Finding an unmolested muscle car can be, in many ways, like earching for a unicorn. Over the decades some weathered the ravages of time quite well, some didn’t, and many are no longer with us. In 1975, when Vernon Ward spotted his ’71 Camaro Z28 sitting in a shopping center parking lot with a For Sale sign on it, he could tell that it wasn’t as it rolled off the showroom floor. From a distance he saw the obligatory Cragar S/S wheels.
When he popped the hood, the LT-1 350 small-block was gone and in its place was a 400ci small-block capped off with a two-barrel carburetor—this on a car that was barely 4 years old with less than 40,000 on the odometer. None of that mattered to Vernon. “I’ve always liked Camaros, especially the
