A Teenager Sold His Camaro Z/28 for $2,500 — Nearly 40 Years Later He Paid 60 Times That to Buy It Back

A Maryland teenager lost his license street racing a 1969 Camaro Z/28, then sold it to keep his girlfriend happy. Decades later, now a self-made millionaire, Glenn Stearns tracked the exact car down at auction and paid a small fortune to drive it off the lot one more time.

A 16-year-old kid in Maryland got so wrapped up street racing his brand-new 1969 Camaro Z/28 that the state took his driver’s license away. Not long after, his girlfriend convinced him the car had to go, and he sold it for $2,500 — a price that looked reasonable in 1969 and looks almost comical today. He spent the next several decades wondering what happened to it. Then, by pure chance at an auction, Glenn Stearns found the exact same car. By then he wasn’t a teenager anymore — he was a self-made mortgage-industry millionaire, a reality-TV star, and a bestselling author. He paid roughly 60 times what he’d sold it for just to drive it home again.

The Car That Cost a Teenager His License

Stearns’ story unfolded on a recent episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, where Leno took the restored Z/28 out for a drive with its original owner riding shotgun. According to the episode and Chevrolet enthusiast outlets covering the reunion, Stearns bought the Camaro as a teenager and immediately started racing it on public roads. The citations piled up fast enough that Maryland pulled his license before he’d even had the car long. His girlfriend at the time pushed him to let it go, and he sold the Z/28 for $2,500 — not a bad number for a used muscle car in that era, but nowhere close to what the same car would be worth once collectors caught on to what the Z/28 badge actually meant.

It’s a familiar shape for a first-car story: a kid gets a fast car before he’s ready for it, the car causes trouble, and an outside voice — a parent, a girlfriend, an insurance bill — forces a decision that feels reasonable in the moment and painful for the rest of a lifetime. What makes Stearns’ version different is what came next. He didn’t just move on and tell the story at parties for forty years. He went looking.

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First-car regret is common enough that it has become its own genre of car-forum thread, but most of those stories end with a shrug and a search that never goes anywhere. Decades pass, memories fade, VIN numbers get lost, and the car itself usually gets parted out, crashed, or repainted into something unrecognizable long before anyone goes looking. Stearns had the resources to actually follow through on the search once he had them, and the patience to keep at it for the better part of 40 years. That combination — means and persistence — is rarer than the car itself.

Stearns went on to build an improbable career far from anything connected to cars. He founded the mortgage lender Stearns Lending with no prior experience in the industry, later started Kind Lending, wrote the Wall Street Journal bestseller InteGRITy: My Slow and Painful Journey to Success, and starred in Discovery Channel’s Undercover Billionaire, where he built a business from scratch under a fake identity and a fraction of his real net worth to prove the American Dream still works. None of that financial success erased the memory of the car he’d been forced to give up as a teenager, and by his own account he began actively hunting for it as early as 1984.

Why the 1969 Z/28 Was Built to Beat a Rulebook

The Z/28 wasn’t just a trim package with stripes and a wing. Chevrolet built it specifically to go racing, and the engineering underneath tells that story better than any badge on the fender. SCCA’s Trans-Am series capped engine displacement at 305 cubic inches for the cars competing in its smaller class, so Chevrolet engineers combined the 4-inch bore of the 327 small block with the 3-inch stroke of the 283 to land right under that ceiling at 302 cubic inches. The resulting DZ 302 V8 was advertised at a conservative 290 horsepower, a number period road testers openly doubted. Car and Driver called similarly conservative factory ratings on these high-revving small-blocks unrealistic, and the engine’s real output on the street was widely understood to run well above the advertised figure once it got up into its favorite part of the rev range.

To legally race in Trans-Am, Chevrolet had to build enough street versions to satisfy homologation rules, which required a back seat, a wheelbase no longer than 116 inches, and at least 1,000 production units sold to the public. What started as a thinly-disguised racing special turned into one of the most sought-after muscle cars Chevrolet ever built, with Chevrolet producing roughly 19,000 to 20,000 Z/28s for the 1969 model year alone — a huge jump from the car’s low-volume debut just two years earlier. Stearns’ car carried the Rally Sport option on top of the Z/28 package, adding the hidden headlights and distinct nose treatment that make the ’69 RS/Z28 combination especially desirable among collectors today. Fewer of those cars left the factory with both options checked than with the Z/28 package alone, which is part of why finding one decades later — let alone the specific one a person used to own — counts as a genuine needle-in-a-haystack moment.

Collector interest in first-generation Camaros has only intensified as the generation that grew up wanting one reaches the point in life where they can finally afford one. Clean, documented ’69 Z/28s with the Rally Sport package routinely draw serious money at major auctions now, and a car with a verifiable, single-family ownership history — even with a four-decade gap in the middle — tends to draw even more attention from bidders who care about provenance as much as condition. Stearns’ Camaro checks every box collectors look for: rare factory options, a credible paper trail, and now a story that no amount of money could have manufactured after the fact.

Four Decades, One Auction, and a Reunion Nobody Expected

Stearns began actively searching for his old Camaro as early as 1984, according to accounts of the story, but the trail went cold for years at a time the way these searches usually do. Then, decades later, he came across what looked like the same car at auction — the same color, the same options, a history that lined up closely enough to convince him. He bought it on the spot, paying somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 times his original $2,500 sale price to bring it home a second time. The car had since been restored to its original specification, including a return to its factory Rally wheels with Derby caps in place of the Cragar wheels Stearns remembered bolting on as a teenager trying to make his Z/28 look faster than it already was.

When Leno got behind the wheel with Stearns in the passenger seat for the Jay Leno’s Garage segment, the drive became less about horsepower figures and more about what the car represented. Viewers who left comments on the episode described it as one of the more emotional stories the show has told, with several owners of their own 1969 Z/28s chiming in about cars they’d kept, sold, or spent years chasing down themselves. One commenter wrote about buying his own Z/28 brand new as a teenager in 1979 and still owning it today. Another described finding a barn-find triple-black Z/28 for $2,400 in the 1990s and restoring it himself, vowing never to sell. The responses made clear that Stearns’ story, while unusually dramatic, taps into something a lot of muscle car owners recognize: the fear of letting go of a car too early, and the relief of getting a second chance most people never get.

It’s the kind of story that resonates with anyone who’s ever regretted selling a first car — and a reminder that the muscle cars built to satisfy a 1960s racing rulebook have only grown more valuable, and more emotionally loaded, with every decade that passes. Fans curious about what a similar restoration actually costs today can see how those numbers add up in our 2026 muscle car restoration cost breakdown, or read about another owner who went looking for a lost piece of muscle car history in our story on a hand-built Mercury Cougar fastback.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.