Welcome to the Historic USV8 cars featured in the V8 Power Pack. Detroit’s Golden Age of Creative Engineering.
By the end of the 1960s, America’s premier production-based road-racing series had become a delightfully inventive exercise in taking something that resembled the car in your neighbour’s driveway and asking how much of it could be reworked before scrutineers started reaching for rulebooks and slide rules. The answer, of course, was—a lot.
Get to know these legendary cars in this blog.
Roger Penske and Mark Donohue had already established the Camaro as the benchmark car by 1969 on the back of Chevrolet’s ’68 manufacturers’ title in a season that featured Donohue’s 10 race wins.
The secret of success? Let’s put it down to some creative rule interpretations. The ’69 Camaro coming to Project Motor Racing is the evolution of that legendary, dominant ’68 Camaro.
Half a decade later, Mark Donohue would reveal much of what he and Penske had been getting up to in The Unfair Advantage, his autobiography written during his 1974 sabbatical and published in 1975 (before that F1 race in Austria that would claim his life).
As the title suggests, finding clever ways to interpret, and occasionally exploit the rules was an integral part of his engineering mindset. Donohue was one of the great engineer-drivers of an era when data acquisition was primitive and driver feedback remained fundamental to performance. And few did it better than Donohue. Indeed, when Porsche went all-in on Can-Am with Penske in the early ’70s, Donohue became central to the development of the turbocharged 917/10 and, later, the monstrous 917/30.
Which brings us back to Penske’s infamous “Lightweight” Camaro, the ’67 car that, despite having been effectively banned, Penske rather cheekily brought back out for 1968.
That creative rule reading saw the Camaro’s steel body getting an “acid dip”. A chemical process that eats away metal until the shell becomes dramatically lighter. Period accounts say it dropped from roughly 2,920 lb to around 2,550 lb and became so thin that Donohue was concerned about structural rigidity, prompting the installation of an extensive NASCAR-style cage that effectively became part of the chassis.
Why bother if the car still had to meet the minimum weight requirement, you ask? Because ballast could then be used where Donohue wanted it, lowering the centre of gravity and improving weight distribution. That was classic Donohue: don’t merely make the car lighter but find ways to then make it work even better.
By 1969, Penske’s now-famous Sunoco Camaros were the finished article. Donohue won six rounds that season, while Ronnie Bucknum added two more, easily delivering Chevrolet another manufacturers’ crown. Back then there wasn’t a drivers’ championship, just manufacturers’, because this was all about Detroit settling boardroom grudges where it mattered most: on the racetrack on Sunday … and the showroom floors on Monday.
The Camaro’s legacy was quick to take hold. This was the car that made everyone else start reading the regulations with a magnifying glass. Almost six decades later, it remains an icon of American road racing.
Ford’s response to the Camaro came via Bud Moore Engineering, with the legendary Parnelli Jones and George Follmer doing the wheelwork, and Kar Kraft helping turn the Boss 302 into something considerably less showroom-standard than its shape suggested.
By 1970, chemically thinning a body was hardly an exotic idea anymore, and the Mustang was also “chemically milled” to approximately half its original sheet-metal thickness. Kar Kraft then extensively rewelded the structure, reinforced suspension pickup points and installed a substantial roll cage.
Under the bonnet sat the iconic Ford 302 cubic-inch V8, and Jones drove the thing as though he’d been promised ownership of a dealership if he stuck it to Chevy enough time in a season.
He took five victories in 1970, Follmer added another, and Ford reclaimed the manufacturers’ championship from Chevrolet.
When Plymouth decided to enter the stock car war, they took one look at Donohue and Penske, another at Follmer and Parnelli Jones, and hightailed it back to Detroit where they called in the cavalry from California.
That came in the guise of none other than Dan Gurney and his All American Racers, with Gurney initially doing the wheelwork before the suitably named Swede Savage took over the pedals.
Yes, this was the same Dan Gurney who Car and Driver had nominated for President in 1964, and the man who started motorsport’s champagne-spraying tradition after winning Le Mans in 1967.
And also yes, building a suspiciously clever Barracuda was hardly going to be the first time Gurney created something mind-bending—like the Eagle-Weslake in which he won the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, becoming the only American to ever win a World Championship Formula 1 Grand Prix in a car of his own construction.
With the Plymouth, Gurney’s AAR team started with the usual acid-dip—described at the time rather innocently as “chemically cleaned”—and then incorporated titanium components, drawing on Gurney’s Indy-car and F1 experience.
But since everyone else was big on rules interpretation, Gurney decided to take it one step further by installing an aluminium casing transmission, despite rules requiring the standard-type iron component. Then AAR coated the aluminium casing with an iron-containing finish just in case any scrutineers decided to take out any magnets. The 340-derived V8 was then de-stroked to meet the series’ roughly five-litre limit.
Swede Savage would go on to prove the car genuinely had race-winning pace—taking three pole positions in 1970—but reliability would be the curse that the ’Cudas could never quite get on top of.
It remains, though, one of the more fascinating pieces of engineering to come out of stock car racing’s golden era.
And finally, the unlikely champion. With the iconic and never-forgotten red, white, and blue livery. A car born out of pure spite, a need for vengeance, and the dreams of a smaller brand that dared to dream big.
See, by the end of 1969, Roger Penske, who’d given Chevrolet two straight titles, was getting fed up with Chevy execs suggesting they deserved all the credit.
When Ford racing boss Homer Perry reportedly told Penske that without Chevy building his cars, he’d have won nothing, Penske decided it was time to prove a point … from the boardrooms in Detroit to the pitlanes of Road Atlanta.
But how? Well, there was this outfit named AMC who were running their Javelin programme that was doing nothing much to beat Detroit’s giants. What they needed was some leadership. And when they heard Penske and Donohue were on the verge of walking away from the Camaro program, the execs at AMC decided to put in a call.
Two years later, AMC were champions. Spite, it turns out, is the best development budget money can buy.
But let’s go back a bit, to when Penske and Donohue ditched Chevy and moved to AMC. Engineer Don Cox later recalled that the Javelin was effectively running on its bump stops, so Penske got to work redesigning major elements of the rear suspension, including the axle housing, hubs, locating system, and braking arrangement.
Then there was the engine. AMC’s original racing unit was badly down on power, so Traco developed a legal five-litre engine by de-stroking a larger AMC V8.
Donohue also influenced the Javelin’s aerodynamics. His rear spoiler became so vital to the race programme that AMC were forced to build 2,501 “Mark Donohue” Javelins to homologate it for competition.
By 1971, the work paid off spectacularly. Donohue won seven races, including six consecutively, and AMC took its first manufacturers’ championship.
A year later, AMC did it again with Roy Woods Racing running the factory programme while George Follmer won the newly introduced Drivers’ Championship for good measure.
And there you have it: the historic heroes of stock car racing’s golden era coming to Project Motor Racing with the V8 Power Pack.
Chevrolet had Penske ingenuity. Ford had Bud Moore. Plymouth had Dan Gurney quietly introducing aerospace thinking and magnetic deception.
And AMC? AMC had spite, desire, and Mark Donohue and Roger Penske with a point to prove.
Welcome to Historic USV8: where “production-based” was less a description than an opening argument — and the cleverest engineer-driver pairing usually won.
Yours to experience in Project Motor Racing with the V8 Power Pack.