BITCHIN' BOW TIE; Chevy relaunches its fabled Camaro.

Byline: NATALIE NEFF

Chevrolet withstood a lot of grief, suffering the slings and arrows of the Camaro faithful when it torpedoed the 35-year-old pony car in 2002. After years of keeping the Camaro afloat despite foundering sales, Chevy felt it needed to cut the storied but antiquated F-body loose.

The besieged carmaker went on to suffer the added scourge of watching Ford Mustang sales-buoyed by that car's first complete redesign since 1979-swell to fill the void. For Chevrolet and its fans, this took some of the luster off their best news for '05: Chevy outsold the Ford brand for the first time in 19 years.

Now the folks at Chevrolet have finally given Camaro loyalists something to celebrate. Perhaps inspired by the Mustang's success, or even the booming interest in classic American muscle, the bow-tie bunch has deemed conditions again conducive to a resuscitation of its pony car. And while Camaro exists solely in concept form for now, we expect a production version to follow, by 2009 at the latest. (Those who think that's too long should consider that even mighty Toyota took three years to turn the FJ Cruiser concept into a production model.)

Chevy used the Detroit show to officially unveil the concept car, but if you're one of the thousands that frequent any number of enthusiast message boards on the web-including autoweek.com's own Combustion Chamber-then you've already caught buzz about the car, perhaps even peeked at leaked photos of the clay model.

Fuzzy pics of clay mock-ups, however, don't do justice to the real thing. Chevy ran a webcast of the reveal for thousands of lucky Camaro fanatics. But before they-and the throngs of press on the scene-could get a glimpse of the new car, Chevy staged a show of first-generation models, including a 1969 ZL1, the personal car of Tom Peters, director of design for GM's global rwd performance cars.

One by one the cars rumbled down the catwalk onto the dais, followed by the concept itself. As people crowded around the shiny silver car for a closer look, the folks from GM's own FastLane weblog reported receiving over a dozen comments from Internet watchers within minutes-new technology contributing to the rebirth of an old idea.