Secret Ist ever 1967 Camaro built May 1966 Num. N100001

This 1967 Chevrolet Camaro carries build number N100001 — the very first unit off Chevrolet’s Norwood, Ohio assembly line. Along the way it was stripped down and turned into a race car, a fate that erased the history of countless early Camaros before it. What saved this one was a single decision: whoever converted it kept the original parts instead of scrapping them, making a true, numbers-matching restoration possible decades later. Watch to see how a factory-first Camaro survived its own history.

Every assembly line has a first car, but almost none of them survive long enough for anyone to notice, let alone matter. The very first 1967 Camaro to roll off Chevrolet’s Norwood, Ohio assembly line carries build number N100001, a detail that would mean nothing if the car itself hadn’t nearly vanished. Somewhere along the way, it left the world of collectible history and became a race car — stripped, modified, and pushed toward the strip instead of a showroom. Most cars that go through that transformation never come back. This one did, and the reason has everything to do with what one person refused to throw away.

The Camaro Nobody Was Supposed to Notice

The video comes from Drew Money, who originally uncovered and documented this story before it was re-shared here for a wider audience. Its subject is about as rare as automotive history gets: the very first 1967 Camaro assembled at Chevrolet’s Norwood, Ohio plant, identifiable by its build number, N100001. The “N” prefix ties directly to Norwood, a plant that built Camaros for years before it closed, and whose former workers still turn up in the comments describing summer open-house tours hosted by the UAW. A build number ending in 00001 isn’t a marketing gimmick — it is the literal first unit off a brand-new production line, made before Chevrolet had fully worked out what the 1967 model year would look like in dealer lots.

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How One Engineer Stumbled Onto Camaro History

One commenter, a GM engineer who started at Chevrolet’s PowerGlide transmission plant in Toledo in August 1966, recalls walking the factory floor and finding a gold pre-release Camaro sitting among test vehicles months before the car reached showrooms. He remembers its spec exactly: a two-barrel 327 cubic-inch V8 rated at 210 horsepower, paired with a three-speed manual on the floor — a modest combination compared to the big-block Camaros that would define the muscle car era. He can’t confirm it was this exact car, but the detail matters anyway: it shows Chevrolet was quietly circulating pre-release Camaros through its plant network in the months before launch, exactly the kind of vehicle that could end up with an early, low build number like N100001.

From Pre-Production Prototype to Race Car

Somewhere between its early build number and its eventual restoration, this Camaro’s history took a detour that would make most collectors wince. Instead of being preserved, it was converted into a race car — stripped of its original components and reconfigured for the strip rather than the street. Cars from this era routinely met this fate; a low-mile, historically significant Camaro was, to most owners in the 1970s and 1980s, simply a fast car with cheap parts, not yet the six-figure collectible it would eventually become. What separates N100001 from the countless other first-generation Camaros lost to that same instinct is what happened to the parts that came off it.

The Parts That Saved a Piece of GM History

Whoever converted this Camaro into a race car made one decision that changed everything: they kept the original parts instead of scrapping them. That single choice is what made a real, accurate restoration possible decades later, rather than a best-guess reproduction built from period-correct reproduction pieces. As one commenter in the video’s community put it, the person kept enough integrity in the process that a proper restoration back to factory spec was still possible, with those original components surviving intact somewhere, waiting to go back on the car they came from. Full restorations of a Camaro this early are difficult even with unlimited budgets; doing one with a documented set of the car’s own original hardware is close to impossible to replicate with any other surviving early Camaro.

Norwood, Ohio: The Plant Behind Build Number One

Norwood, Ohio, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, built Camaros continuously from the model’s 1966 debut until General Motors closed the plant decades later. In the comments, former employees and their children describe a different version of the plant than most car histories bother to record — open-house tours run by the UAW, summers spent on the factory floor, and, for at least one family, employment that spanned from the Camaro’s earliest years to the plant’s eventual closure. Today, the site is remembered mostly through an elevated parking structure that’s one of the only physical remnants left standing. A build number like N100001 is a direct link back to that specific facility, workforce, and moment in GM’s manufacturing history.

What Made the Early 1967 Camaros Different

The first cars off any new assembly line tend to carry small, telling imperfections and specification quirks that get ironed out within weeks of production ramping up. Chevrolet was building the Camaro to answer the Ford Mustang, and the earliest 1967 units, including pre-release cars like the one recalled from Toledo, sometimes carried different component combinations than what became standard once volume production settled in. That variation is part of why a documented, low build number matters so much to collectors: it isn’t just about being early, it’s about capturing the car in the exact state Chevrolet built it before the model found its final form.

Why Chevy Even Let Car Number One Go

It seems almost inconceivable today that General Motors would let its very first production Camaro leave the plant into private hands rather than preserving it permanently. One commenter puts it plainly, wondering aloud why a car this significant wasn’t kept in a corporate collection from day one. But in 1966 and 1967, nobody at Chevrolet was thinking about a Camaro’s build number as future history — they were thinking about hitting production quotas and meeting dealer demand for a brand-new model competing directly with the Mustang. That gap between how a car is treated when it’s new and how it’s valued decades later is exactly why survivors like N100001 are so rare in the first place.

Collector Significance of an Unrepeatable Build Number

A build number can’t be replicated, faked convincingly, or manufactured after the fact — it either belongs to a car or it doesn’t, and N100001 belongs to exactly one 1967 Camaro in existence. Comments on the video include an offer from a viewer willing to pay the original asking price just to keep the tradition going, a small but telling sign of how much weight collectors put on documented, numbers-verified history over raw performance figures. Restored properly, with its original parts reunited after time spent as a race car, this Camaro occupies a category by itself: not the fastest, not the rarest option package, but the literal first of a model that would go on to define an entire era of American performance cars.

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