Although not quite the celebrity of it’s older brothers of 1969 ,the 1970 9796 COPO option for the Z28 holds an interesting place in racing history. On the surface one might not even notice anything more than a Z28.
Let’s travel back to early 1970 and where the story begins……
The 1970 Trans Am season was a replay of the prior year's manufacturer wars with one major exception, the Shelby Racing team pulled out of Trans Am racing totally. Trans Am racing had become the top race in the country. Attendance was way up at the races. The Z-28 Camaros and Boss 302s were competing for street sales with the public.
The competition was going to be tough in 1970. Leaving Chevy Penske took his team, including Mark Donahue to American Motors. The Chevy team was at a great disadvantage. The loss of the Penske team and a new body that wasn't scheduled for release until mid model year threatened Chevy's repeat of the 1969 win in 1970. Jim Hall quickly put two Camaros together. One to be driven by him and the other driver was Ed Leslie. Even though GM was officially uninvolved in racing, the Hall Camaros were factory race cars.
The early testing and competition proved a disappointment for the Chevy team. Handling issues and other problems vexed the cars. One of the dominant problems was lack of stability at higher speeds. It was found that the short production spoiler was not creating the desired effect at speed and in fact was reducing down force. The team went to a large duck tail rear spoiler with AO Smith tooled end caps to eliminate the stability issues and get the car firmly back on the ground. Only one problem, SCCA required equipment used in Trans-Am race series to be production based, and needed at least 1000 cars with the option prior to racing approval (homologated).
Time was of the essence, the season was starting and in order to use the larger spoiler production cars were needed fast. In order to get this done a Central Office Production Order (COPO 9796) was used. With some smooth talking, Team Chevy was able to convince SCCA officials that the duck tail spoilers had met the production requirements as the first COPO 9796 cars were being built. In fact there is no real accounting for the number of COPO cars manufactured. It is believed the figure is less than 500. Chevy went through the 1970 series with disappointing results and resigned from the Trans Am series the end of 1970.
Moving forward it was noted that the “Tall” spoiler was extremely popular with the public and the COPO 9796 option actually replaced the short spoiler as RPO D80 in subsequent years. The COPO 9796 although developed for high speed road racing is the only COPO option ever to be move into standard production and was utilized for several years. -Carl Bolander
Thanks Carl for the story and your participation in the Nickey Chicago Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals! FYI- Carls application was the VERY First application we recieved for the show!
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