Time to go to the A-Plus Mini Mart on a hot day and not buy water. Buy a half-gallon of Clover Farms Icy Tea. Yea, I'm gonna stroll up and down the street holding this ice tea jug by my middle finger. My shoes are from Payless. The sun is blazing up from the blacktop and I'm taking slugs from my tea-jug. I wipe my mouth with my forearm and take a gander about to see if anyone else notices how unstoppable I am. I have five children.

A Corvette is a poor-man's Ferrari 355, and the Camaro is the poor man's Corvette. The Z28 Camaro used the LT1 V8, the same engine the Corvette C4 used! So, the Camaro Z28 is a 4-seat Corvette, right?

Camaro Z28: The Official car of Rumspringing teenagers of Lancaster County sipping boilo out of washed-out A-Treat bottles in Wawa parking lots.

On paper, the 1995 Camaro Z28 was making 275 hp and 325lb-ft of torque. The torque was always the big number. That is what put the affordable Camaro in the dream garage of many 90's kids. It's had that unstoppable grunt that all the little Hondas and even the N/A Supras didn't have. The Z28 doesn't have to downshift to pass on the highway. Mash your foot down and the legendary Chevy 350 pulls into the sunset.

The real trick to Camaros was to nudge the stock 275hp LTI V8 over the 300hp mark. The easiest way to do that was to flip to the back page of a Summit Racing catalog and buy the cheapest Nitrous Oxide system you can find. I'm talking about the one where you get out a quarter-inch drill bit and probe your airbox on the clean side of your airfilter. Then, you go to Radio Shack and get the "DANGER" toggle switch. With the bright red safety cover. How do you mount it? That's easy. Plug in your Harbor Freight soldering iron and melt a square hole down on the center console right next to the shifter. Classic.

Your more sophisticated Camaro owner would make their 90's muscle car faster, not with the engine but, with the rear-end. 2.73 or 3.23 ratios were available for the rear differential. In all street applications, a 3.73 is enough, but the more devilish show-offs would find 4.11 gears (the bigger the number, the lower you gear the whole drive-line). Even with an automatic, tires will spin whenever you want with a 3.73, but 4.11 is what you need to lay rolling burnouts over 100-yards long up Route 30 after the bars close.

Camaro: Z28: The official car of camo shorts in January and not covering up your ankle bracelet with a tube sock.

The C4 Corvette held a privileged position in the GM lineup since it didn't have parts-bin-Lego-construction on the interior. Remember, this is mid 90's General Motors, they "food-serviced" their cars in the same way Taco Bell builds menus.

If anything, it was contempt for the customer that made GM smash together the fourth generation Camaro with its low-quality dash plastic that cracked in the sun, and the spastic steering rack, and a soft top that never closed right, and rear wheel hubs that collected stagnant water and turned to rust. GM really must have had something in for us, maybe they had enough of Ska's Third Wave and, for this, gave drivers hood vents that went nowhere.

But it was that same dolling-out-Oliver-Twist porridge-treatment of the Camaro that made it a cheap success. The Z28 was one of the most inexpensive routes to horsepower in the 90's. Think about it: What was the 1995 Camaro's competition? Fox Body Mustang? Oh wow...a 302 V8. The Ford 302 was an outdated Windsor block that began in 1962 and was kept alive all the way to 1993 or 1994 depending on how you argue about it. Plus, the Ford 302 was about 700cc smaller than the more modern (at the time) GM LT1 350.

There's a reason that the Ford 5.0 was heckled as the Five-Slow. The blocks are Nerfed from Ford and, in the 90's, choked by an EPA-appeasing exhaust gas recirculation system. If you want a Ford 302 to perform, you need to replace a lot of parts. I should know, I am doing the same thing to my 302 for RCR's Vagabond Falcon.

Dodge had the Viper, but in the 90's that car was so expensive, it was only affordable to your town's only orthodontist because he gets kids from both school districts.

Camaro Z28: Brought to you by Backwoods Cigars, Rolling Rock and five percent window tint.

The 90's 4th gen Camaro outclassed the imports too. Supra? Please, The naturally aspirated 2JZ came up short by 22hp and an embarrassing 155-less torque. Even the twin-turbo 2JZ, while it made 45 more horsepower, still couldn't match the Z28's torque, coming up 10 lb-ft short. Worse, the Twin Turbo Supra was "BMW Money" as all my friends' Dads said.

Camaro Z28: "I wanna go FAST."

Look at the Z28 this way: it is a cheesesteak on a cold Autumn day. A Corvette C4 is a steak dinner. A big sloppy cheesesteak is not expensive. It's not complicated and there is no greater meaning to it. It's not a steak dinner, even though the ingredients come from the same source as a superior and revered Corvette meal. What's the problem with taking the heart of the C4 Corvette and putting it in a more affordable body so everyone with a secured credit card can know the feeling of Big-Gulp-Torque?

Do you want to cut donuts behind the loading dock of Big Lots and not feel guilty? Do you want to troll every Scion TC fanboy from Harrisburg to Easton? Do you want to blast Molly Hatchet, Ram-A-Jam and finish it off with three plays of Mountain's "Mississippi Queen?" Then this is the perfect car.

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