Our intrepid Road Test Editor HOWARD WALKER smokes up a storm in Chevrolet’s hottest SS street fighter.
So what’s a guy going to do when he slides behind the wheel of a flame red, bad-ass Camaro SS with a 6.2-liter LS3 Corvette motor up front packing 426 horses and six on the floor? Of course, he’s going to burn more rubber than Big John Force at the Gatornationals. Off with the traction control.
Into First. Dial-up six-grand on the tach, and simply step off the clutch. Yow-eeee. Talk about fricasse’d Firestones!
And with 420 foot-pounds of twist being channeled to those monster 20-inch rears, the smoke just billows like a California brush fire. Heck you could read a chapter of War & Peace, or learn Swahili, before the rubber finally hooks up and the Camaro goes off on its merry way. Thanks to a trick software program called Launch Control, you can floor the throttle and step off the clutch and the on-board Dell will manage the torque and feed in the wheelspin. The result? Zero-to-60 in a searing 4.6 seconds.
Here is the modern-day pony car king; a true Yankee musclecar that mangles the 2010 Mustang, and kicks the butt of Dodge’s lardy new Challenger.
See the Chevy in the metal, and those cascading, curvy lines are enough to make grown men cry. And the beauty here is that unlike the Challenger and Mustang, which stick boringly to their retro roots, the new Camaro is a fresh, modern take on its originator.
Two engine options – well, three actually – are up for grabs. The "base" model – not that there’s anything remotely base about it – gets the terrific 3.6-liter 304-hp direct-injection V6 out of Cadillac's CTS. Opt for the big 6.2-liter V8 with the six-speed auto and you get an L99 motor that makes 400-hp and 410 foot-pounds of torque. It comes with Active Fuel Management too, which reduces its thirst by shutting down four cylinders when throttle action is low.
But Camaro heaven is the full house, fire-breathing 426-hp motor coupled to a Tremec six-speed manual. This thing has muscle in its spit. Yes, it’ll blast off the line like it’s been fired out of a Ringling Bros. canon, but its massive serving of low-end grunt makes it a joy to drive in cut-and-thrust daily driving. It’s super-refined too, delivering all the right, horny V8 rugga-rugga-rugga noises from low speed, but it never sounds boomy or breathless even as the tach needle sweeps towards the 6,400rpm redline.
And while you won’t confuse the Tremec with the snick-snick shift action of an S2000 Honda, it’s super-precise and has the long throw and heft you expect of a muscle car. Pity, however, that the Camaro’s pedals are in different zip codes; GM engineers must think that heel-and-toeing is something you do in a country music line dance!
But no matter how fast this new Camaro gets off the line, its real appeal is the way it handles itself. The Holden-based platform is truly superb, delivering poise, balance, and an agility that will thrill any hard-core wheelman.
The steering might feel a little light initially, but it is as precise as a surgeon’s scalpel and offers a ton of feedback. And with 245/45 Pirelli PZero rubber up front and 275/40s at the rear, this thing sticks to the blacktop like Wrigley’s to a running shoe.
And that independent rear end is simply brilliant at coping with pretty much every rut, ridge or pothole you throw at it. It makes the Camaro a truly fun-handling car that feels much more competent, capable and “grown-up” than its image suggests.
And you’ll love the cabin, with its look and feel of the ’69 original. Those squared-off instruments, cool center console quad gauge pack, and George Jetson jet-thruster heat-and-vent controls are retro nirvana. What sucks however, is the quality of the interior trim. Some of the plastic, especially on the center console, looks like something Trabant would have rejected.
But when you’re paying $31,795 for a base SS – around $36k very nicely loaded – you could forgive it anything.
For more information about the 2010 Camaro, please visit http://www.chevrolet.com/camaro/