What year is this Camaro?

Chevy sold over 220,000 Camaros in its debut 1967 season, but only 602 of them wore the Z/28 option code — Vince Piggins’ quietly-introduced, race-ready package that turned an ordinary pony car into one of GM’s rarest muscle machines. Add in a 396-powered Indy 500 pace car pedigree from that same first year, and the ’67 Camaro didn’t just answer the Mustang, it arrived swinging. A six-cylinder base car and a numbers-matching Z/28 both wear the same badge — but only one of them is a genuine unicorn.

Classic silver muscle car with hood open at an indoor show.

Somebody dared you to guess the year on this one, and honestly, that’s an insult to a car this recognizable. But the real trivia here isn’t the model year — it’s what almost nobody ordered the same year this photo’s Camaro rolled off the line. Chevy sold over 220,000 of these in their debut season alone, yet a tiny fraction of buyers checked one specific option box that turned an ordinary Camaro into one of the rarest muscle cars GM ever built. Which raises the question: is the car in this photo one of the ordinary ones, or one of the 602?

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GM’s Answer Nobody Saw Coming

Chevrolet rushed the first-generation Camaro to market for 1967 to answer the Mustang, riding on a brand-new rear-wheel-drive F-body platform it would go on to share with the Pontiac Firebird. It launched as a hardtop and a convertible, with a base 230 cubic-inch inline-six for buyers who just wanted the looks, and a ladder of 283, 327, and 350 cubic-inch V8s for buyers who wanted more. Eight engine choices in total, which tells you Chevy wasn’t sure yet exactly who was going to buy this car — so they built it for everybody.

The Z/28 Nobody Ordered (On Purpose)

Buried in the order sheet, introduced quietly in December of 1966, was option code Z/28 — Vince Piggins’ idea to sell a “virtually race-ready” Camaro straight off a Chevy dealer’s lot. Out of more than 220,000 Camaros built for 1967, only 602 left the factory as Z/28s. That’s not a rounding error, that’s a needle-in-a-haystack survivor rate, and it’s exactly why a numbers-matching first-year Z/28 commands serious money and serious respect at any show today. Everything else on the lot that year was a Camaro. The Z/28 was a statement.

A Pace Car Before It Even Had a Track Record

Chevy also handed the Camaro instant credibility by tapping a 396-powered RS/SS convertible to pace the 1967 Indianapolis 500, then sold 100 replicas to the public — a bold move for a nameplate that had existed for all of a few months. Between the Indy pace car pedigree and the Z/28’s race-bred DNA, the ’67 Camaro didn’t ease into the muscle car conversation. It kicked the door down. Whether this photo shows a six-cylinder driver or one of the 602 unicorns, it’s a first-year survivor from the season Chevy proved it could build a legend on the first try.

RS and SS — Two Packages, One Car

Chevrolet also let 1967 buyers stack two purely optional packages on top of a base Camaro: RS, the Rally Sport, and SS, the Super Sport. RS swapped in hidden headlights that rotated open behind vacuum-operated doors, plus RS-specific taillights and badging, while SS brought a blacked-out grille, simulated hood louvers, and a choice of the 350 or 396 V8. The two packages could be combined into an RS/SS, giving Chevrolet a way to sell one basic car as a boulevard cruiser, a street brawler, or both at once, depending entirely on which boxes a buyer checked at the dealership.

The Small Block That Would Outlive Them All

1967 was also the debut year for Chevrolet’s 350-cubic-inch small-block V8, first offered as an option on the Camaro SS before it went on to power millions of Chevrolets across the next four decades. At launch it was rated at 295 horsepower, a modest figure next to the big-block options, but its combination of light weight, strong torque, and easy tunability made it one of the most influential engines in American automotive history — and the Camaro was the car that introduced it to the world.

Racing Pedigree: Trans-Am From Day One

The Z/28’s real purpose was homologation: Chevrolet needed a Camaro that qualified for the SCCA’s Trans-Am series, which capped engine displacement at 305 cubic inches for the sedan-based class. Vince Piggins engineered the Z/28’s 302-cubic-inch small block specifically to meet that rule, and Roger Penske’s team, with Mark Donohue behind the wheel, campaigned Camaros in Trans-Am competition starting that same season. The showroom Z/28 and the race-prepared Camaros shared far more hardware than most muscle cars of the era ever did.

A Body Built to Handle, Not Just Look Fast

Underneath the sheet metal, the first-generation Camaro used a unitized body shell bolted to a separate front subframe, a hybrid construction method Chevrolet had not used on a passenger car before. The subframe carried the engine, front suspension, and steering as a single assembled unit that could be bolted directly onto the unibody on the assembly line, simplifying production while still giving the chassis the rigidity a performance car needed for serious cornering, not just a straight line.

From Junior Muscle Car to Blue-Chip Collectible

First-year Camaros were, at the time, considered Chevrolet’s answer to the Mustang rather than a landmark in their own right. Decades later, that perception has flipped entirely: documented, numbers-matching 1967 Z/28s and RS/SS combinations now regularly draw six-figure bids at major collector auctions, with the rarest documented Z/28s among the most sought-after muscle cars of any make or model year from the entire era.

When the Original Recipe Gets a Modern Twist

A car like the one pictured here, hood up at an indoor show with its engine bay on full display, represents a different but increasingly common path for first-generation Camaros: the pro-touring build. Owners graft modern brakes, coilover suspension, and updated interiors onto the original unibody-and-subframe architecture, chasing the handling and stopping power the factory car never had while keeping the silhouette that made it famous in the first place. Whether the donor car started as a six-cylinder or a genuine Z/28 barely matters once the build is finished — the shape is the point.

Whichever version this particular hood conceals, one thing about first-generation Camaros hasn’t changed since 1967: they were built to be personalized, whether that meant checking the Z/28 box at the dealership or grafting on a modern drivetrain fifty years later at a home garage.

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