Inside the Build: 550 HP Muscle Car

Gage Vann's 1968 Chevrolet Camaro Pro Touring Tell us the story behind your ride. What made you pick this particular one Where did you find it? The first gen Camaro was always my favorite car and ever since I got into the car scene it was a dream of mine to one day own one. Coming home late one night from eating dinner with my family, right as we were about to pull into our driveway, I spotted what looked to be a first gen Camaro underneath a tarp. My family didn't believe me so we turned around and went take a peek at it and sure enough across the street from my house was a 1968 Camaro. We talked to the owner of the car at the time and asked him about the car, but he had no intentions of selling it, and we were fine with that. We just wanted some information on where the car came from and what was going on with it. So as much time had gone by we became good friends with the owner, helping him out with little things he needed help with. For a while we figured that we were not going to be able to get the car as he was not wanting to see it go. Coming up on what was my 14th birthday at the time, my uncle got a knock on his door late one night. Having no idea who could be knocking on his door late that night when he opens the door it was the owner telling my uncle that he was indeed ready to sell the car and we were ready to buy. So the day of my 14th birthday, my family decided to surprise me with the car, and boy was I not expecting that at all. In the end, the owner realized who the car was going to and knew that it would be taken care of and that he could come by and see it whenever.

Describe the modifications you've made. Where did you start, what’s the most recent mod and what motivated it? When we finally got the car, we had a few different ideas running through our heads at the time. Our initial idea was to restore it back to factory, then we realized that we didn't want that and that we really wanted to be different and go for a pro-touring look. At the time, not too many people were going the pro-touring route, so it was pretty unique. We started out with the bodywork, getting rid of all the rust the car had so that meant changing basically every factory panel on the car. Once the bodywork was pretty much all figured out we came across a wrecked Pontiac Firebird with an LS1. We immediately went to take a look at it. The guy was just selling the motor and transmission but we managed to buy the entire car off of him. That meant that we could reuse the wiring harness, the discs brakes all around, the parking brake that we modified to work with the car, and many other things the Camaro didn't come with that could modernize it up a bit. For many years the car sat around not getting worked on as much mainly because we lost focus in the car, then a few of our friends took up to this big car show in Mississippi called Cruzin The Coast. After seeing all the amazing cars over there, we found our interest in the car again and decided to get heavy on the car so that we could make next year’s Cruzin The Coast. Our plan was to have a daily driven car that was reliable and was also track focused so we could drive it to the track and also track the car without having to tow it. So the car got all Detroit Speed Suspension, and the all mighty LS1. We recently took it to the track and ended up blowing the motor so we went through it and bought a 6.0 block for it, upped the compression, pistons, rods, heads, etc. The car is currently back on the road running strong!

Of all the mods you’ve made, which do you think offers the biggest bang for the buck? The biggest bang for the buck has been getting the wrecked Pontiac Firebird with the LS1 for $2,000. The guy was intentionally selling just the motor and transmission for $1,500 but we figured we could use a lot of those parts from the Pontiac like the brakes, the wiring harness, power windows, etc. So we ended up getting the entire car for $500 more than what he was asking for just the motor and transmission. We ending up using about 80% of what we could take off of that car and the car ended up being a shell when we were done with it.

How did you go about selecting the specific parts for this build? Any installation tips to share? Thankfully since the first gen Camaro's are so popular, there are many aftermarket companies out there that still make parts for this car. Our parts came from Detroit Speed for our suspension, Classic Industries for all the sheet metal and other components, Forgeline for the rims and Hooker Headers for the whole exhaust system. When building a car like this and installing parts that were never meant to go on this car, you will run into many problems. We had to cut and fabricate a lot of our brand new parts just to make them fit the way we wanted them to. My tip here is don't go into a project expecting everything to fit and work smoothly, it takes a lot of time and patience.

What are you planning next? As far as plans go on the car, we basically done with everything we wanted to do to the car and more! We would like to take the car to more autocross events do a lot more power tour events. Other than that it would be interesting to supercharge the car but with the way we built the motor with high compression the motor is not meant to run boost or at least not very much boost. Our goal was to have a bad ass Pro Touring car that could travel cross country and run the track with no problem and we well exceeded that!

What’s been the biggest challenge with this build? The biggest challenge with the overall project was all of the aftermarket sheet metal, nothing fits as good as factory parts do. Like I said pretty much every piece of metal on the car has been replaced, such as the doors, fenders, roof, fender wells, and floors. None of those pieces fit like we wanted them to. We had to cut, weld and chop up brand new sheet metal that cost us a lot, so it was pretty heartbreaking to take those pieces and cut them up, but it was well worth it because the end result came out better than it would have if we would have just left it alone.