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.

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