February 20, 2009Fort Lauderdale Weekend: Flexing Muscle - The 1994 Chevrolet Z28 Camaro
This past weekend I had occasion to be down in Fort Lauderdale, which meant a happy reunion with my oldest vehicular friend, a lightly driven 1994 teal Chevrolet Z28 Camaro Convertible. The Camaro and I became friends at a time before I could legally drive, when my affection for cars was unwavering yet naïve, with my only real driving experience having been around the track in the IROC go-carts at Costa’s Family Fun Park in Hawley, PA. The Camaro and I met in Maine when my parents came up to visit me at camp in July 1994. Over the years, the Camaro was driven only a few dozen times a year and usually to traverse relatively short distances. My dad’s tireless work to keep the car in top condition is on-going and continues to pay tremendous dividends.
Sure, the CD player skips constantly and the headlights give off about as much light as a pair of Eveready flashlights, but these shortcomings are not what the car is about. The enjoyment derived from a fifteen-year-old Z28 Camaro with just over 26,000 miles on it is the experience of the drive. It is one that I look forward to when I come down to Florida; and during my most recent trip, with few plans and no demands, I had plenty of cruising time to enjoy.
Throw the convertible’s top down, turn the tunes up, floor the gas pedal while riding alongside the Atlantic on A1A and experience bliss. Its tear off the line – enough to pin you to your seat – and its voracious roar – the sound that men participating in a Strongman challenge generate as they flip colossal tires — is the what is meant by the term “muscle”. The Z28 Camaro is American muscle. Acceleration feels like the powerful thrust of two enormous (perhaps steroid-injected) arms.
Like the flesh and blood equivalent that it is meant to connote, “muscle” cars tend to be brazen and they frequently inspire effrontery from their drivers. I certainly find myself exhibiting this behavior when I am behind the wheel of the Z28 Camaro. Thus, when Saturday landed me at a red light behind a circa 2000 Aston Martin DB7 Vantage, I couldn’t resist the urge to pit the brute force of unpretentious US muscle against the subtle strength of stuffy British refinement.
On an aside, I’ve been into what the Brits have to offer, lately. Downtime at work is spent reading the Economist. The iPod is saturated with UK artists like Kate Nash, Amy Winehouse, and the Police. The Spotted Pig is a favorite among Manhattan’s roster of gastronomic indulgences. The man in a Paul Smith suit and a Ted Baker tie is sexiness incarnate. And the British automotive fleet: Aston Martin, Bentley, Rolls Royce, Jaguar, and Range Rover, is the apex of automotive artistic achievement. Each of these cars (save for the few models that have been subject to a character-sapping by Ford) are magnificent to look at and most boast wicked performance metrics, the Aston Martin being my favorite.
So, I, emboldened and feeling nervy at the helm of my favorite ride, zipped through traffic on Route One to chase the Aston Martin, a relatively easy task given the flat terrain, the sparse traffic and the 275 ponies powering the Z28’s 5.7 LT1 engine. As the V12 Aston changed changed lanes, the Camaro changed lanes, as the Aston sped up, the Camaro sped up; I guided the Camaro to mirror the Aston’s every move through about 15 intersections on Route One, hoping for an opportunity to land stopped alongside of the Aston, desperate for a chance to compare the two cars’ explosions off the line from a stand still.
Unfortunately (or fortunately…depending on how you look at it), my scheming proved futile and, after about ten minutes of chasing, the Aston Martin turned west at the precise moment that it was time for me to turn east. While the Aston and I sped away from one another, I couldn’t stop thinking about how my exhilarating muscle car would fare in competition with the DB7 Vantage. Would we see the outcome of the Revolutionary War all over again or would the tea and crumpets clan prove its superiority and put the colonial progeny in its place?
You can probably guess who would prevail in a day at the racetrack (it’s not really a fair “apples” to “apples” comparison); but, if we broke the two vehicles down on a cost per unit of performance basis (a metric that I would have to spend some time and enlist some of my more quantitatively-inclined friends to devise), I wonder how far off the two might turn out. The fifteen-year-old Z28 Camaro packs quite a lot of punch for such a low-profile, relatively inexpensive car.
