1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird 426 Hemi in Alpine White Paint

Lou Costabile visits Roanoke Motor Co. in Illinois to see a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird 426 Hemi in Alpine White, pulled straight from dealership owner John Gastman’s personal collection. The car’s 53-pound cast aluminum wing and NASCAR-driven aerodynamics tell only part of the story; according to Gastman, the horn has never even been used. Built to homologate Chrysler’s aero package for racing, fewer than 2,000 street Superbirds exist today. Watch to see why this one has barely been touched since it arrived.

Some cars get driven into the ground. Others get parked the moment the title changes hands and barely see daylight again. This 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird in Alpine White falls firmly into the second category, and according to the man showing it off, it has never even had its horn beeped. For a car built to chase NASCAR aerodynamics records, that kind of restraint says something about who ends up owning a Superbird fifty years later, and why.

A Car That Has Never Had Its Horn Beeped

Lou Costabile filmed this one in Roanoke, Illinois, on May 13, 2015, at Roanoke Motor Co., a dealership that has sold Dodge, Jeep, RAM, and Viper since 1984. The car itself came out of the personal collection of John Gastman, the dealership’s owner, who walks through it with Lou rather than treating it as inventory. That distinction matters: this is not a car for sale, it is a piece of one man’s personal collection that happened to roll out for a video.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

A Dealership Owner’s Personal Collection, Not the Showroom Floor

The 426 Hemi under the hood is the headline number, but the wing on the back is where the real engineering story lives. According to detail shared in the comments, the wing itself weighed 53 pounds and was cast from aluminum in three separate pieces, not stamped as a single panel. The bracing running through the trunk was not cosmetic either; it was there to handle roughly 200 pounds of downforce generated by airflow once the car reached speed, keeping the rear end planted during the high-speed NASCAR homologation runs the Superbird was built to survive.

The Wing Wasn’t Decoration

That wing, along with the nose cone, existed for one reason: Chrysler needed 1,920 street Superbirds built to qualify the aerodynamic package for NASCAR competition. The street cars that resulted, cars exactly like this Alpine White example, were essentially race-homologation byproducts sold to the public, which is part of why so few remain and why the ones that do tend to end up treated like museum pieces rather than daily drivers.

Built to Qualify for NASCAR, Sold to the Public

Alpine White was one of several colors Chrysler offered on the Superbird, and it does something the brighter factory colors do not: it lets the body’s aerodynamic shapes read as pure engineering rather than as a paint statement. Commenters clearly respond to that restraint, with one calling it their all-time favorite car from the entire muscle car era, a striking claim given how many bright orange and purple Superbirds tend to dominate car show photography.

Why Alpine White Suits This Car

A detail from the comments adds an unexpected layer to the Superbird’s factory story: according to someone who sold these new, Superbirds did not leave the factory with radios installed at all. Dealers added radios and antennas themselves once the cars arrived on the lot. It is a small reminder of how stripped-down and purpose-built these cars were underneath the wing and nose cone, built first for aerodynamics and homologation, with creature comforts bolted on almost as an afterthought.

No Radio From the Factory

This is not the only unrestored, original-owner Superbird still floating around either. One commenter mentions a Hemi Superbird up in Skagit County, Washington, still with its first owner, though it rarely comes out of hiding anymore. Stories like that one underscore just how small the surviving population of these cars really is, and how much of what remains sits far from public view, in private collections and dealership back rooms rather than on the show circuit.

A Second Untouched Survivor, Hiding in Washington State

For John Gastman, keeping a Hemi Superbird in a working new-car dealership’s personal collection is its own kind of statement. Selling modern Vipers and RAM trucks by day while holding onto a piece of Chrysler’s most extreme aerodynamic experiment says something about where his own enthusiasm sits, even decades removed from when this car was new.

A Viper Dealer Who Still Holds Onto a Hemi Superbird

Watching Lou walk around a car that has apparently never had its horn touched is a different experience than watching a typical My Car Story episode. There is no drive, no exhaust note, just a careful look at a car that exists almost entirely as an object of preservation. For a Superbird, built originally to prove a point on a NASCAR oval at nearly 200 miles an hour, ending up parked and untouched in Illinois is as unlikely a second act as the car itself.

An Unlikely Second Act for a Car Built for 200 MPH

Chrysler only kept the Superbird in production for a single model year before NASCAR changed its rules specifically to push winged cars like this one, and Ford’s own aero cars, off the track. That short production run is a big part of why survivors like this Alpine White example draw this much attention decades later: there was never a second or third year of Superbirds to dilute the story, just 1970 and then nothing. Every surviving car is effectively a snapshot of a rule Chrysler and NASCAR both abandoned almost immediately after this generation of cars was built.

A One-Year Rule, A One-Year Car

It also explains why a dealership owner would hold onto one instead of selling it. A car built to answer a rulebook that no longer exists, sitting in Alpine White with a wing engineered to fight real aerodynamic forces at speed, is not really comparable to anything else in a modern new-car inventory. Gastman is not just keeping a rare Mopar around for nostalgia; he is holding onto a physical answer to a question NASCAR stopped asking the same year this car rolled off the line.

Why a Dealership Owner Keeps It Instead of Selling It

Watch the walkaround closely and it becomes obvious Gastman knows exactly what he has. He handles the conversation less like a salesman describing a car and more like a caretaker explaining why a piece deserves to stay exactly as it is.

Hit play on the full video and share your take in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter