by Bert Meinders

Created on: December 15, 2008

In 1959 the Ford Falcon was announced. By American standards it was a small car, and in the spirit of Ettore Bugatti and Herbert Austin it was "a big car in miniature". It was Robert McNamara's response to the remarkable success of the Studebaker Lark, although unlike that car it was an entirely new design and not a full-sized car with a yard of useless but heavy overhang deleted.

In 1964, Lee Iacocca's coupe version of the Falcon, called the Mustang, took the automotive world by storm. General Motors had to compete.

Carmakers do not admit it readily, but some cars made by rival companies have a profound effect on the design and marketing of their products (Consider the BMC Mini, or the Renault Espace.) In 1965, Bertone Design built a body to their own design on a Mustang platform, making no engineering changes under the skin, by which I mean that the entire Mustang substructure was kept unchanged, and could have gone into production in the next model year, if Ford so desired.

Ford declined, but someone in GM noticed the car, which embodied many styling cues found later on the Chevrolet Camaro. The resemblance forward of the windscreen is close, while the rear end of the car looks more like the early seventies version of the Camaro.

The Camaro's lines are cleaner and more cohesive than the Mustang's, and it is likely that the Camaro was also better dynamically in the cheaper versions; the suspension was a bit more sophisticated and some of the engines may have been better. The Mustang, under its dramatic body, was very much a Falcon at heart, with the outstanding exception of the Shelby version. The basic Camaro, and in reality most of them were powered either by a six-cylinder engine or a softly-tuned V8 with automatic transmission. The suspension was biased more towards comfort than handling, especially in regard to damping (a surprisingly expensive part of suspension engineering), and the steering and brakes did nothing to encourage fast driving. The faster Camaro variants were, of course, a different story with more direct steering, disc brakes at the front and firm springs with effective dampers. The Z28 took a characteristically European approach to performance with a short-stroke V8 of just 4.9 litres capacity, relying on high RPM to get high power.

Like the Mustang, the Camaro was available with big-block engines. Like the Mustang, it was no faster thus equipped than with the fiercer small-block engines, which being lighter did not spoil the handling.

I have written about the Camaro in the context of the Mustang because one led inevitably to the other. Both were commercially very successful, both had a performance image, and both sold mostly as image cars, with soft engines and soft handling. Ironically, both were capable of being made, easily, into proper fast cars, although neither was ever a sports car.

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