Celebrities and Their Classic Camaros

Famous owners are a small corner of the Camaro's public life. The bigger picture, from the screen to the radio to the parking lot, is in our Camaro pop culture guide. Here the focus is narrower: five well-known people, five cars, and what their choices say about a model that has meant different things to different generations.

Paul Walker's LeMans Blue Z28

Walker co-owned the car with Roger Rodas, his friend and business partner. The specification is the kind that makes Camaro people lean in: the 302 cubic inch DZ V8, an M21 four-speed, Positraction, black interior, and 22,639 miles showing on the odometer. The patina was heavy, and it was left alone.

The two of them ordered a Camaro Hi-Performance Report on the car, the sort of documentation serious collectors chase to prove what a Z28 started life as. It appeared in an inventory of Walker's cars and is believed to have been one of their last projects together. Rodas was driving the Porsche Carrera GT in the 2013 crash that killed both men. After that the Camaro passed to a Chevrolet collector, then to Solo Speed Shop in California, and it was consigned to Mecum's Monterey sale, held 15 to 17 August 2024. It crossed the block as Lot S143 on Saturday, 17 August, and Mecum records it as sold for $220,000, well above the $165,000 high estimate on the lot page.

Rock and roll: Bret Michaels and Alice Cooper

Rock singers have always liked a car that looks good under stage lights, and both of these are 1969s, the year many fans consider the Camaro's best-looking. Bret Michaels, the Poison frontman, owned a custom 1969 Camaro finished in Moonbeam Silver with black stripes and black leather inside. Fox described it as an SS, and it was sold as one. The car was no garage secret. It turned up on MTV's Cribs, on VH1's Rock of Love and Bret Michaels: Life As I Know It, and in his "Driven" video.

It crossed the block at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale as Lot 1288.1 on Saturday, 22 January 2011, and brought $200,000. That figure came with extras: a signed guitar and a lifetime backstage pass. Fox reported the proceeds going to the American Diabetes Association and JDRF. It is a celebrity price, in other words, and nobody should read it as a market value for a silver '69.

Alice Cooper's car was louder in every sense. It is a 1969 Camaro SS 396, orange with black stripes, with a three-speed automatic and front disc brakes, built to his own specification. He reportedly drove it regularly around Arizona, which fits the man better than any trailer queen would. It was offered at no reserve at Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach and sold as Lot 469 on 7 April 2017. Barrett-Jackson keeps the price behind a registration wall, so we have not quoted a figure.

"The best celebrity cars are the ones that look like the owner chose them on a Saturday, not like a manager chose them for a photo shoot. Cooper's orange SS and Walker's tired blue Z28 both pass that test, and that is why people still talk about them."

Patrick Walsh

Tim Allen and Linda Perry: two ways to keep a Camaro

Tim Allen went the other way entirely. His 1968 Camaro, built by Bodie Stroud, carries a Corvette 427, a Keisler five-speed, Brembo brakes and a Detroit Speed chassis under dark green paint. It debuted at SEMA in 2013 and later appeared on Jay Leno's Garage. It is worth being clear on one point, because the internet often is not: this is a modern build with a big-block, not an original COPO car. It honors the 1969 factory 427 cars in spirit while improving on them in every way a modern chassis allows.

Linda Perry, the 4 Non Blondes singer, kept things simple. Her 1967 Camaro convertible has a 350 V8 and a four-speed manual, and she owned it for almost 20 years. That kind of tenure is rarer among famous owners than it should be. She offered it at no reserve at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale, held 17 to 25 January 2026, and drove it onto the block herself as Lot 4000. We have not been able to confirm what it brought.

Taken together, Allen and Perry mark the two poles of how people keep a first-generation car today. One rebuilds it into something the factory could never have made. The other leaves the formula alone and simply drives it for two decades. Both are honest choices, and both have their defenders at every car show.

What celebrities with classic Camaros tell us

Line the five cars up and a pattern appears. Every one of them is a first-generation car, built for 1967, 1968 or 1969. That is not an accident. Those three years are the Camaro most people picture when they hear the name, the one Chevrolet pitched in the period ads as the "Hugger" and sold to a generation that would later have the money to buy one back.

The second pattern is that fame does strange things to price. A celebrity name can lift a car well past what its metal is worth, as the Michaels sale shows, and it can also attach a lot of noise to a car's history. The sensible buyer treats the name as a bonus and the paperwork as the real asset. Walker's car is the clean example: the Hi-Performance Report and the inventory listing do more to establish it than any photograph of him behind the wheel.

The third pattern is simple affection. None of these people needed a Camaro. They had the means to buy almost anything, and they chose a car that ordinary kids saved for in the late 1960s. That choice is the quiet compliment underneath all the auction lights. If you want to know why the car still holds that pull, the place to start is the Camaro from 1967 on, and how a pony car built to answer Ford turned into something people of every kind wanted to be seen in.

Sources and notes

• 1969 Chevrolet Camaro RS Z28, previously owned by Paul Walker and Roger Rodas, Mecum Monterey 2024 lot S143
• Bret Michaels outmuscles Bill Goldberg at car auction, Fox News
• Roll like a rock star in Alice Cooper's '69, Carscoops
• 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS 396, Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach 2017 lot 469
• Tim Allen stops by Jay Leno's Garage, Street Muscle
• Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale 2026 results release, Linda Perry's Camaro