Secret Ist ever 1967 Camaro built May 1966 Num. N100001

Long before Chevrolet’s first production-run 1967 Camaros hit dealer lots, one pre-production car, serial number N100001, rolled off the line in May 1966. It was later gutted for racing, nearly lost to history, and eventually restored. A GM engineer’s own firsthand account of spotting an early Camaro on the factory floor adds a rare layer of verification to this story. Watch to see how the very first Camaro almost didn’t survive to tell it.

Chevrolet built exactly one 1967 Camaro before any of the others, a pre-production car stamped with the serial number N100001, assembled in May of 1966, months before the model officially existed to the public. What happened to that specific car afterward reads like a cautionary tale for anyone who’s ever sold something too soon. It was raced. It was gutted. It very nearly disappeared entirely. One commenter says he would still pay the original asking price of twenty-five hundred dollars today just to keep its story going. What actually saved this car wasn’t luck. It was somebody who understood exactly what they were looking at.

The First Camaro Chevrolet Ever Built

N100001 represents the very first Camaro Chevrolet ever assembled on the pre-production line, built specifically for the 1967 model year before dealers had received a single unit to sell to the public. That timeline alone makes it a genuinely unique artifact rather than simply an early example of a popular model, since pre-production cars like this one were typically built in extremely small numbers to validate tooling and assembly processes before the line ramped up to full volume for public release.

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A Firsthand Account From the Factory Floor

One of the most valuable pieces of evidence in this story comes directly from the comment section rather than any official record. A viewer identifying himself as a GM engineer recalls stumbling across a gold-colored pre-release 1967 Camaro on the factory floor at the Norwood, Ohio assembly plant back in August of 1966, months before the car was ever meant to be seen by outsiders. He specifically remembers it running a two-barrel 210-horsepower 327 cubic-inch V8 paired with a three-speed manual on the floor, a specific, technical, and highly credible firsthand account of just how secretive this build phase actually was at the time.

From Landmark to Race Car

At some point after its earliest days, N100001 was converted into a dedicated race car, a fate that would normally erase almost any car’s original identity and provenance entirely. Stripped of its factory trim and reworked for competition, a car like this one typically vanishes into anonymity, indistinguishable from countless other modified first-generation Camaros still scattered across the country today with no way to prove what they originally were.

The One Decision That Saved Its History

What actually saved N100001’s history wasn’t the car’s fame at the time, since almost nobody outside the factory even knew it existed yet. It was a single decision made by whoever converted it to race trim: keeping the original components rather than scrapping them outright. That one choice is precisely why this car’s identity as the genuine first-built 1967 Camaro could later be verified and eventually restored, instead of being lost the way most modified muscle cars from this era ultimately are.

A Plant, a Community, and a Legacy

The comments trace the Camaro’s broader legacy back to the GM manufacturing communities that actually built it, including a specific mention of the Norwood, Ohio assembly plant, where entire families worked for generations, their employment predating the Camaro nameplate itself by years. That plant, like so many others tied to this era of American manufacturing, eventually closed for good, leaving little behind but memories, open house tours, and the cars themselves as physical evidence of the work that happened there.

What a Numbers-Matching Restoration Actually Means

One slightly skeptical comment jokes about the restoration relying on the finest reproduction sheet metal that overseas suppliers can offer, and it points to a genuinely common modern reality. Restoring unibody cars from the 1960s, especially ones with this kind of historical significance, increasingly depends on imported reproduction panels rather than scavenged factory originals, a practice that remains a point of real debate among purists even when the alternative is losing the car to rust entirely.

Nearly Sold, Nearly Lost, Nearly Forgotten

Elsewhere in the comments, an owner recalls selling his own 1969 Z/28 back in the 1970s and admits outright that he regrets it now, framing it as a missed gold mine given how the car’s value has climbed since. That kind of regret runs through Camaro culture broadly: countless genuinely significant early cars were sold cheaply or scrapped outright simply because nobody at the time understood what they would eventually be worth, historically or financially, decades down the line.

Why Chevrolet Ever Let It Go

One comment asks the obvious question directly: how did Chevrolet ever let the actual first production Camaro leave the company at all, rather than keeping it permanently in a corporate collection where its significance would never be in doubt. Decades later, that decision is exactly what makes this car’s survival and eventual rediscovery such a genuinely rare story within Camaro history, rather than a simple footnote sitting safely behind glass in a museum somewhere.

Body Styles the Whole Comment Section Agrees On

Even setting aside N100001’s own unique story, the comments circle back repeatedly to a broader consensus about the first-generation Camaro lineup as a whole, with several viewers independently naming the Camaro, Nova, and Chevelle body styles as some of the best-looking cars GM ever put into production during this era. That kind of unprompted agreement across strangers in a comment section is rare, and it says something about how enduring the styling from this specific stretch of Chevrolet’s history has turned out to be, decades after any of these cars were new. Restoration specialists who have handled comparably significant early Camaros note that a project like this one routinely takes years rather than months, since every panel and fastener has to be weighed against the question of whether it might actually be original before it gets replaced.

A Story Worth More Than the Metal

What makes N100001 worth watching isn’t really the sheet metal, reproduction or otherwise. It’s the sheer improbability of the whole chain of events: a secretive pre-production build, a factory floor sighting nobody was supposed to see, a race car conversion that should have erased its identity forever, and one person along the way who simply refused to throw the original parts away.

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