1969 Chevy Camaro Robert Stanley - American Idol

When casting about for a proper medium of automotive self-expression, one can do worse than to consider a proven formula. Since making its debut as a cobbled riposte to the '64 Ford Mustang, the Chevrolet Camaro has survived the depredations of OPEC, the rise and fall of velour upholstery, and even the often baffling judgment of its own corporate stewards (remember the '84 Olympics Package?) to emerge as the one plus ultra of custom-car foundations. Even now, more than a year after the line's quietus, the Camaro endures, if only in a metaphysical sense, as a totem of American cultural primacy and engineering audacity.

That the car has achieved something approaching ubiquity on show grounds and in auto-mag centerfoldsshould not be taken as evidence of an incipient slouch toward irrelevance. In the car-builder's quest to build something truly unique, tapping a weirdo platform (Pro Street Pacer, anyone?) is, paradoxically, the easiest way to get noticed. Steering a bright-yellow Camaro down the razor-slim line between hip and hackneyed, fresh and flyblown, on the other hand, is the kind of Wallenda-like balancing act that separates the committed from the merely curious.

Embracing that challenge and making it his own, Bloomington, California resident Robert Stanley set out to create a First-Gen Camaro like no other. By conning the local classifieds and auto-trader pubs, Stanley eventually located an appropriate canvas, in the form of a nicely preserved '69 coupe. Draped in unmarred sheet metal and powered by a drum-tight 327 small-block, it was exactly the sort of closet classic in which most of us would be happy to while away untold hours in a transport of muscle-car delight.

Stanley immediately tore it apart.

"When I set out to build the car, I wanted to make sure it didn't end up being just another Camaro," he explains. "Everything about it needed to be special, so most of the stock parts just had to go." To that end, he delivered the car into the fell clutches of body man Mike Todorovitch, who stripped away its staid black-on-silver paint in favor of a refulgent chrome-yellow scheme overlaid with diaphanous purple ghost flames. A deck-lid spoiler purloined from a '79 Trans Am provides a subtle styling link to the Ghost of F-Bodies Past.

News of the Camaro's ongoing transformation quickly spread, eventually attracting the attention of one of the customization game's most well-respected players. "Boyd Coddington himself personally measured the offset of the wheels," says Stanley, pride evident in his voice. Not surprisingly, the 17-inch "Smoothies" are a perfect fit-in both the dimensional and stylistic senses-even when encased in mammoth Goodyear F-1 radials. They team with a set of 12-inch Wilwood discs to confer a level of stopping and cornering power unimaginable during the Johnson administration (that would be Lyndon, not Magic).

Shoehorning a bespoke interior into a pukka classic demands a carefully considered approach and a finely honed aesthetic sensibility. A dram too much chrome, a superfluous smidgen of pleated leather, and suddenly you're tooling around town in a nine-second version of Huggy Bear's Lincoln. Stanley has managed the job with admirable facility, thanks in no small part to the contributions of custom-interior wizard Ron Mangus. Mangus cannily elected to key the cabin to the Camaro's conflagrant paint scheme, starting with a color-matched steel dashboard housing white-faced AutoMeter gauges and a GT billet steering wheel. Tan leather-and-suede upholstery punctuated with swatches of purple imbues the upright cockpit with an appropriate level of comfort and understated style.

While propriety demands that a car of the Camaro's stature derive its accelerative motivation from a comparably august powerplant, the effort and expenditure involved in tracking down a well-preserved ZL-1 or LS-6 ultimately led Stanley to settle on a slightly more plebeian alternative.

"My cousin had this bored-out 454 in his Camaro, but [the car] only ran nines. That wasn't fast enough for him, so he made me a great deal on the engine." Built by Steve Dougan in Riverside, the 468-cuber is chockablock with top-shelf racing hardware, most notably a set of 13:1 TRW forged pistons, a .724-lift Comp cam, and a brace of big-valve "990" Chevy heads. To ensure adequate fuel-air delivery as well as optimum visual impact, Dougen topped the whole mess off with dual 500-cfm carburetors and a polished Edelbrock Performer RPM intake. A suitably reinforced Turbo-400 transmission from B&M channels the power aft to a 12-bolt differential housing 3.73 gears.

We're pleased to report that what the package lacks in vintage cachet (it did, after all, start life in a '76 pickup truck), it more than makes up for in great gobs of big, stupid power. Dyno-verified figures of more than 700 horses and 662 ft.-lbs. of torque are impressive in any setting. That the big engine manages to generate these numbers without barfing a lung during the occasional cruise event or suburban sortie is an achievement worth celebrating.

Among the car's more noteworthy mechanical features is its gaudily proportioned exhaust setup, which was designed ex nihilo by pal Ken Asche. A fabricator for header wallah Doug Thorley, Asche relished the challenge of creating an exhaust system that was in keeping with the Camaro's over-the-top mission statement. He began with a set of 2-1/8-inch primary tubes, which wend their way through strategically located cut-outs in the car's custom-fabricated aluminum fender wells. From there the pipes dilate to a full 3 inches, snake rearward to a pair of electric cut-outs, and finally terminate in a pair of Doug's high-flow mufflers. It's a truly unique system for what is, inarguably, a one-of-a-kind car.

"Most people, they see an old Camaro-even a nice one-and after a minute or so they move on. With this car, they just stand there in awe," says Stanley of his creation. A slightly grandiose assessment, perhaps, but not an unwarranted one. Indeed, the car snared top honors in its very first show appearance, at the 2003 California AutoFest Classic in Fontana.

In our haste to fte the contrarian, we sometimes overlook the champion right under our noses. And while we typically don't engage in brand warfare, it doesn't feel unreasonable to point at that no one ever wrote a song about an AMC Matador.