Taxing A Dream Doesn’T Kill It

Say you had this dream as a teenage boy of driving a hot Camaro.

Then your parents put on the brakes. No high insurance premiums. No Camaro. Just a ‘66 Ford Fairlane.

So, you grow up.

You get a job. A few months before your 30th birthday you buy the car you always wanted, a ‘69 Camaro.

Now you are hooked.

Your garage is cleaned out and you begin collecting rusty and wrecked examples of the sporty Chevy answer to the Ford Mustang.

Newsletters from the U.S. Camaro Club arrive every two months.

Late at night, after your job as a computer programmer is done, you poke around the garage restoring old cars.

Your name is Mike Ryan and at 39 life is going well in the Spokane Valley.

Does it get any better than this?

Well, yes.

A few days ago Mike Ryan was at work when he got the phone call.

“I answered the phone in the computer room,” he recalled. “they said, `Is this Mike Ryan and are you sitting down?’

The president of the U.S. Camaro Club was calling from Michigan.

Mike, he said, you have just won the rarest Camaro ever built.

It’s called a ZL-1.

Only 69 rolled off the Chevrolet factory assembly line.

Only 41 are known to still exist.

Only seven have their original all-aluminum 427 engines.

Mike Ryan won one of these seven.

“I bought two pictures of the car from the Camaro club magazine and got two tickets for the giveaway,” Ryan explained. The car giveaway is designed to build interest in the U.S. Camaro Club’s annual convention among the 15,000 club members who live 50 states and 24 foreign countries.

A few months ago the club purchased a car collection that included the rare ZL-1. So this year the club decided to give away this most rare machine.

On the outside the ZL-1 looks like any other 1969 Camaro. Dark blue with the telltale grill.

Under the hood, the ZL-1 roars like no other American muscle car ever to roll off an assembly line.

The ZL-1’s engine block, manifold and major engine parts all are cast from aluminum. With its transistorized ignition the ZL-1 could develop 575 horsepower and hit 110 or more in a quarter mile.

You couldn’t buy one from just any dealer. Only a few dealers who supported Chevy’s racing division sold the car in 1969, and buyers had to be willing to pay nearly $9,000 for a car that looked no different than the stock Camaros with sticker prices of $2,700.

But they were different.

And they have appreciated faster than Microsoft.

Two ZL-1 Camaros are known to have been sold in the collector car markets in the last couple of years, according to Ken Morehead, President of the U.S. Camaro Club. Each was purchased for about $200,000.

So, this weekend Mike Ryan, who wanted a ‘69 Camaro as a teenager but couldn’t have one, at 40 is about to take title to the rarest and most valuable Camaro of them all.

The car arrives in Spokane this weekend.

What does Mike Ryan plan?

“Well, I really think I will have to sell it,” he said with a note of regret.

The income taxes on winning a $200,000 car could run as high as $74,000.

Licensing the car in the state of Washington would be another $16,000.

“And I called my insurance agent just to see what it would take to get $500 deductible comprehensive insurance, and he said it would be $266 per month,” Ryan said.

“I have two teenage boys. I don’t have a good facility to store the car. I can’t afford the insurance or the license, unless I win the lottery on Saturday.”

The rarest Camaro of them all likely will go into a major collector’s inventory. “It’s a big, big boy toy,” Ryan said, “and I’m just a little boy when it comes to something like this.”

No, Mike Ryan is just a good guy who likes to tinker with cars on the weekends.

He has a family, and kids, and he’s right now trying to keep the rarest Camaro in the world in some kind of perspective.

When the car sells, Mike Ryan says he will put the money away for college for his two sons.

He hopes to buy his wife a new car to drive to work. If there is anything left, he may look for a little land for retirement.

`It will make my life a lot easier,” he said.

He considered what was best for his family, and has even considered what his friends who drive Camaros around town might want.

“For them, I’m planning to take the car to the All Car Club picnic in Mission Park on the 11th of September,” he said. “I want to give everyone around here a chance to look at it.”

Of course he will take pictures and likely hang one of them in the garage.