Tonawanda did not produce engines on spec. They were built based on demand from vehicle assembly plants. Tonawanda built 1,373 Camaro/Chevelle L72 engines. For '700 total vehicles' to be correct means about 700 L72 engines were produced for no reason. Really think they did that?
"That would mean less then 500 L72 Camaros produced by July 31."
By July 17th, Tonawanda had produced 920 Camaro L72 engines. The various data bases out there have over 400 COPO Camaro VINs built as of the July shutdown at Norwood. There are plenty of unknown COPO Camaros; the famous Mac's Chev photo dated June 1969 shows 8 COPO Camaros on their lot. Only one is known. Courtesy Chev in Sebring OH had some; none known to exist.
"The Fran Preve article "The Numbers Game" said that engine production was 2 to 5 percent over car production . He was talking about regular production engines and cars and he must not have known the COPO 427 car production numbers at the time of the article (1987)."
What difference would it would have made if he did know? Fran clearly states where he got the data:
“The numbers are taken directly from Chevrolet’s Summary of Engines Shipped.”
Why do you continually second-guess his data, obtained directly from Tonawanda production records by an employee, 18 years after production?
“…and the Fran Preve numbers come close but there are questions on the accuracy…”
Who knows better than an insider with complete access to production data?
Here is a COPO Camaro build record for a car shipped to Canada. Lists L78, 9561, no Z27. Why are there 1,066 more Camaro SS engines [L48, L34, L35, L78] listed in the T & B totals than total Z27 Camaro SS production?
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