Jeff,
As the story was relayed to me the cross ram and JL8 were not on the car to showcase it to the public, but rather to get Pete to approve those additions on the Camaro. The design and engineering team decided the best way to get Pete to approve the project was to build one for him to test through driving the car with those options, the only glitch was Pete would very rarely drive anything but a convertible so therefore the only Z convertible was built with the special options installed to get Pete to drive the car, of which he approved of the set up and the rest is history. Since those options were not part of a actual factory build but rather an engineering model, if the car had been sold to the public when it was no longer of use there would have been liability/warranty issues so the options were removed by engineering. However, from the standpoint that the options were ordered to be installed on the car before it saw use, one could argue that they were a "Factory" build through tech, in some ways a technical COPO.
Motown
