Chevy Chase

Wheels Magazine
February, 2007

Three hundred pounds if he's an ounce, the big and very serious man in the crisp white shirt and wraparound shades could be sitting in any one of Homestead-Miami Speedway's 65,000 empty seats. He'd surely be more comfortable there, rather than the passenger seat of what is, at this moment in January 2007, the only driveable Chevrolet Camaro Concept coupe on the face of the planet. Head jammed hard into the concept car's roof, torso overflowing the snug-fitting, stitched leather seat, the guy is here for a reason, discomfort be damned. In a cockpit where the one and only functioning electrical component is the Stop-Start button, he's Mr Speed Limiter.

He's effective, too. Halfway through my single lap of this immaculate 2.4km-long redneck colosseum, I tire of counting the 1005 palm trees in 15 different varieties it's claimed surround the circuit. I fall back a little from the minivan ahead, where stocky shooter Richard Prince is afety-harnessed into the cargo compartment with his gyrostabilised digital camera.

Back to second, then a gentle increase in pressure on the throttle pedal. There's a satisfying deepening in the volume from the 6.0-litre V8's obviously unrestrictive exhaust. The silver coupe accelerates gently to ... I don't know. Like every dial and gauge in this car, the speedo isn't functional. But Mr Speed Limiter's inbuilt 30mph (48km/h) threshold has been exceeded. "Whoa there," he booms. He's not the kind of man you argue with.

Driving a concept car always makes for great photographs. The day before being detailed to record for posterity each international motoring journalist's single lap of Homestead, Richard Prince made the most of locations around downtown Miami and the city's beachside Ocean Drive strip, with all its pastelpainted and neon-lit deco-era delights.

Driving a concept car also never tells you anything about how well the production version is going to work. They're fragile things, designed for stationary excitement rather than kinetic satisfaction. The instrument panel is a facade. The front seats, with their afterthought lap-only belts, are far too high. The ergonomics of the driving position are all wrong, and the car's manual transmission for some reason resents second gear. More importantly, designers, not engineers, hoose the springs, and the wheels and tyres.

This is why, near the end on my allotted five minutes behind the wheel, Mr Speed Limiter coaches me carefully on the right course as I steer the Camaro off the lowest possible line on Homestead's 20-degree banking and onto the flat of the pitlane access road. There's very little clearance between the car's massive 21-inch front, 22-inch rear tyres and the handcrafted body. Apparently the smallest bump is enough to cause contact.

Call me weird, but I found talking about the Camaro Concept coupe way more interesting than driving it. The previous few days had been spent in Detroit, for the opening of the annual North American International Auto Show. There, General Motors rolled out the Camaro Concept convertible, to general acclaim, and company executives were candid about the pace of progress in turning its two Camaro concepts into showroom-ready realities.

It's true the Camaro coupe and convertible are a little more real than many other concept cars. Anyone familiar with the underside of a VE Commodore will find plenty that's familiar beneath the Camaro Concept.

"I call it [a] cobbled kind of architecture," Holden chairman and managing director Denny Mooney had explained in Detroit two days earlier. "You take the existing VE hardware and you cobble it to make it work on that car," he said. "From a dynamic standpoint it's not going to be ideal. It's pretty crude."

He wasn't wrong.

While the Camaro production models will share the VE Commodore's basic architecture, there will be important differences. "We stepped off [from] pretty good fundamental architecture," said GM global engineering boss Jim Queen, who visited Australia in December. "But in the case of the Camaro, we had to do some front-end work because of the proportions that we wanted with the dashto-axle." This change, a 50mm stretch in the distance between front axle and dashboard over the VE Commodore, is key to the Chevrolet's dramatic proportions. "We also did some work in the rear end with the suspension out there, too," Queen added.

"Out there" is, of course, Australia. Melbourne, not Miami, is the true centre of the Camaro story. Although not manufactured at Holden's South Australian assembly plant, the design, engineering and development work is going on in this country.

Leadership of the Camaro programme, plus other models that will utilise the vehicle architecture developed by Holden for the VE Commodore, is the responsibility of two senior North American executives assigned to Australia. Gene Stefanyshyn is vehicle line executive (and the man in charge), and Doug Houlihan is chief engineer. But most of the hands-on design and engineering development work is being done by Australians.

"We've frozen design," says Holden design director Tony Stolfo of the Camaro programme, "so we're well into the execution phase of that car." Production of the coupe is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2008 and it will go on sale later that year as a 2009 model. The convertible will be added a year later.

"Right now, it would have to be about 40 percent of my workforce working on North American programmes," Stolfo continues. This includes Camaro and other still secret models. "Then we've got GM-DAT [Daewoo] programmes, and there's the Holden work. And we've got the Advanced Design Group that we're setting up now as well."

To facilitate the workload, high-tech communication links allow Detroit to regularly check on progress in Melbourne, and American GM designers are assigned to Australian Holden designers for on-the-spot input. It's important to actually have the American designers sitting with us executing the car," Stolfo says. "Our technology now allows us to work across the globe, so we're in contact with Mike [Simcoe, former Holden design chief and now GM's North American car boss] and his team on an almost daily basis, working through the design, making sure the emotional side of the execution of the car is ... we're getting it right."

It's more than likely Australians will have the opportunity to judge the work of Stolfo and his design team first hand. General Motors global product boss, Bob Lutz, is emphatic that the company will design and build almost everything, everywhere, in both left-handand right-hand-drive, and that includes the Camaro. "Denny would have to figure out what to call it and how you would brand it," Lutz admitted in Detroit. Mooney was quick to add that he wouldn't dream of calling it anything other than a Chevrolet Camaro, even in Australia.

Unlike many concepts, the production version of the Camaro will be similar to the original (though Queen admits the side vents and wing mirrors will be "a little bit different"), but it's not simply a case of following the concept design all the way through to production.

"Show cars have got stretch, they've got big wheel and tyre combinations, they've got a whole range of proportional challenges that all make it difficult to actually execute in the production sense," admits Stolfo. "Have we done it? Well, you'll find out..."

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