It was the early 1990s, and a new guy at General Motors named Mark Stielow had an idea for a car build. At that time, Stielow had messed with Mustangs, AMXs, and even MGBs, but he found that first-gen Camaros looked, drove, and just worked better than anything he had worked with before. His first Camaro was a white (black vinyl top) 1969 RS that had 50,000 miles on the odometer. He stuffed a Doug Nash five-speed in it and had fun. Maybe a bit too much fun—that car left the equation after trying to clear a patch of trees. As Stielow stated, “I was only bruised and unhappy. The Camaro was totaled but proved its strength and safety as it protected me.”
In 1991, Stielow, while working at the GM Proving Grounds in Mesa, Arizona, bought a non-running 1969 Camaro that he saw in Auto Trader magazine (life was harder before the Internet took off). The ride was located on reservation land and had a dead 427 big-block under the hood backed by a TH400 trans and a 12-bolt with 4.11 gears. He had the Camaro towed to the parking lot of an Embassy Suites hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the manager was nice enough to let him work on it at night when he was done over at GM. Stielow was going to drive the car back to Detroit, but after he got
