Chevrolet Camaro 1967 Indianapolis 500 Official Pace Car

Chevrolet handed its brand new Camaro one of the biggest stages in American motorsport in 1967, and a three-time Indianapolis 500 winner drove it around the Brickyard in front of a packed house. Then the man who actually won the race that day refused to go anywhere near it. This 1967 Camaro SS convertible is one of the small fleet Chevrolet built for that month of May, and its story is stranger than the badge suggests.

A three-time Indianapolis 500 champion drove it around the track at speed in front of hundreds of thousands of fans, but the man who actually won the race that day wanted nothing to do with it. That is the odd footnote buried inside the story of Chevrolet’s 1967 Indianapolis 500 pace car program, a brand new pony car handed one of motorsport’s biggest stages before most of America had even seen one in a showroom. Chevrolet built only a handful of true pace cars, plus a separate batch of Festival cars for VIPs and officials to drive around the speedway grounds all month, and the convertible in this post belongs to that second group. So why did the race winner turn down a free Camaro on national television?

Chevrolet Bets a Brand New Car on the Brickyard

Indy officials selected the Camaro as the official pace car for the 51st running of the Indianapolis 500, marking the first time Chevrolet had paced the race since 1955 and only the third time in the event’s history to that point. The timing was aggressive on Chevrolet’s part. The Camaro had only gone on sale in September 1966 as a rushed answer to Ford’s Mustang, which had a two and a half year head start and a commanding lead in a segment Chevrolet had badly misjudged. Putting the new car in front of the largest single-day crowd in American sport was a marketing decision, not an engineering one, and it worked exactly as intended.

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The Winner Who Turned Down a Free Camaro

Three-time Indy winner Mauri Rose drove the actual pace car, a white convertible with blue stripes carrying a 396 cubic inch big block V8. A.J. Foyt won the race that year, his third Indy victory, in a finish that became famous for reasons having nothing to do with Chevrolet: Parnelli Jones and the STP turbine car led commandingly before a transmission bearing failed with three laps remaining, handing Foyt the win. Foyt then declined the Camaro Chevrolet offered him. The official explanation was that the car lacked air conditioning. The far more widely repeated explanation is that Foyt’s primary backing came from Ford, and being photographed in a Chevrolet was not a career move he was interested in making.

Pace Car, Festival Car, Speedway Car: Three Different Things

Chevrolet built roughly 104 Camaros for Indianapolis duty in 1967, but the fleet was not uniform and the distinctions matter enormously to anyone looking at one today. Only a small number were true pace cars used on track. A larger group, around 43 cars, carried the 500 Festival designation and were assigned to parade duty and VIP transport around the speedway grounds. Another ten or so were designated Speedway cars for track officials. The convertible featured here is a Festival car, which places it in the largest of those subgroups but still makes it one of fewer than fifty built. Surviving documentation from the program is famously incomplete, which is why the exact split is still argued over.

The 350 Small Block’s Very First Year

Under the hood, this one carries a 350 rather than the 396 that powered the on-track pace car, and that is its own piece of 1967 history. The 350 cubic inch small block debuted that year specifically for the Camaro SS, making it the first application of an engine that would go on to become one of the most produced V8s in history. In 1967 SS trim it was rated at 295 horsepower with a four barrel carburetor and 10.25:1 compression. The alternative SS engine was the 396 big block, offered at 325 horsepower in base form and 375 in the L78 configuration. A 350 car is the more common of the two but also the sweeter driving one, with meaningfully less weight over the front wheels.

Ermine White, Blue Stripes, and a Recipe Too Easy to Copy

The pace car livery itself is one of the cleanest Chevrolet ever applied. The cars wore Ermine White paint with blue racing stripes over the hood and deck, blue houndstooth interior trim, and the pace car door lettering that identified them at the speedway. Most were built as SS convertibles, most carried the RS appearance package with its hidden headlights, and the combination of RS and SS on a white convertible remains one of the most desirable first generation Camaro specifications regardless of Indy provenance. That overlap is precisely what makes the pace car story complicated: the visual recipe is easy to replicate, and thousands of ordinary 1967 Camaros have been painted into it over the past five decades.

Why Proving One Is Nearly Impossible

Verifying a genuine Indy car today is difficult and expensive. Chevrolet did not use a unique VIN sequence or a dedicated option code for the program, so authentication depends on assembly plant records, original build sheets, Protect-O-Plate documentation, dealer paperwork and period photography rather than anything stamped into the car. The absence of a definitive factory list is why the 104 figure and its subgroup breakdown are still described in approximate terms by serious researchers. Buyers looking at any car advertised as a 1967 pace or festival Camaro should expect a documentation file rather than a story, and should treat an undocumented example as a well-optioned RS/SS convertible priced accordingly.

What the Car Is Worth Without the Story

That said, the underlying car stands on its own merits. A 1967 RS/SS convertible with the 350 is a first-year, first-generation Camaro in arguably its best specification, and first-year cars carry a premium in almost every collector market. Values for well-documented, correctly restored examples have climbed steadily over the past fifteen years, with the convertible body style commanding a clear premium over the coupe and the RS hidden-headlight package adding further. Genuine Indy provenance, when it can actually be proven, adds a further layer on top of that. The gap between a documented car and a tribute can easily run into six figures, which is exactly why the paperwork matters more than the paint.

A Marketing Gamble That Outlived Everyone Involved

What keeps the 1967 program interesting is how much it reveals about where Chevrolet stood that spring. The division needed the Camaro to succeed badly enough to spend real money putting it in front of 300,000 people before the model had established any reputation at all, and it needed a retired champion to drive it because the active one would not. Fifty-plus years later, the Camaro is a permanent fixture of American car culture and the Mustang rivalry it was built to answer is still running. Foyt’s refusal, meanwhile, has outlived nearly every other detail of the day, which is a strange kind of immortality for a car he never sat in.

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