What a different 20 years can make, right? This video is cool because it is an accurate look back at the pony car war that Ford and Chevy were still fighting and would fight for a couple more years before the Camaro went on hiatus and the Mustang reigned supreme for close to a decade. I have personal stories regarding both of these cars.
The first is the simpler one. I owned a 1998 Cobra for a couple years after I graduated college. I got my first real job and had some dough so I bought a used one. It was fun as hell. That mod motor could rev like nothing I had ever owned before and I enjoyed the car a bunch. The other story is less fun. I street raced an undercover Massachusetts State Police officer in a 1998 Camaro SS when coming home from the drags in my mildly hopped up 1988 350 powered Camaro when I was a senior in high school. You’ll never know fun until you have a guy twice your size hauling you out of car after ripping down the highway at 120mph. That was an experience that I think I am still paying for today. I get shivers thinking about the moment that the wig-wags came on. Not good.
Anyway, these cars were pretty evenly matched at the time and the 1998 model was the first year the Camaro had an LS engine installed and long before an entire industry exploded around the platform. One that continues to thrive today with new products flying onto the shelves on a weekly basis two decades later.
The performance that these cars had was stout for their day and it was a harbinger of things to come all these years later. Fun stuff and who can believe that this was 20 years ago?!
I’ll take either one.