This New 1972 Camaro Street Car Is A Real Head-Turner

Noel Steibel has built a 1972 Camaro that’s destined to turn heads in the drag-and-drive competition scene in every possible way. This project is a tribute to his late father, Norman Steibel, who introduced him to drag racing. “This build is to honor his memory and legacy of drag racing,” says Noel. Norman started street and drag racing in 1960, so Noel, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, was essentially born into the sport.

“When I was 16, this local racer had this Camaro — he was always street racing around St. Louis, and they built a big small-block on nitrous and couldn’t get the car hooked up,” noel explains. “We’ve got an old mom and pop welding shop. My dad started racing in the early 1960s and started the shop, and there’s a lot of drag racing history in some of the cars we’ve worked on there over the years. So Brad brought the Camaro to us to a back half. We did the chassis and he was going to do the tin work and everything. He took it from here to a body shop to have the quarters put on it, and while he was at that body shop, his wife got pregnant and she said, ‘guess what? No more race car.’ ”

“He left it sitting in the garage for a few years and one day he called me, he said, ‘Hey, I’m selling that car. You want to buy it?’ Well, I didn’t have as much as he wanted at the time, which was probably only a little bit more than what we charge for a back half. And the car was sweet. He had all new parts, he had brand wheels and tires, everything. And I’m like, ‘man, I don’t have the money.’ I said, ‘I’ve got four-grand.’ He goes, ‘oh, I can’t take that,’ but a couple of years later, he called me and said ‘I’ll take your four grand.’ ”

“So somewhere around ’92 or ’93, I ended up buying the car and I’ve been storing it from garage to garage to garage for a lot of years. I was under the impression time flies by, but apparently not that fast. It’s been sitting in storage unfinished from 1992 up to when I took it to Rob Matheis’s shop in 2020. It’s been sitting all these years,” Noel says.

Steibel raced seriously in his late teens and early 20s, but later sold the early Jerry Haas-built car he had acquired, bought some land, and took a break from competition. Now, 35 years later he’s set to go racing again.

Reflecting on the build, Noel shares, “The interaction with Rob and bouncing ideas off of Rob and his team to implement them was an interesting part of the…