The Camaro at 50

While other teens in the early 1990s likely weren’t thinking too hard about their future, Adam Barry, so absorbed by sketching flashy sports cars, had already settled on his.

He wanted to work for General Motors. Designing cars. Chevy Camaros in particular. It was an ambition encouraged by his father Sonny, a car buff who loved restoring vintage vehicles at the family’s Marlton home, and young Adam envisioned a life in cars and never looked in the rearview mirror.

He graduated from Cherokee High School in 1994, headed to Michigan and art school at the College for Creative Studies, and promptly landed his dream job upon graduation --- joining the GM design team in 1998.

He is 41 now, a family man with four children, and 2017 is Adam Barry’s dream year. It’s the 50th anniversary of the Chevy Camaro, a milestone that is being celebrated with production of a special anniversary edition of the revered sports car --- and he’s the guy who designed its appearance.

Talk about pressure.

“I grew up wanting to work on Camaros,” says Barry, the Camaro senior creative designer since 2012, “so any pressure from designing the anniversary edition would have been self-inflicted. I knew the lineage of the car. I was the guy who always wanted to design Chevy Camaros. So I felt pretty comfortable about it.”

With its deep gray exterior and tasteful orange hood accents, the special-edition Camaro is alternately classy and nasty, its brash look exuding style and power, and popular car magazines have largely hailed it as a worthy tribute to a sports car that turned heads when it roared onto the scene in 1967.

For Barry, the design challenge was clear. Honor the Camaro’s legacy and its muscle-car fans but steer it toward a future of ongoing evolution and renewed appeal.

“I didn’t want to do retro for the 50th,” he says. “It’s interesting. I’d gone through 150 pages of a blog for Chevy enthusiasts, and that was a frequent comment: ‘How come they didn’t make it more retro?’ They all want the hugger orange Camaro. And that’s fine. But we tried to move it forward as a more modern interpretation of the Camaro.”

The irony here is that Barry’s pride and joy is a powerful 1968 Camaro RS/SS --- yep, the exterior is hugger orange --- that he bought in 2004 upon selling a 2000 Chevy Corvette. He too appreciates the past, but as a Camaro designer, his eyes are on the road ahead.

The 50th-anniversary edition --- it’s available through this year, and about 2,400 had been sold by late February --- coincided with another high-profile Camaro event that showcased Barry’s design skills. He had a big hand in the Camaro’s sixth-generation makeover, a 2016 update that infused the full model line with upscale styling, increased power and road performance, and broader technology.

The new design certainly impressed Motor Trend. The magazine anointed the Camaro as its 2016 Car of the Year.