1970 Dodge Super Bee in Plum Crazy Purple & 440 Engine Sound

Plum Crazy Purple with a white vinyl roof and a 440 Six Pack under the hood — this 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee is the kind of factory combination that still stops traffic at a car show fifty years later. Restorer Mark Klopack walks through the build at Chicago’s World of Wheels. Watch to hear that pistol-grip four-speed and 440 come alive.

Paint colors don’t usually come with a personality, but Plum Crazy Purple is the exception that proves the rule. Dodge gave it that name on purpose, and by 1970 the company had built an entire marketing identity around colors loud enough to earn their own nicknames. Find one of those cars still wearing its original hue fifty years later, fully documented and freshly restored, and you’ve found something that goes beyond nostalgia — you’ve found proof that the loudest option on the order form was also, somehow, the right one.

The Color With Its Own Personality

This particular car is a 1970 Dodge Coronet Super Bee finished in that exact shade, paired with a white interior and a matching white vinyl roof — a combination that reads as almost restrained against the shock of the exterior color until you notice the details. Under the hood sits a 440 cubic inch V8, and according to viewers who know the car well from the comments, it carries the full 440 Six Pack treatment: triple two-barrel carburetors on top of the big block, backed by a four-speed manual and Chrysler’s now-legendary pistol-grip shifter.

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What’s Actually Under That Purple Paint

The car was shown at the World of Wheels event in Rosemont, Illinois, by Mark Klopack, owner of Hot Rod Auto Body Restoration Shop in nearby Schiller Park. Klopack’s shop performed the restoration that brought this Super Bee back to the condition seen in the video, and having the actual restorer present to walk through the build details — rather than a generic owner or a dealer rep — gives the footage a level of technical credibility that a lot of car show coverage simply doesn’t have.

The Shop Behind the Restoration

Beyond the purple paint and the pistol grip, commenters flagged a long list of factory-correct details that separate a genuinely well-restored Super Bee from a cosmetic repaint: the console-mounted shifter, the “Tic-Toc-Tach” combination clock and tachometer that Dodge fitted into the dash, the white bucket seats, and the full complement of Super Bee badging front to back. Every one of those pieces has to be sourced correctly and installed correctly for a restoration to hold up under scrutiny at a judged show, and viewers in the comments clearly noticed the shop got it right. Between the pistol-grip shifter, the Tic-Toc-Tach, and that unmistakable purple paint, there isn’t a single angle on this car that reads as generic — everything about it was chosen deliberately, and it shows.

The Details That Separate a Real Restoration

The Super Bee itself occupied an interesting spot in Dodge’s 1970 lineup — positioned as the value-oriented muscle car below the Charger R/T, built on the mid-size Coronet platform, and aimed at buyers who wanted big-block performance without the Charger’s higher price tag or flashier image. That positioning meant Super Bees were ordered with a wide spread of engines, from the base 383 up through the 440 Six Pack and the 426 Hemi, which is part of why finding one specced this aggressively still turns heads even among people who see muscle cars every weekend.

Where the Super Bee Fit in Dodge’s Lineup

Maintaining a car like this one presents its own challenges once the initial restoration is done. The 440 Six Pack setup in particular is notorious among Mopar owners for needing careful, ongoing tuning — three carburetors have to stay synchronized or the car runs rough and loses the smooth power delivery the package was famous for. Parts for the triple-carb intake and linkage are more specialized than a standard four-barrel setup, which means fewer shops are comfortable working on one correctly, and owners often end up learning the tuning process themselves out of necessity rather than choice.

Living With a Triple-Carb Six Pack Today

Collector interest in factory Six Pack cars has climbed steadily over the past decade as buyers who grew up watching these cars in period rediscovered how genuinely rare the correct combinations are. A numbers-matching 440 Six Pack Super Bee with documented ownership history, like the car Klopack’s shop restored here, sits well above a base 383 car in both asking price and the level of attention it draws at a judged event — and the paint alone, in a color this specific, adds another layer of desirability on top of the mechanical rarity.

What Six Pack Cars Bring at Auction Now

One commenter in the video’s replies mentioned owning a ’70 Coronet Super Bee decades ago that started life with a 383 before he swapped in a 440 four-barrel and a 727 automatic himself — a reminder that plenty of Super Bees left the factory modestly equipped and got upgraded later by owners chasing more power. That makes a numbers-matching, factory 440 Six Pack car like this one meaningfully rarer than the Super Bee name alone might suggest, since so many surviving examples carry engines they didn’t leave Detroit with.

Why a Factory 440 Six Pack Car Is Rarer Than It Sounds

Against its factory rivals — the Plymouth Road Runner it shared a platform with, and Dodge’s own Charger R/T one rung up the ladder — the Super Bee traded some of the Charger’s fastback styling drama for a more straightforward, budget-focused muscle car formula. That formula clearly still resonates; the response to this particular car in the comments was almost uniformly enthusiastic, with more than one viewer calling out the color specifically as the reason the car stuck in their memory after watching.

The Super Bee vs. Its Mopar Siblings

Fifty years on, a correctly restored Plum Crazy Super Bee with the 440 Six Pack under the hood sits near the top of what collectors look for in the Coronet-based muscle car world. It’s loud, it’s specific, and it’s exactly the kind of car that a shop like Klopack’s builds its reputation on getting right down to the smallest badge. It’s the kind of car that photographs almost as well parked and silent as it sounds running — which, for a Super Bee, is saying something.

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