Mark Donohue’s 1967 Penske Camaro Could Be Your Ticket to Vintage Racing

What a loss to motorsports Mark Donohue’s death at age 38 was: He gave team owner Roger Penske his first Indianapolis 500 win, Penske’s first NASCAR win, and he drove for Penske in Formula 1. He won the 24 Hours of Daytona with Penske. And the pair teamed up to enter, and dominate, the Sports Car Club of America’s Trans Am series in 1967.

Donohue, the very first IROC champion, would bring the SCCA manufacturer’s championship to Chevrolet in 1968 and 1969, but the tide was already turning in Chevrolet’s favor at the end of the 1967 season as Donohue’s driving gelled with Penske’s car-building prowess. In the 1967 season’s final two races, Donohue claimed back-to-back wins by taking the checkered flag at the Las Vegas 350 in a nail-biter in front of a pair of Shelby Mustangs, and also at the Kent 400, which was much more decisive. The 1967 season championship went to Ford, with Mercury and Chevrolet finishing close behind.

This is the 1967 Z/28 Camaro that Donohue took to a win in those two races, and was known as “The Lightweight.” It’s headed to Mecum’s Kissimmee sale on January 18th. We don’t have a copy of the SCCA rulebook, so we can’t say whether or not Penske’s weight-trimming was outright illegal or some careful rule interpretation, but the secret was a prolonged acid bath that ate off more than 300 pounds of steel from the car’s body and structure. The SCCA was not pleased with Penske’s methods or their results and banned the car from competition after an inspection late in 1967.

Undeterred, Penske gave the car a slight makeover to compete as a 1968 Camaro at the following Trans Am season’s second race, the Twelve Hours of Sebring. Donohue took the pole and never looked back, finishing four laps ahead of another Penske Camaro and a Shelby Mustang that took second and third in class, respectively. Sebring would kick off the first of eight straight victories for Donohue and Penske on the way to a dominant 1968 Trans Am season for Chevrolet.

Setting aside its impressive Trans Am pedigree, this Camaro is also noteworthy for being the second Z/28 ever built. Sales of Z/28s would climb to more than 7000 in 1968 and more than 40,000 in 1969, although just 602 Z/28s were sold in 1967, as demand for the road-race-winning option package had yet to catch on.

Chevrolet’s recipe for meeting the SCCA’s 5.0-liter engine capacity rule was combining the 327’s 4.0-inch bore with the 3.0-inch stroke from the 283, which was also the same as the original 265-cubic-inch Chevy small-block that debuted in 1955. The Z/28 Camaro was the only production Chevrolet to receive the 302 V-8, so despite the popularity of the small-block V-8, there are rare variants, and a 1967 Z/28 is among the most desirable. Rated at a laughably low 290 horsepower in production form, the 302 made far more in race trim and the latest in valvetrain technology can have them up around 500 horses while still looking the part.

Because this car was raced in-period, it’s eligible to compete at the Rolex Historics, which is always one of our favorite things to take in during Monterey Car Week. With any luck, we’ll see this 302-powered legend at Laguna Seca running fender-to-fender with the same cars it battled during its heyday.

As for Donohue, as a degreed mechanical engineer, he had a great deal more input into his race cars than most drivers. Donahue was in Austria, shaking down his March 751 Formula 1 car prior to the Austrian Grand Prix, when a tire failed and he crashed into the catch fence. He did not appear badly injured, but the next day, he was hospitalized with a cerebral hemorrhage. He fell into a coma and died on March 19, 1975.