By 1969 and ‘70-1/2, Chevrolet was offering some VERY stout Camaros. The Z-28 was a well balanced street brute and the 396/375 Camaro in good tune could handle its own. But that wasn’t enough for one Joel Rose of Long Island, New York.

Joel had been running his little speed shop called “Motion Performance” since the early ‘60s. Carroll Shelby’s success for Ford and Hertz Rent-A-Car was legendary. So Rosen figured that he might be able to strike a deal with local Baldwin Chevrolet and offer “super car” versions of the Chevrolet line of cars. Amazing as it seems, the deal was made and Rosen was in business doing conversions, ala’ Reeves Callaway (except that there were minimal emission controls in the olden days).

Rosen called his creation, “Phase III Supercars.” There was no Phase I or II, “Phase III” just sounded cool. So here was the deal. Mr. Customer buys a Chevy from Baldwin Chevrolet and chooses the Phase III package (they had brochures to look at and everything). Your new Chevrolet was then delivered to the Motion shop where the conversion took place based on the options chosen by Mr. Customer. High performance street machines were becoming complex, so for a fee, Rosen and his crew would put everything into the car that any street racer-type might put into his car.

To top it all off, Rosen guaranteed that when they were done bolting on, replacing, and tuning, the car would run in the 12s on the quarter-mile. And lastly, since the car was technically “brand new” somehow or another, the cars managed to still be under the full factory warrantee!