2012 COPO Camaro:  GMs Baddest Factory Camaro Ever! - HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 6 - video Dailymotion

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Its the baddest factory Camaro ever! The 2012 COPO Camaro is a pure drag racing car built to compete in NHRA Stock Eliminator and Super Stock classes

Transcript

00:00 These days GM offers a Camaro for everybody from the V6 to the SS packages on the street,

00:06 the killer ZL1, the new handling package back here called the 1LE.

00:10 But today we're looking at the badass drag racing package called the Copo Camaro.

00:28 Now kind of the bummer is we're not going to get a chance to drive the car down the track because

00:31 GM hasn't even released how quick it is yet. In fact they won't even tell us exactly the

00:36 horsepower that these things make or even how much they weigh. But what we are going to do is

00:40 talk to some of the guys who are the insiders who built these cars. We're going to show you

00:45 where they assemble them and take you inside a dyno room within GM. In 1969 Chevrolet dealer Fred

00:53 Gibb figured out how to trick Chevrolet into building the car they never really intended

00:57 using a process called the central office production order which was Copo. And what he

01:02 did is he took the all aluminum 427 cubic inch engine that they were running in Can-Am

01:08 and had it put into the 69 Camaro for drag racing use. And now here is the first Copo Camaro since

01:15 1969. A pure drag racing car built by the factory to go heads up in NHRA stock eliminator and super

01:22 stock drag racing against the other factory drag packages. This thing is pure race car. As a matter

01:28 of fact the factory eliminated the independent rear suspension and went with a solid axle. That's

01:34 a strange 9 inch hanging on a four link. Back in 1969 the Copo Camaro was actually a production

01:41 vehicle. You could license it and put a plate on it and drive it on the street. The 2012 Copo is

01:47 really an all out race car. It doesn't have a VIN number, it has a serial number. You can't title

01:53 it or register it. It is literally the first race car that Chevrolet has brought to the drag strip

02:00 for consumers to purchase. We're now moving forward with production for this car and we're

02:05 going to build a total of 69 cars in 2012. Copo Camaro will be available with three different

02:10 engine options for a variety of stock eliminator drag racing. First engine is a 427 naturally

02:16 aspirated motor. The second is a 327 based on the LSX block with a 2.9 liter supercharger.

02:23 And the third engine is a 327 LSX engine with a 4 liter supercharger.

02:41 Right now we're inside the Wixom powertrain plant for GM and it's just an awesome facility

02:46 with CNC machines and guys doing amazing things with computers that we've never seen in the

02:51 aftermarket. They build all the Corvette GTP racing engines here and also all of the Copo

02:57 race engines will be assembled here. But the thing that's really cool is the Copo car itself

03:04 was really born right here on jack stands built by the hot riders who work here at Wixom. They did

03:11 a lot of this after hours and pushed the whole concept uphill at GM and made it happen right

03:16 there and I think that's really cool. Now we're at one of the engine dyno cells here at the Wixom

03:21 powertrain plant and there's a 5.3 liter Copo engine on the dyno, one of the small blower ones.

03:27 It's just amazing data collection here. Check out the infrared screen up there

03:37 so they can see the heat map of the engine while it's running. That's badass.

03:41 Yeah.

03:42 This is pretty cool. This '69 Chevelle was built a few years ago for a story in Hot Rod. It was

04:02 actually a cover story where we took every single performance parts crate engine and put it in the

04:08 car to see how fast it would be in the quarter mile. And now they're using this car for Copo

04:12 development. It's got the 427 engine in it right now. This engine essentially has all of the same

04:16 bits that our production Copo engines will have like the tunnel ram intake manifold, the ATI

04:22 damper and the American Racing stainless exhaust headers, the cylinder heads that will have some

04:30 special work for Copo only use. Now we're next door at GM's performance build center and the

04:36 thing that's really neat here is we found out that each engine is assembled by one worker start to

04:43 finish. And normally these guys are building Corvette engines for the ZL1, ZL6 and Grand Sport,

04:49 but now they have an even more radical project. Kind of transitioning now to a little bit higher

04:54 performance levels with the new Copo Camaro introduction where we'll be hand assembling

05:00 the Copo Camaro long block engines. There's also the opportunity with these engines to

05:06 hand assemble them yourself with a customer build experience.

05:09 It's mic proof. Even I can't screw that up. This thing tightens all the cylinder head bolts

05:20 at the same time and even torques them to spec. It speeds things up and creates a better clamping

05:26 force. I don't even want to go home and build engines anymore. It takes way too long.

05:30 We need one of those. After all the hand work is done we checked out some really awesome machinery

05:38 that test runs every single engine they build and then they move it on to this balance cart where

05:44 they run the engine and it shakes on this table and they're able to dynamically balance the thing

05:49 right there before it goes out and gets stabbed into a car.

05:52 So that was our visit with the new Copo Camaro. They're going to be delivering those cars in

06:00 late June and you'll see them on the drag strip this summer. While we were in town,

06:05 Chevy also let us drive some of the new and wicked Camaros that they've got for the street.

06:10 The one that you probably have heard of is the ZL1 and what's interesting is ZL1 was the name

06:15 for that all-aluminum 427 back in 1969 but this new car doesn't have an all-aluminum 427. As a

06:22 matter of fact it's a 6.2 liter. It's supercharged. It makes 580 horsepower. Chevy's big deal with the

06:30 ZL1 is actually handling. They've been bragging about Nurburgring performance but we wanted to

06:35 run it on the drag strip. The weather didn't let us really thrash on it but we did learn about this

06:41 bitchin feature which is a factory drag racing launch program. You set the thing up and all you

06:47 have to do is floor the gas, bring it up on the rev limiter and dump the clutch and the traction

06:51 control takes over with an optimal launch that was designed for the drag strip by GM at the factory.

06:59 So cool.

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07:14 And finally there's the latest Camaro, the 1LE which is a handling package.

07:19 Basically they took all of the great suspension components off of the ZL1,

07:24 not including the magnetic ride shocks, and applied it to a regular Camaro SS.

07:29 They also made this trick blacked output just so that you would know it's a 1LE.

07:33 And here's a friend of Hot Rod Magazine, Al Oppenheiser, who's the engineer in

07:39 charge of the whole Camaro program and he knows how to do a burnout.

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2012 COPO Camaro: GMs Baddest Factory Camaro Ever! - HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 6

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