Pittsburgh's musclecar gift to the world

[PghUSA]

I always knew we invented the world's first four wheel drive/all terrain vehicles (Jeep) and I knew that in the Super 60's we invented the first "Super" Burger (Big Mac) but I was unaware that Pittsburgh invented the first "Super Car" the "Yenko Super Car" arguably the world's "first" muscle car (it was the first with horsepower over 400 to go from 0 to 60 in less then 5 seconds--if I have my facts right, let me know if that's wrong). Only dawned on me that Pittsburgh had this legacy when I was watching Musclecars with Bill Goldberg on the History Channel, according to the show the Yenko Camaro could do 0 to 100 in 10 seconds. It was also the first musclecar put out by the world's leading car maker GM. Don Yenko owned a series of dealerships (Dormont, Cannonsburg among others) in the southhills of Pittsburgh, he was an avid racer and in 1967 upon reception of the brand new GM Camaro riped out the engines and put in monster 427s, made some other adjustments and put on some unique asthetics and the "supercar" was born. I'm trying to find some more info on these cars, appartently only about 500 were ever made between 1967 and 1970 and all because of a Pittsburgher named Don Yenko, today these cars are collector items and are extremely valueable, the Yenko Super Camaro was also given a star role in the movie "Too Fast Too Furious". Another Pittsburgh first. More info to come, google isn't finding many specifics on the "firsts" of this car, but there is a lot of info on the surviving ones out there.

[urbanophile]

Hehehe. I saw that last night too and I was going to post on it but I *knew* you'd beat me to the punch!

[PghUSA]

Yeah the only raw deal was that they never came out and said Pittsburgh or Canonsburg etc.

[urbanophile]

Yeah the only raw deal was that they never came out and said Pittsburgh or Canonsburg etc. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I know. I'm sure 95% of the people viewing the program automatically assumed Yenko was in SE PA instead - just like how people hearing "New York" automatically think of New York City unless its prefaced by "upstate". Of course I think what happened was that the producers saw that Yenko was in a place called "Canonsburg" and they didn't know where that was and didn't bother to look at where it was (it wouldn't have been relevant to the show in any event) so they simply said "Pennsylvania dealership".

[PghUSA]

Here's some visuals of the world's first GM musclecar, the Yenko SuperCar Camaro, brought to you by Pittsburgh

This is the monster under the hood:

Also I checked up on this, the Yenko Camaro was the fastest beast on the road in 1969 and really up until 1988 no car could beat it's 0-60 out of the gate of 3.8 seconds! let alone 0-100 of 8.9 seconds. (at least by the facts I checked).