Chevrolet’s Camaro elbowed into the pony car market on the heels of the Ford Mustang and Plymouth Barracuda, but quickly carved out an identity all its own. The car’s good looks and built-in willingness to accept any of the contemporary Chevrolet V-8s up to the howling 427, and later the 454, made it a blank slate for performance upgrades. It had barely hit showrooms when a cottage industry emerged dedicated to hopping up and engine swapping Camaros for performance-hungry buyers.
You recognize the names of the original gangsters today: Baldwin Motion, Gibb, Harrell, Dana, Yenko, Nickey, and Berger. But as the Camaro rolled along over the decades, others emerged and carried on the tradition of building high-performance F-bodies: SLP, GMMG, and a scrappy privateer in Hemmings’ backyard, Redline.
It’s been widely reported that the Camaro will ride off into the sunset after the 2024 model year, likely replaced by an EV. It’s a foregone conclusion, then, that the tradition of tuning up new Camaros for street and track will come to a close as well. But it wouldn’t be the first time that the Camaro was pronounced extinct only to mount a comeback, and perhaps there’s a tuner out there waiting to unleash even more power from some next-generation drivetrain. In the meantime, there’s an ample supply of post-factory enhanced, high-performance Camaros ranging from prized first-generation cars to more affordable fourth-, fifth- and sixth-generation offerings.
Here for your perusal are 10 tuners who did their mightiest to convert Camaro owners’ cash into billowing clouds of tire smoke. Some are household names (at least in households containing a Camaro or two), others you might not have heard of — but all played a part in muscle car history.
Motion Performance and Baldwin Chevrolet
Who: Joel Rosen and Martyn Schorr
What: SS-427s, Phase III SS-427s, SS-454 Camaros, and plenty more
Where: Baldwin, Long Island, New York
When: 1967-’74
How much? A 1968 Baldwin Motion Camaro sold at Barrett-Jackson, Scottsdale in January for $583,000.
If you The car featured above is a replica of the ’69 that appeared in many of those ads and was built by another veteran automotive journalist (and former columnist), the late Joe Oldham, and his son Scott. The Oldhams patterned the tribute after the Motion Camaro Joe purchased new, which was then stolen about a year later and never recovered. The car is a convincing lookalike, but it’s powered by a new GM Performance Parts ZZ427 and a four-speed was installed in place of the original car’s automatic.
