2010 Camaro SS: Subtle it's not

Despite some published reports, the 2010 Camaro SS is not really what you'd call a sports car, unless you tend to shave with a chain saw or sign your name with a piece of burning timber or make scrambled eggs by dropping a piano on a chicken. The consonant quality of this car, from the moment you turn the key to the moment you gratefully leave it in the chiropractor's parking lot, is a wanton and cheerful disregard for finesse and delicacy.

This is exactly right.

You have to understand, after four decades in the market, the Camaro nameplate stands for something: 40-ounce beers, mullet hairdos, barbed-wire tattoos, that trick where you put cigarettes out on your tongue. If you ever stole cable TV from your neighbor, own more than two stuffed deer heads or have ever confused your girlfriend's birth-control pills for Skittles, you might be a Camaro prospect.

Oh, please, don't even start with accusations of cultural stereotyping. I'm from North Carolina. A telephone pole with a Camaro wrapped around it might as well be the state tree.

While it would have been easy for Chevrolet to build a sleek, high-revving sport coupe, something to thrust-and-parry with the Nissan 370Z or Mazda RX-8, that would not honor the Camaro's rightful heritage as the Molly Hatchet of sport coupes. And so the company went the other direction: a big lummox of a car powered by thudding 6.2-liter pushrod V8, an engine that is to acceleration what dynamite is to fishing. This detuned version of the Corvette LS3 engine produces 420 pound-feet of torque at 4,600 rpm, which -- channeled through the Tremec TR6060 six-speed manual transmission -- is quite capable of making an evil stinking unholy mess of the rear 20-inch Pirelli P-Zero radials.

Now, given that I live in California and I was fearful of the Air Resources Board's black helicopters, I never dumped the clutch with the engine at full honk and the traction control disabled. I am assured by one of my colleagues, however, that the car will leave 50 feet of smoldering, bubbling brimstone on the pavement, burnout tracks so lurid that my colleague actually went out and bought gray spray paint to cover it up. It didn't help.