Ode to the Camaro Z28

By |  November 5, 2013

Headshot: Seth JonesI should be buying a sports car about now, not selling one. Is this a reverse midlife crisis? ¶ For the last 20 years I’ve been driving a Camaro. My current Camaro is a 2002 Z28, (5.7 liter V8 with 310 hp at 5200 RPM) red with a black top. It’s the third Camaro I’ve owned since 1994. ¶ And soon, it will surely be the last one I ever owned.

I’ve got two young kids — one 7, the other 2. I can handle the hypocrisy of toting one small child in the back of a sports car, but two? How sad is a red Camaro with two child car seats in the back?

And yet the end of my Camaro days came unexpectedly. I was at my mom’s house a few weeks ago. In her driveway is my dad’s old truck. Dad died four years ago. Dad had a nice 1999 Dodge Ram V8 truck. It was sitting there in the driveway, just aging, dead battery, cobwebs in the door jambs. This was the truck that Dad and I always took fishing, you know?

“Mom, what are you going to do with Dad’s truck?” I asked her. “Nothing,” she said. “But I can’t get rid of it.”

So I opened my dumb mouth. “Why don’t you let me drive it for a few years?”

“I think your dad would love that,” she told me.

Great idea at first. It’s a nice truck. Just needed a little work (by “a little,” I mean “$1,000.”)

But the problem? I already had two vehicles. The aforementioned Camaro, as well as my first car, a 1964 Chevy Impala (2-door, 327, baby blue with a white top and glasspacks.) There’s no way the missus would let me get away with keeping three cars.

So, goodbye, Camaro. You’ve been a fun ride. But practicality wins today. I can’t get both kids inside you, my wife can’t drive you and you’re worthless in the snow.

Sigh…

It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever own a car that fast again. The Z jumped off the line, screamed through turns and laughed at steep inclines. I recently enjoyed the highlight of my Camaro years with this Z28 when I took it on a three-lap joyride around the turns of the Kansas Speedway. My adrenaline was pumping for that, let me tell you! I only got it up to 90 on the turns (they had a pace car and motorcycle cops monitoring drivers during the event) but it was still so cool.

I remember when I bought that red Z in 2002. I was in Mulvane, Kan., helping my dad build a new back deck at their house. Dad had the oldies channel on all day while we worked. Every commercial break, the same commercial came on — Rock Chevrolet in Mulvane begging people to come take their last 2002 Z28s off their hands. They were offering 60 month zero-percent financing, which caught my ear.

Camaro

Photo: Seth Jones

As soon as we were done with the deck, my old man asked me what I wanted to do. “I want to go test drive one of those Zs,” I said. It couldn’t have been any easier; the dealership was less than two miles from their doorstep.

The one I went for was the one in the showroom. They pulled back the sliding windows to get my future Camaro out for a test drive. They let one of the sales guys pull it out. I was standing there with my dad when he turned the engine over. “Vrooom!” The showroom echoed with the power of those 8 cylinders. They had me at “vrooom!” The next thing I knew I was cleaning out my black 1998 6-cylinder Camaro. I didn’t stand a chance.

I held on for almost 20 years. That’s a good run. Now I’ll be like most of my readers: a truck man. I look forward to the advantages of having a truck at my convenience.

I’ll miss this Camaro. But for now, it’s time to get out of the fast lane.

Got a cool ride? Email Seth a photo at: sjones@northcoastmedia.net.

This article is tagged with and posted in Columns

About the Author: Seth Jones

Seth Jones, a 25-year veteran of the golf industry media, is Editor-in-Chief of Golfdom magazine and Athletic Turf. A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Jones began working for Golf Course Management in 1999 as an intern. In his professional career he has won numerous awards, including a Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association (TOCA) first place general feature writing award for his profile of World Golf Hall of Famer Greg Norman and a TOCA first place photography award for his work covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In his career, Jones has accumulated an impressive list of interviews, including such names as George H.W. Bush, Samuel L. Jackson, Lance Armstrong and Charles Barkley. Jones has also done in-depth interviews with such golfing luminaries as Norman, Gary Player, Nick Price and Lorena Ochoa, to name only a few. Jones is a member of both the Golf Writers Association of America and the Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association. Jones can be reached at sjones@northcoastmedia.net.


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