Thanks To A Huge Aftermarket And A Hunger For The Latest Trend, Building A High-End, Pro Touring Car Is Just A Catalog And A Checkbook Away. Here's How One Company Did It.
Most Dare To Be Different cars require a good deal of know-how, imagination, and fabrication ability to complete because it's likely there won't be many ready-to-go, off-the-shelf parts available, especially if the plan calls for real performance instead of just style. Only a decade or so ago, the same was mostly true of even the most popular musclecars. Most of the parts dedicated to a particular year and model were restoration-oriented, not performance-minded, so to build a full-on Pro Touring car required an impressively outfitted shop and a builder with advanced knowledge of chassis preparation and serious fabrication ability. Not so much today.
We're at a point where almost anything you want for your project can be mail-ordered, ready to install, and in many cases tailored to your specific needs. Not surprisingly, at the forefront of this bolt-on revolution are first-generation Camaros, with an amazing amount of highly sophisticated, OE-level equipment available. As long as you can come up with a solid, '67-'69 Camaro body, it's feasible to put together a killer Pro Touring car in your garage with a minimal amount of fabrication work. The clean, understated, black car here, known as Fuel, is a perfect example of the extent of the possibilities out there. Of course, this car was built by pros at G-Force Design Concepts (www.gforcedesignconcepts.com), so there's a level of execution here that will be hard for the average Joe to match. But let's go beyond that arrow-straight sheetmetal and flawless black paint and look at what's underneath.
As fledgling builders who have only been in the hot-rod arena for a couple of years, the guys at G-Force have been consistently stepping up the potency of their project cars, and following the great response generated from their '65 Mustang fastback project known as Quicksilver, it was time to build a Camaro to match. The problem is that nowadays, it's nearly impossible to build a '69 Camaro that stands out from the crowd, since virtually everything has been done to them already. The answer was not to try to outdo other shops with gimmicky parts but to build a car that would appeal to anyone with a Pro Touring jones when it came to suspension and performance. They eschewed the current bright and flashy, look-at-me style common to some Pro Touring cars by creating a more subtle and understated look.
What they ended up with was a sinisterly sensible '69 Camaro that boasts the right look, and they didn't have to reinvent the Camaro to build it. Though the dramatic visual impact of the finished car implies otherwise, it's actually a fairly basic recipe. For the body, the G-Force crew chose to rely on the strength of the Camaro's stock lines, so they simply stripped down a clean, original '69 RS Camaro and perfected the sheetmetal and subframe to factory-fresh standards before laying down layers of black paint everywhere.