In 1983 my wife bought a new Camaro. To her it looked a lot like Kit on Knight Rider and that is what she called it.

Of course Kit was a Trans Am and the Camaro did share some body tin I suppose but they were pretty much totally different cars. Hers was as plain Jane as was ever built. It had the smallest V6 available at the time. It came with an AM/FM stereo and the 6 speaker premium sound system but that was about all it had going for it.

The OEM equipment package included power steering, power disk brakes, tilt wheel, reclining bucket seats, tinted windows, and the 14” stamped steel 'mag' wheels with chrome beauty rings.

We drove the smeg out or that car. I did have to replace the water pump and for a while I had a bad time keeping ignition coils in it. It developed a knock and a miss that turned out to be one of the push rods for the valves had worn through the rocker arm. I went to a junk yard and pulled the whole rocker arm assembly out of another engine and put it in right at the junk yard. We drove another 30,000 miles after that.

It started showing its age pretty badly but would still shine up like a new nickle with a little elbow grease and some turtle wax.

The odometer showed something like 140,000 miles when I sold it but that was only because the odometer could not show the other 100,000 miles. There were not enough places on the mileage indicator.

I sold it for $1,500 even with that many miles on it. I made no secret of it having more miles than the odometer could show. I told the kid who bought it that just because it was a Camaro that did not mean it was a performance car, it never had been, it just looked sorta like one.

He blew the engine up the first week he had it. He had been down on the dyke in Clinton Iowa doing Texas J's. I saw his daddy drag it home. In a week or so he had replaced the V6 with a 350 and went back to the dyke.

This time he blew up the transmission. Again, doing Texas J's.

The turbo hydro 350 transmission was used in a lot of GM vehicles but the ones intended for use in V6 equipped cars did not have nearly as many clutches in them, the clutch drum simply would not hold them all. You had to change it for one intended for use in a V8 power car.

If you bolted a V8 up to a transmission intended for a V6 you could not expect it to hold up, especially if it already had 200K+ on it.

Again I saw his daddy drag it home for him. This time they went with a 4 speed transmission. The conversion is not all that hard just time consuming to get it all right.

Once he got the car on the road again he was a bit more careful with it but still managed to take out three other cars with it one snowy day.

There was enough body damage this time that his daddy boned it.