Features

Ford sold more than 160,000 Mustangs in the US in 2005 and, although both cars are cut from the same general cloth, their buyers have historically tended to be subtly distinct from one another.

If geometric multiples of 100,000 units, the sorts of numbers these models shifted in their salad days, seem improbable (the Mustang in its earliest iteration sold almost 500,000 units per annum, while most years Camaro sales topped 100,000, reaching a zenith of 282,571 in 1979) the new Camaro projection, most analysts concur, can be achieved without any rose-coloured squinting.

This number could only go higher were GM to build a Firebird twin for the Camaro, but as much as the people of the Pontiac nation want to talk about it, no one at GM will be drawn into that discussion now.

GM's belated response to America's original pony car, the Mustang of 1964, the Camaro broke cover in 1967 (along with the Firebird) to a rapturous public response. Until production ended three-and-a-half decades later, the 2+2 Chevys were a steadfast fixture of the American landscape, as well as the basis for numerous successful Trans Am and IROC racers, countless street rods and innumerable drag racing efforts.

With their long bonnets, short decks and classical Coke bottle curves, they became a particularly potent icon of the American road. Always available in several flavours - mild to hot - the Camaro was, at its best, a textbook example of good old American marketing smarts, reaching high, stooping low and engendering incredible loyalty along the way.

Like the Mustang, which shared much with Ford's Falcon saloon, the genius of the first Camaro, at least from a shareholders' perspective, lay in its heavy reliance on the existing mechanical underpinnings of the parent corporation's most prosaic rear-driver, in its case, the Chevy II, precursor to the Chevrolet Nova.

Sophistication was never the thing for any of these cars; the first Camaros had drum brakes all around and, though these would eventually be upgraded, Chevy's pony cars had, till the last one rolled off the line in 2002, live rear axles all. Through 35 years and four generations, Camaros all looked fast, though only some of them actually were.

But now it's back to the future for us, as we are transported to GM's Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, at the company's invitation, to drive a running prototype of the Detroit show car.

Though closer inspection will reveal what is plainly not a production car, the object of our attention looks quite real and superbly finished, not to mention appealingly lean and mean, in the metal. It also hints at a distinctly more sophisticated Camaro to come, even while harking back to our favourite Camaros of yore.