How Chevy’s fairly secret COPO special car program came about during the late 1960s is actually ironic, because the COPO program in itself was originally setup to build taxis, police and other vehicles that served utilitarian purposes.
This was in spite of the well adopted belief that the Central Office Production Order program (COPO) was established by GM in order to offer buyers factory race cars in a time when the other American automakers were exhausting resources to “out cubic inch” each other.
President of Automotive Services Corporation, Jim Mattison explains how the COPO program was started by Chevrolet’s director of product promotions, Vince Piggins,
“Vince truly loved his job and was quite the visionary as far as seeing the need for a product and going back to the engineering group to see if we could satisfy some of those needs…”
Piggin’s then new COPO program mostly revolved around the First Gen Camaros, and the ZL1 optioned COPO was one of the best examples of Vince Piggin’s ability to foresee buyers’ wants and needs.
This is because out of the few COPO Camaros that were ever built, even fewer ZL1s were stuffed with the all aluminum version of the 427.
Most of the COPOs were stuffed with the cast iron, L72 427 which was advertised as 425 horsepower, though these advertised outputs always seemed to be up in the air at the peak of the horsepower wars.
The COPO cars lost Chevy money before they ever brought it in, but track worthy horsepower was the aim of the game and not profits.
In 1967 when the first SS Camaro was ever sold to the public, a 350 and 396 option were made available. The hottest factory performance option for the brand new Camaro was the 375 horse version of the 396 big-block.
Don Yenko of Yenko Chevrolet in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania became the godfather of big-block Camaro performance, as he built some of the first 427 Camaros to become part of the dealer car canon. In 1967, GM’s corporate rule of thumb was that the 427 big-block could not be stuffed into anything smaller than an Impala.
Corvettes basically governed themselves during the late part of the ’60s, as they followed their own unique list of rules. At the same time, the L72 and ZL1 427s represented the best in Chevy’s race motor development.
Being that this was the case, Don Yenko’s policy became simple: “If you can make it go faster, just do it.”
This straight forward philosophy became a radical contrast to the General’s corporate level confines, which without Yenko and other GM COPO dealers would have successfully suffocated the 400 plus cube potentiality of the subframed, SS350 Camaro.
In door slamming contrast to the typical muscle cars of the late ’60s going into the very early ’70s that were adorned with special motor badges, racing stripes and functional hood scoops, the COPO Camaros and other 427 COPO cars severely lacked any badges or stripes that would give them away as race cars.
Yenko, Dana and the other prominent performance dealers of the day invented the “door slammer” during the last part of the ’60s. It’s true that the 409 and other legendary motors achieved drag racing greatness only a few years before. But before Yenko and the entire COPO program, true racing cars just weren’t ordered in showrooms as far as the Bowtie scene was concerned.