Mark Hassett already owned a Yenko Camaro, Chevelle, and Nova, all painted the same shade of orange, before a Yenko Stinger Vega came up for sale and completed the set. My Car Story with Lou Costabile catches up with the car at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals, where decades of Vega rust jokes in the comments collide with a genuinely rare piece of Yenko performance history. Watch to see the car most people forget Yenko ever built.
There is exactly one kind of person who, upon finding a rare car for sale, thinks this would look great parked next to my other three cars painted the identical color, and Mark Hassett is that kind of person. He already owned a Yenko Camaro, a Yenko Chevelle, and a Yenko Nova, every one of them finished in the same shade of orange. When a Yenko Stinger Vega came up for sale, completing what might be the most specifically themed muscle car collection in America suddenly became possible. My Car Story with Lou Costabile caught up with him and his newest addition, and the car itself might be an even bigger surprise than the collector who owns it.
The Vega Nobody Expected Yenko to Touch
Don Yenko built his reputation on Camaros and Novas, the cars most people picture when his name comes up. The Stinger Vega program is a smaller, far less remembered chapter of that same performance history, which makes finding one in this kind of condition, let alone finding one to complete a themed collection, a genuinely unusual event even among dedicated Yenko collectors.
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One Collector’s Very Specific Obsession
Hassett’s collection is built around a single, very specific idea: every Yenko he owns wears the same orange paint. The Camaro, the Chevelle, and the Nova were already matched before this Vega ever came up for sale, and the video, filmed at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois on November 18, 2016, catches the moment his very particular set finally became complete.
A Compact Car With a Rocky Reputation
It’s worth remembering just how rocky the Vega’s own reputation is before layering a Yenko badge on top of it. Chevrolet’s compact struggled with well-documented rust issues and an aluminum-block engine that developed a reputation for wearing out early, problems serious enough that they still define how most people remember the car decades later, Yenko involvement or not.
The Rust Jokes Are Part of Vega Folklore
That reputation is very much alive in the comment section. One viewer jokes that up north “you could hear the Vegas in town rusting out at night,” a line that gets at just how deeply the Vega’s corrosion problems are baked into muscle-car-era memory, even for a well-preserved, orange, factory-adjacent performance survivor like this one.
A Car Plenty of People Owned, Just Not Like This One
Plenty of commenters have their own Vega stories that have nothing to do with performance at all. One received a Vega GT wagon as a graduation present with just 14,000 miles on it. Another remembers a college friend’s manual-transmission Vega Sport and the deadpan line that came with it: “Come on man, everyone knows what a Vega is.” A third recalls a buddy who dropped a 327 into his Vega and actually made it a runner.
Common Car, Rare Badge
Those memories matter here because they underline exactly how common the base Vega was against how rare a genuine Yenko-built example is. Millions of ordinary Vegas were sold, rusted, and scrapped through the 1970s. A documented Yenko Stinger Vega, especially one clean enough to anchor a themed collection like Hassett’s, represents a vanishingly small fraction of that total production run.
Cosworth Vega vs. Yenko Vega
This Yenko Stinger also isn’t the only performance chapter in Vega history worth knowing about. GM’s own Cosworth Vega, a separate, limited-production, high-tech version of the car, gets its own shoutout in the comments, with one viewer naming a black-and-gold Cosworth example the best-looking Vega ever built, a reminder that this unloved platform actually carries more than one overlooked performance story.
A Novelty and a Serious Piece of History at Once
None of that context changes the basic appeal of what’s parked in this video: a genuinely rare Yenko-built compact, restored well enough to sit proudly next to a matched-orange Camaro, Chevelle, and Nova, at a show built specifically to showcase collections exactly like this one. It’s a novelty car and a serious piece of Yenko history at the same time.
Why This Particular Vega Still Draws a Crowd
What ultimately makes this Vega worth a second look isn’t just its rarity or its color-matched place in someone’s collection, it’s the way it forces a reconsideration of a car most enthusiasts have already written off. A Vega most people remember for rust and reliability complaints turns out to have its own small, genuine slice of muscle car performance history, one that took a collector as specific as Hassett to actually track down and complete.
What Building a Matched Set Like This Actually Takes
There’s also something worth noting about what it takes to build a collection like Hassett’s in the first place. Matching a single paint color across four different Yenko-built models, spanning a full-size Nova, a mid-size Chevelle, a pony car Camaro, and now a subcompact Vega, means sourcing cars across completely different segments of Chevrolet’s lineup and, in at least one case, waiting years for the right example to surface. That’s a very different kind of collecting than simply chasing the most valuable or most famous Yenko model available; it’s a curatorial project as much as an acquisition one, and this Vega is the piece that finally closed it out.
A Reminder That the Best Stories Aren’t Always Big-Blocks
It’s also a useful reminder for anyone assuming the most interesting muscle car stories only involve big-block Camaros and Chevelles. A compact economy car with a well-earned reputation for rust and reliability trouble turns out to have its own quiet chapter of genuine tuner history, one obscure enough that most Vega owners never even knew it existed, and rare enough that finding a real example took a specific kind of dedicated, color-coordinated collector to finally track one down. It’s the kind of car that only turns up once a collector already knows exactly what they’re looking for. Hassett clearly did, and now his matched set proves it was out there all along. which is more than most Vega owners could ever say.
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Rob Mauser
same color but a 74
Those were bad ass!
look cool if it a slit bumper like on a 70 Camaro rs
Steve Plath The Sleeper
Love it
Look’s good !!!!!!!!
Do you go to shows in the Cleveland g area , would love to see it in person ?
Cool
I had a 72 GT..loved it. .but it smoked like a train. .lol
Junk
Na fords r junk
Love this cares
Looks like a crossbreed between a Camaro and a Maverick.Engines were garbage
What ever ass hole i had a vega it was junk
Cool car hard to hold on drag tracks won’t to jump ever were
Austin Dean,Wade Dean,Jay Whittaker
A buddy I mentored and worked with had a Cosworth twin cam. Nice Car
Sweet!!!!!!
Cosworth Vega’s were cool too !
One day my dad picked me up at school . We went to Smith chevy dealership in Gastonia NC . We walked into the showroom there it sat the factory HP Vega . Dad said your mother and I think this is the car for you . But my dumb ass had my heart set on a old Nova a friend had setting behind his house . What a mistake I made .
Did not know this
I had a 72 that I dropped a 327 / 330 HP with a power glide transmission. It was a real sleeper. From 40 to 90 there wasn’t much that could touch it. I miss that one. Sold it to a high school kid and hr wrapped it around a phone pole 2 weeks later.
It still rusted like a Vega would.
Never knew Yenko did one of these Ed Boland. Tims neighbor has a Cosworth in mint condition. And he has his 63 Nova SS 327 4SPD he bought brand new also a 63 Nova rag top.
Had a 1972 GT in 8 months driver’s side front fender rusted through on top fender, engine smoked so bad at 30,000 miles a guy next to me at a traffic light asked if I was cooking burgers under the hood, after two years had to get rid of it!
Hugger orange vega
Darrell Dean
Pretty cool, but didnt see the Yenko Turbo. That would have been the shit.