in the midst of restoring a 1967 rally Sport Camaro, which a customer had let sit for two years at Rob Keenan’s body shop, hoping it would sell, Keenan was working in his driveway one day, looking dejected and starting to feel the tedium of replacing every single component of the old car to make it look like new.
Then, his elderly neighbor sauntered over, leading to a conversation that would breathe unexpected new life into Keenan’s project.
“What year is it?” the neighbor asked, eyeing the Camaro. Upon hearing 1967, the man smiled: A transplant from Detroit who was living in Keenan’s Winter Haven, Fla. neighborhood, he was a retired General Motors engineer. In fact, he’d helped conceive and design the very car that Keenan was restoring.
“I could not believe that my next door neighbor helped design that body style,” Keenan recalls. That conversation only strengthened his resolve to make the vehicle look exactly like the original.
“You talk about a guy who was excited — he was more excited than me when it was done,” Keenan says. “It looked like a brand new car, like it just came from the showroom. He couldn’t believe it.”
FROM DESERTED TO DESIRED
Although he’s restored and repaired countless old cars for others, Keenan, owner of Precision Collision in Winter Haven, had never rebuilt an old car for himself.
“I like fixing other people’s cars and seeing the looks on their faces when it’s done, but this is the first one I did for myself,” Keenan says. “It was probably a little bit of boredom, to tell you the truth.”
Once he plunked down $2,000 for the Camaro, Keenan went to work. When he picked up a new crate motor one day, the man selling it had a five-speed transmission, too, which Keenan bought and put into his car.
