2 Trans-Am Icons Found Stashed in the Same Barn: 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 & 1970 Plymouth AAR ’Cuda

A trip to inspect a Hemi Road Runner turned into one of the great modern barn-find stories when a stray line in a classified ad — “what’s an X33 Camaro?” — sent two Pennsylvania restorers three and a half hours out of their way. What they found waiting together in that barn were two of the rarest Trans-Am homologation specials Detroit ever built, both hiding in plain sight for decades.

“You find a good car, you cannot sit,†Matt Barczak says. Just 35 years old, Matt feels he was born 30 years too late. “I love, professionally restore, and collect muscle cars. I work with Frank Arone, owner of Arone Restorations in Homer City, Pennsylvania.â€

Matt was driving to Pittsburgh with his father and Frank to look at a 7,000-mile, original paint, 1969 Hemi Road Runner, an old race car with no motor or transmission. “My dad was in the back seat reading the local trader paper. He said to me, ‘Hey Matt, what’s an X33 Camaro?’â€

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Matt almost swerved off the road. “X33†on the trim tag of a 1969 Camaro denotes the Z/28 option. He stopped and called the number in the ad. It was winter, January 2016, about 6 o’clock in the evening. Matt told the seller, “I am 3 1/2 hours away. I can be at your house by 10 o’clock.â€

Full article: https://goo.gl/LkF8eQ

“You find a good car, you cannot sit,” Matt Barczak says, and he’s not exaggerating — the discovery that follows happened because his own father couldn’t stop reading a local trader paper out loud in the back seat of a truck. Matt was 35, professionally restoring and collecting muscle cars alongside Frank Arone of Arone Restorations in Homer City, Pennsylvania, when a routine drive to look at one barn find turned into something nobody in that truck expected. A single three-character code scrawled on a classified ad was about to send them 3.5 hours in the wrong direction, in January, at 6 o’clock at night. What they found waiting in that barn wasn’t one forgotten Trans-Am homologation car. It was two.

When a Trim Tag Code Changes Everything

The trip started as a mission to inspect a 7,000-mile, original-paint 1969 Hemi Road Runner. Matt’s father, killing time in the back seat with the local trader paper, read off a line that nearly put the truck in a ditch: “Hey Matt, what’s an X33 Camaro?” On a 1969 Camaro trim tag, X33 is the factory code for the Z/28 option — the code Chevrolet stamped on exactly 20,302 cars built that year to satisfy SCCA Trans-Am homologation rules, wearing the small-block DZ 302 that Chevrolet engineers built specifically to skirt the series’ 5.0-liter displacement cap by pairing a 4.00-inch bore with a 3.00-inch stroke. Matt called the seller that same night and told him flatly: “I am 3 1/2 hours away. I can be at your house by 10 o’clock.”

Two Trans-Am Legends, One Dusty Barn

What waited in that Pennsylvania barn wasn’t just the Z/28. Parked beside it was a 1970 Plymouth AAR ‘Cuda, Plymouth’s own one-year-only Trans-Am homologation special, built to satisfy the SCCA’s 2,500-unit minimum with a run of just 2,724 cars completed in a five-week window between March and April of 1970. The AAR ran a 340 Six Pack — three Holley two-barrels feeding a 340-cube small-block rated at 290 factory horsepower — wearing a functional fiberglass hood scoop and the model’s signature side-exit exhaust, features no other Barracuda variant carried. Finding either of these cars stashed away and forgotten would be a story. Finding both under the same roof, discovered because of six characters on a trim tag, is the kind of barn find every restorer dreams about and almost none of them get.

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