If you can set aside the nostalgic assumption that every sporty ’60s coupe must necessarily be a big-engine muscle car, there’s no shame in a six-cylinder first-gen Camaro, especially a modestly equipped car like this 1967 example, whose Rally Sport grille and hidden headlights are backed by an L22 250-cid six and three-on-the-tree.
Although the 250 would later become the base Camaro engine, it was a $26.35 option in 1967, RPO L22. With 155 gross horsepower, the 250 wasn’t a recipe for a drag strip champion, but a minimally optioned Camaro sport coupe like this one had a curb weight of less than 3,000 lb, which made it reasonably spry.
A Car Life road test in March 1967 found that a 250/3-speed Camaro could do 0 to 60 in 11.4 seconds, better than some contemporary bread-and-butter V-8 sedans, and returned 19.2 mpg. For 1967, that was more than adequately quick and respectably economical.
For buyers who wanted a good-looking commuter car and didn’t care about back seat space, a Camaro like this was a pretty good deal. It was infinitely better-looking than a Nova or a Falcon, but it was still affordable to buy — sticker price could be under $2,800, if you could do without power steering — and cheap to feed and maintain. That was what a lot of buyers of these cars actually wanted, and while most people ordered the base 327 and Powerglide, Chevrolet sold more six-cylinder Camaros in 1967 than they did SS350, SS396, and Z/28 cars combined: 26.6 percent of production.
Ordering three-on-the-tree on a Camaro had its pros and cons. The three-speed didn’t cost anything extra, it had a synchronized low gear, and it extracted better performance and economy from the sixes than Powerglide did. On the other hand, the column shift linkage was cumbersome and not very sporty.
A three-pedal car like this was also a bad choice for buyers interested in trade-in value. Say you ordered a six-cylinder, three-speed Camaro with a radio, but no power steering or big-ticket accessories, with a sticker price of $2,700. After two years, its Kelley Blue Book trade-in value would be only $1,175 — you saved $268.65 upfront by skipping power steering and Powerglide (or the wide-ratio four-speed, optional on the six), but it would cost you $325 on the back end.
I must confess I never really got the appeal of the first-gen Camaro Z22 Rally Sport package. It sounds like it should have been some kind of performance option, but it was basically just a way to get buyers to pay an inflated price for concealed headlights. Listed on the order form as RPO Z22, it was $105.35 including federal tax. It included the same features as the Z21 Style Trim Group ($29.50 of bright moldings and body side paint stripes), plus a new black plastic grille with concealed headlights. There were also a few other minor trim tweaks you probably wouldn’t notice without reference to the catalog, and a bunch of “RS” emblems to tell the world that you’d paid a hundred bucks for concealed headlights and chrome drip rails.
Concealed headlights have always been a mixed blessing. They usually look cool when closed — the ones on the 1967 Camaro RS certainly did that, whatever my doubts about their value for money — but they sometimes look very awkward when opened, and older ones were often not very reliable with age. The headlight motors on the white car in the photos didn’t work at the time this car was sold in July 2024. (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 112, which requires that concealed headlamps stay open if the concealment mechanism fails, didn’t take effect for another two years.)
On the other hand, the RS package was a definite boon to resale value. Dealers really liked trim options like this — fancy trim was an easier sell on the used car lot than mechanical options like disc brakes (which even six-cylinder Camaros could really have used) — and KBB allowed an extra $50 on the trade-in side for a Rally Sport car. If this car had had the $73.75 vinyl roof, that would have been worth another $50 after two years.
There was no allowance for the bright metal wheel covers (RPO P01), a $21.10 option, but they probably didn’t hurt, although one of the ones on this car has a nasty dent.
The white car is a “20-footer”: It was repainted at some point, and the paint and chrome still look pretty good, especially with the thorough detailing I assume it got for its auction photo shoot. Looking closer reveals a lot of rust around the edges, but nothing seems too catastrophic yet, and the buyer might well decide to just leave it alone for now, judging it good enough.
For me, that’s kind of the vibe of the first-gen Camaro in general, especially in its more modest forms. The rare Z/28 excepted, there was nothing that exciting about these cars mechanically (this one, like most ’67s, has drum brakes all around and Mono-Plate single leaf springs in back), and neither their dynamics nor their fit and finish could bear much scrutiny.
However, if your priorities were basic competence and lots of style for low, low monthly payments, it was easy to see the appeal — and it’s always refreshing today to see one of these basic models that hasn’t been resto-modded beyond recognition or transformed into a clone of one of the more powerful buff book darlings.
Related Reading
Vintage CL Road Test: Two 1967 Camaros, 250 Six and SS350 – “Both Have Virtue And Plenty Of Performance” (by Rich Baron)
COAL #1: 1967 Camaro – Who Needs a V-8? (by Ed Hardey)
1967 Chevrolet Camaro RS Convertible With A 250 Six – Have It Your Way (by Rich Baron)
Curbside Classic: 1969 Chevrolet Camaro – The Last Unmolested ’69 Camaro Six Daily Driver In The World? (by Paul N)
So Just How Many Camaro Sixes Were Built (1967-1976)? And How Many Camaro Six Posts Have We Had At CC? (by Paul N)
I have always thought that one thing Ford did right with the Mustang that the competition muffed was that every Mustang buyer got a floor shifter. By the mid 60’s, that column-shift manual 3 speed reminded everyone of Uncle Clem’s strippo Biscayne or Valiant. My 68 Mustang was a 6/3 speed, but with the shifter on the floor (and even better, popping up out of a console) the car felt as sporty inside as it looked outside.