This Petty Blue 1970 Plymouth Superbird carries a documented history that few muscle cars can match — matching-numbers drivetrain, original broadcast sheets, and a rarity rating that puts it ahead of plenty of Hemi cars. Read on to see why paperwork, not just horsepower, makes this survivor special.
Most muscle cars accumulate stories the way barn floors accumulate dust — vague rumors, a half-remembered owner, a repaint nobody can quite explain. This particular Superbird has the opposite problem: nearly every claim about it can be checked against documentation from 1970, and what that paperwork reveals is rarer than plenty of Hemi cars sitting in climate-controlled garages today. The color alone hints that something unusual is going on here, and the story only gets more specific from there. Keep reading, because the number stamped in this car’s build sheet turns out to matter more than the nose cone or the towering rear wing ever could.
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The Color That Almost Nobody Got
Petty Blue, Plymouth’s factory paint code 999, was the shade the company’s NASCAR team ran on Richard Petty’s race cars, and putting it on a customer Superbird required a special order that most dealers never bothered offering to walk-in buyers. Records tied to this car identify it as one of just seven Petty Blue Superbirds built with the 440 Six Pack engine. Notably, Plymouth never painted a single Hemi-powered Superbird in Petty Blue at all — a detail that puts this car in a smaller club than the Hemi examples that usually dominate Superbird conversation and auction headlines.
One of 308, By the Numbers
Documentation places this specific car among 308 four-speed Superbirds built for the 1970 model year, out of a total Superbird production run that barely cleared 1,900 units before Plymouth quietly pulled the model after a single season. Its assigned number, 715, ties it directly to the 1970 Superbird NASCAR homologation program — the entire reason the aero cars existed. NASCAR required manufacturers to build and sell a minimum number of street versions before a race-only body design could be homologated for competition, which is precisely how a car this outlandish ended up on a public sales lot.
Built to Win a Different Kind of Race
Plymouth and Dodge didn’t design the winged Superbird and Charger Daytona to win over ordinary showroom shoppers; they designed them to survive triple-digit speeds at high-banked tracks like Daytona and Talladega. The elongated nose cone cut aerodynamic drag, and the towering rear wing kept the rear wheels planted at speeds NASCAR’s competitors were only beginning to approach. Buyers in 1970 largely didn’t understand what they were looking at, and the cars famously sat unsold on dealer lots for months, with more than a few quietly converted back toward standard Road Runner trim just to move them off the floor.
An Interior That Rarely Survives This Well
White vinyl interiors are notoriously difficult to keep presentable after five decades of sun, spilled drinks, and everyday wear, yet this Superbird’s cabin is described as remaining in excellent condition, right down to its pistol-grip shifter — a factory option Mopar buyers specifically sought out for how distinctive it looked and felt under the hand as much as how it functioned. Original interiors surviving this cleanly are unusual on any 1970 Mopar, let alone one that has covered nearly 48,000 miles on public roads rather than spending its life wrapped in a private collection.
Matching Numbers, and the Paperwork to Prove It
The car reportedly retains its original, numbers-matching drivetrain, and it comes with two original broadcast sheets — the factory build documents that list every option installed on the assembly line, down to the paint code and rear gear ratio. A visual inspection report from Mopar specialist Dave Wise adds another layer of independent verification on top of that paperwork, the kind of documented trail that separates a genuinely confirmed survivor from a car that is simply claimed to be original with nothing to back it up.
A Magazine Cover Car
Long before Superbird prices reached the levels they command in today’s market, this particular example was already significant enough to land on the front cover of Mopar Collectors Guide Magazine in May 2006 — public recognition that predates the current surge of interest in aero-car values by more than a decade. That kind of documented media appearance is one more data point that makes a car’s provenance easier to trust than a similar Superbird surfacing for the first time at a modern auction with no prior paper trail at all.
The Engine Options Plymouth Actually Offered
Superbirds left the factory with a choice of three big-block engines: the 440 Super Commando with a single four-barrel carburetor, the 440 Six Pack with three two-barrel carburetors feeding it, and the 426 Hemi sitting at the very top of the lineup. This car’s 440 Six Pack falls in the middle of that engine hierarchy on paper, but the Petty Blue and Six Pack combination it wears is scarcer than plenty of Hemi-powered cars simply because Plymouth built so few Superbirds in this exact configuration during the model’s single production year.
Why Survivors Command a Premium
Unrestored muscle cars occupy a strange corner of the collector market: a fresh, no-expense-spared restoration can look completely flawless, but it can never again claim to be untouched. Buyers chasing genuine originality — factory-correct paint, original assembly-line chalk markings, an interior that has simply aged gracefully rather than been redone from scratch — will often pay well past what a comparable restored car brings, because that kind of originality, once lost to a repaint or a re-trim, can never truly be recreated no matter how skilled the shop doing the work.
The Nose Cone’s Real Purpose
The Superbird’s nose cone wasn’t just about looking aggressive on the street. Wind-tunnel testing showed that a standard Road Runner’s blunt front end created enough drag and front-end lift at NASCAR speeds to make the car genuinely unstable above 180 mph, and the fiberglass nose cone extended the car’s overall length by nearly 19 inches specifically to smooth airflow over the hood and windshield. That same testing informed the wing’s height, which had to clear the trunk-mounted spoiler’s own turbulence to work as intended — details that turned the Superbird from a styling exercise into a genuine engineering response to a real aerodynamic problem.
A Model That Almost Vanished From Memory
Plymouth built the Superbird for a single model year before NASCAR rewrote its rules and made the entire aero-car experiment pointless to continue past 1970. That short production run is exactly why surviving, well-documented examples like this Petty Blue car carry outsized significance today. They aren’t just old muscle cars sitting in a garage — they’re the last physical evidence of one of Detroit’s strangest, most narrowly focused engineering exercises, built for a fight against the calendar that both Plymouth and Dodge ultimately lost.
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not in my budget!!!!!
Awesome
Jim Mueller
Where’s my banker ???
He’s not that rich
Cool :)