The Upside-Down Camaro, a Custom Build Like No Other and a LeMons Classic

November is autoevolution’s Chevrolet Month and, in between sharing the latest news on all things Chevrolet, we’re also looking at some of the most famous Chevrolet cars or builds to ever made headlines. The Upside-Down Camaro certainly fits the bill.

This is one of the most mediated creations by fabricator Jeff Block aka Speedycop (because he’s a real cop when he’s not building outrageous vehicles), the man behind the now-defunct SpeedyCopter, the world’s first racing amphibious helicopter car. UDC made its debut at the 2013 edition of LeMons, the 24 Hours of Lemons race at New Jersey Motorsports Park and, without exaggeration, wrote history.

UDC is an upside-down car, a Chevrolet Camaro, as its name implies. There is a twist to it, though, just as you were probably expecting: while the upside down car is a Camaro, there is another, entirely different car underneath it, a Ford Festiva. In other words, the UDC is a Festiva with a pair of Camaro car-pants.

SpeedyCop doesn’t have a way only with strange vehicles, he also has a way with words, as the first video at the bottom of the page will confirm. Talking about the motivation for the project way back in 2013, in his very typical way, he put it best: why shouldn’t he build an upside-down car?

“People constantly ask me what drug or alcohol-fueled altered states of consciousness induce these terrible LeMons builds,” he wrote on his website. “I wish could offer such a rational explanation. I don't know where they come from, but they are never in short supply.”

In order to qualify for the LeMons race, he had to get everything done on the cheap. As luck would have it, he is very skilled with his hands too, has a lot of friends willing to help and a head full of (mostly bad, he says) ideas. So he first bought the runner car, a 1990 Ford Festiva that was literally one short drive from dying out.

With nearly 200,000 miles (322,000 km) on the clock, the Festiva was powered by a 1.3-liter engine and, according to SpeedyCop himself, was chosen because of its racing capabilities (lol). He paid a couple hundred bucks for it, and then another $900 on a 1999 Chevrolet Camaro that was no longer running and came with a rotten interior.

He then proceeded to skin the Camaro off and rip the chassis apart, building a sort of shell that covers the Festiva entirely. The shell is removable, as you can see in the gallery attached as well. So the UDC is basically a very tired Festiva carrying the extra weight of the Camaro shell, original wheels included.

Because this was designed as a race car (at the LeMons track, but it’s a race nonentheless), SpeedyCop had to consider certain safety regulations. He ripped the roll cage from an old Geo Metro he’d wrecked a while back and, without as much as a single measurement, welded it onto the Festiva.

This all sounds like the most stupid, senseless and easy project, but SpeedyCop promises it wasn’t without challenges. The biggest was creating the Camaro upside-down shell, so as to keep the panels aligned and, with it, the illusion that this was a real upside-down car rolling down the street. It also had to be sturdy enough for racing. His biggest regret was having to pay another $200 for the paint job on the shell.

After the LeMons debut, the Upside-Down Camaro became an international star. It attended other races and auto events, and was heavily featured in the media (including appearances in Sports Illustrated and on Jay Leno’s Garage). It was never that impressive in terms of actually winning those races, for the obvious reason, but it could always turn heads wherever it went.

Before starting to work on the SpeedyCopter, SpeedyCop sold the UDC for $7,000, which is a whole lot more than he ever paid to have it built – and a huge profit considering he got to enjoy it all those years.