test around the curvy Wisconsin rural roads was 18.2 miles per gallon on the car’s computer.
Perhaps the best compliment to the new Camaro is that if buyers didn’t know the screaming V8 SS models with their launch-control drag-racing tricks were out there, they would be more than thrilled by the performance of the RS V6 and the improved agility of the lighter RS.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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