General Motors has been building the Chevrolet Camaro since 1967, with a brief respite from 2002 until 2009, when the modern iteration was revived in impressive form. Overall those decades, the Camaro has been available in a ton of different trim packages, offering improvements in performance, style, and comfort. But one stands out as the best of the best, the most desirable, and without a doubt, the most awesome: the Yenko Super Camaro.
So what makes the Yenko Super Camaro so great? Well, a little bit of history comes into play, as the car's legendary origins come down to marketing decisions and the interplay between powerful automotive personalities back in the 1960s.
Don Yenko, The Man And The Legend
The Yenko Super Camaro gets its name from Don Yenko, an American racecar driver from Pennsylvania. Yenko earned his stripes racing Corvettes in the United States, winning the Sports Car Club of America national driving championship four times, as well as competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. By 1957, Yenko had set up a shop modifying Chevys at his family's auto dealership, with the first popular product to come out bearing his name being a modified Corvair, nicknamed "The Stinger."
Yenko built somewhere around 185 Stingers between the years 1965 and 1967, when the Camaro debuted as Chevy's answer to the Ford Mustang. Now, the first-gen Camaro remains a legendary vehicle to this day, thanks to impeccable styling and a range of engine options that included powerful V8 mills.
But GM made the decision not to make the Camaro too powerful, as the company's Corvette still ruled the roost. And Don Yenko just couldn't sit with this decision. The Camaro was limited to a 6.6-liter V8, which meant that the likes of Ford's Mustang, Plymouth Barracuda, and even the Dodge Dart were more powerful from the factory.
The Workaround
Yenko shrewdly decided to build his own high-performance Camaros, ordering cars in SS trim and then dropping in the very same L72 V8 available in the Corvette. Displacing 7.0 liters and producing a claimed 450 horsepower, the Yenko Super Camaro was born in impressive form, including additional add-ons like a fiberglass replacement hood with a nice, big bulge, an upgraded rear end with 4.10 gearing, and heavy duty suspension. Estimates place the number of 1967 Yenko Super Camaros built at 106.
By 1968, Yenko knew he had a hit and decided to up the ante. He placed orders for Camaros in ever better spec by using the COPO system, which stands for Central Office Production Order. He wanted a 140-mile-per-hour speedometer, plus a larger front sway bar. Other modifications for 1968 Yenkos include 16-inch Pontiac wheels with Yenko badging, as well as front and rear spoilers on most of the 64 examples built (again, an estimate since impeccable record-keeping clearly wasn't in Yenko's playbook).
The Rest Is History
For model year 1969, General Motors essentially caved to Yenko and his Super Camaro, opting to just do the modifications through the COPO system rather than having Don's shop work its magic. This would be the final year of the original Yenko, however, which might be chalked up to 201 units built, which reduces desirability, or the fact that the rest of the industry was starting to catch on and catch up. The final year also included more options, from an automatic transmission to power disc brakes and a four-core radiator.
Today, the few Yenko Super Camaros that remain in existence—experts place the number at fewer than half, some even say fewer than a third, of the original crop—have become almost too valuable to drive aggressively. In 2014, a 1968 Super Camaro sold at auction for $320,000. By 2017, values have increased further, as another 1968 example reached a mind-melting $600,000 at a Mecum Auctions event in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Anyone who loves the lore of the Yenko Super Camaro but that can't quite live up to the absurdly high prices that these cars command on the collectible market has a few options—none of them are cheap, though. One company, Brand New Muscle Car, builds officially licensed continuations from scratch. Meanwhile, Specialty Vehicle Engineering, a well-known aftermarket GM tuning company, is happy to convert a modern Camaro into Yenko S/C trim, with the fully licensed right to include the Yenko name on the car and up to 1,000 horsepower on tap thanks to a stroked 6.8-liter LT1 V8 and a set of supercharger options. The latter "only" runs about $67,000 without even including the Camaro being modified.
In the end, the original Yenko remains a fan favorite—and was ushered into the 21st century by none other than Paul Walker, who raced one (and won, obviously) in 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Sources: Motor1, Hemmings, Automobile Mag, and Wikipedia.