From the April 1994 issue

Just before it crashed to earth in a smoldering knot of bankrupt wreckage, one of America's crooked savings-and-loan institutions, amidst much panicked parboiling of hooks and ledgers, described its lack of cash as an "ephemeral fiscal shortfall." Imaginative euphemisms are an American tradition. Recall, for instance, one other: "the unfair advantage." That was the annotation Roger Penske and Mark Donohue, throughout their long partnership, affixed to what was, in less well-heeled circles, known more commonly—if somewhat inelegantly—as, uh, cheating.

The first of the famous unfair-advantage Penske/Donohue creations was the 1967 Camaro you see here. At the end of the '67 SCCA Trans-Am season, after Donohue had piloted it to victories at Las Vegas and Seattle, SCCA tech inspectors discovered that most of this Camaro's metal bits and all of its body panels were acid-dipped—an ethically questionable process carried out at Lockheed Aerospace in California. This acid bath reduced the Camaro's weight from the stock 2920 pounds to an Oprah Slim-Fast 2550 pounds. At which point Donohue, who of course ultimately had to strap himself into the thing, became alarmed about the car's structural rigidity, then roughly akin to a 15-foot roll of Reynolds Wrap. His solution was to install a NASCAR-style roll cage, one of the first in sports-car racing. The cage effectively served as the car's frame.

SCCA's tech inspectors were bemused by the roll cage—a new sight—but were downright snotty about the see-through body panels. They told Donohue after a race at Modesto that the car "was banned forever and would never see the light of day in any SCCA race." If Donohue showed up with it again, he'd be suspended and beaten on the kidneys with large saps.

Mark and Roger did not scare easily. At the start of the 1968 season, they entered two Camaros at Sebring, which at the time was a combined 12-hour Trans-Am and sports-car enduro. One car was a legal, standard-weight 1968 Camaro. The other was the same old '67 acid-dipped cheater—mildly disguised—which crew members had by then affectionately dubbed "The Lightweight."

View Photos DON HUNTER

"So we pulled a tricky stunt," Donohue later recounted to Chevy engineer and author Paul Van Valkenburgh. "I carefully shaped the number circles so they could be easily interchanged between the number 16 for one car and number 15 for the other. First we went through [tech] inspection with the heavy [and legal] number 15 car, then we went back to our garage on the far side of the track, put the number 16 on it, and went back through inspection again. Nobody said anything."

It was a brazen deception, particularly because Penske's team had neglected to remove the cheater's wing-vent windows and had also forgotten to install side-marker lights, items that instantly distinguished "The Lightweight" as a year-old car. Mark and Roger weren't concerned. Fresh in their memories were a variety of raw run-ins with SCCA the year prior, and the partners relished rubbing the club's autocratic nose in whatever unfair advantages they could contrive.

"By changing the numbers around again," Donohue recalled, "and entering the track where our garage was, instead of through the pits, we even used the dipped car to qualify for both cars. Funny to think we could put one over on them like that." Also funny was that the dipped, cheater Camaro was 1.5 seconds per lap quicker than the new car, and it rocketed to an easy win in its Trans-Am class at Sebring. Funnier still, this lowly, live-axle, primitive Camaro finished third overall there—blowing off the likes of Ford GT40s, Lola T-70s, a Ferrari LM, even a Howmet Turbine—and might have won outright were it not for two blindingly fast mega-Deutschmark Porsche 907s, which finished first and second.

This 1967 Camaro, assembled by Donohue and only one other mechanic, was the second in a series of six that Penske would unleash on the Trans-Am tour. Each was laden with unfair advantages—trick brake calipers that allowed the crew to change pads in eight seconds; cleverly reconfigured noses that drooped raffishly toward the tarmac but looked stock to the inspectors' tape measures; and wafer-thin roofs whose proclivity to buckle and warp required that they be hidden by black vinyl. ("We just like the look of vinyl," Penske once told a deeply suspicious SCCA official.) Still, the '67 Lightweight remains the most famous and historically interesting of that hot half-dozen.

View Photos DON HUNTER

Now, thanks to 47-year-old Pat Ryan of Montgomery, Alabama, old number 15 has been painstakingly restored to perfection. And it is racing again. This task was neither simple nor inexpensive. Since 1968, the Camaro had filtered through the hands of seven owners, was briefly converted to a Firebird, had been crashed several times, and the documents proving its highfalutin pedigree had long since evaporated into the ether.

Ryan, however, is a historian for the Sportscar Vintage Racing Association (SVRA) and was qualified to embark upon some in-depth sleuthing. His Hohnesian detective methods uncovered unimpeachable GM-racing spoor: a rear-axle housing number that could be traced only to a rare batch of 22 such housings produced by Chevy in 1967 and '68.

Ryan noticed that the car's left-front fender was obviously acid-dipped—it is so thin that you can make dimples in the metal with your fingers. And then he spied the clincher: a brake master cylinder with no serial number or manufacturing ID whatsoever. He asked GM about the piece and heard this: It was an experimental master cylinder, a prototype, and the only one produced. It had been shipped to Penske and was installed on a Camaro with the words "Penske Godsall Racing" stenciled on both front fenders. Ryan had his car.

Specifications VEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 1-passenger, 2-door race car

ESTIMATED PRICE: $240,000

ENGINE TYPE: V-8, cast-iron block and heads

Displacement: 305 cu in, 4992 cc

Power: 440 bhp @ 7200 rpm

Torque: 358 lb-ft @ 5500 rpm

TRANSMISSION: 4-speed manual

DIMENSIONS:

Wheelbase: 108.1 in

Length: 184.6 in

Width: 72.5 in Height: 51.4 in

Curb weight: 3197 lb

C/D TEST RESULTS:

Zero to 60 mph: 4.2 sec

Zero to 100 mph: 9.4 sec

Zero to 130 mph: 16.0 sec

Standing ¼-mile: 12.5 sec @ 116 mph

Top speed (redline limited): 150 mph

Braking, 70-0 mph: 185 ft

Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.95 g

FUEL ECONOMY:

Typical racing fuel economy (racing gasoline): 4 mpg

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