The first of the famous unfair-advantage Penske/Donohue creations was the 1967 Camaro you see here. At the end of the '67 SCCA Trans-Am season, after Donohue had piloted it to victories at Las Vegas and Seattle, SCCA tech inspectors discovered that most of this Camaro's metal bits and all of its body panels were acid-dipped—an ethically questionable process carried out at Lockheed Aerospace in California. This acid bath reduced the Camaro's weight from the stock 2920 pounds to an Oprah Slim-Fast 2550 pounds. At which point Donohue, who of course ultimately had to strap himself into the thing, became alarmed about the car's structural rigidity, then roughly akin to a 15-foot roll of Reynolds Wrap. His solution was to install a NASCAR-style roll cage, one of the first in sports-car racing. The cage effectively served as the car's frame.
SCCA's tech inspectors were bemused by the roll cage—a new sight—but were downright snotty about the see-through body panels. They told Donohue after a race at Modesto that the car "was banned forever and would never see the light of day in any SCCA race." If Donohue showed up with it again, he'd be suspended and beaten on the kidneys with large saps.
Mark and Roger did not scare easily. At the start of the 1968 season, they entered two Camaros at Sebring, which at the time was a combined 12-hour Trans-Am and sports-car enduro. One car was a legal, standard-weight 1968 Camaro. The other was the same old '67 acid-dipped cheater—mildly disguised—which crew members had by then affectionately dubbed "The Lightweight."
"So we pulled a tricky stunt," Donohue later recounted to Chevy engineer and author Paul Van Valkenburgh. "I carefully shaped the number circles so they could be easily interchanged between the number 16 for one car and number 15 for the other. First we went through [tech] inspection with the heavy [and legal] number 15 car, then we went back to our garage on the far side of the track, put the number 16 on it, and went back through inspection again. Nobody said anything."
It was a brazen deception, particularly because Penske's team had neglected to remove the cheater's wing-vent windows and had also forgotten to install side-marker lights, items that instantly distinguished "The Lightweight" as a year-old car. Mark and Roger weren't concerned. Fresh in their memories were a variety of raw run-ins with SCCA the year prior, and the partners relished rubbing the club's autocratic nose in whatever unfair advantages they could contrive.
"By changing the numbers around again," Donohue recalled, "and entering the track where our garage was, instead of through the pits, we even used the dipped car to qualify for both cars. Funny to think we could put one over on them like that." Also funny was that the dipped, cheater Camaro was 1.5 seconds per lap quicker than the new car, and it rocketed to an easy win in its Trans-Am class at Sebring. Funnier still, this lowly, live-axle, primitive Camaro finished third overall there—blowing off the likes of Ford GT40s, Lola T-70s, a Ferrari LM, even a Howmet Turbine—and might have won outright were it not for two blindingly fast mega-Deutschmark Porsche 907s, which finished first and second.
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