1970 Superbird & 1972 Cuda Racing On Interstate 75

In September 1985, a group of Mopar owners drove in convoy from Detroit to a car show in Columbus, Ohio — and somewhere on I-75, a Plymouth Superbird and a Cuda ended up racing side by side, countdown called over CB radio. Both cars are still owned by the same two friends today, now transformed into a Sox & Martin tribute build and a Hemi-powered Cuda. The story behind that afternoon is better than the race itself.

Long before anyone talked about numbers-matching, concours points, or six-figure auction results, a Superbird was just a used car — and in September of 1985, that’s exactly how a group of friends treated a pair of them on the interstate between Detroit and Columbus. CB radios crackling, a countdown given from the passenger seat of a Limelight Green Superbird, and two Mopars running side by side on a public highway toward a car show that hadn’t even started yet. Decades later, one detail from that afternoon still catches people off guard: what actually happened right after they blew past a state trooper.

A Road Trip That Became Its Own Piece of Mopar History

The footage comes from a home video shot in September 1985, when a group of Mopar owners drove in convoy from Detroit, Michigan to a Mopar show in Columbus, Ohio, coordinating the trip over CB radios. Somewhere along Interstate 75, the driver lined his Alpine White Superbird up against a friend’s 1972 Cuda, and what started as a road trip turned into an impromptu race — the exact kind of moment nobody plans to capture on tape but everyone’s grateful somebody did.

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The Three-Count Came From Inside a Third Superbird

According to the car’s current owner, who still posts under the channel name OneBadSuperbird, the countdown that kicks off the race was called over CB radio from inside the camera car itself — a Limelight Green, 440 Six Pack automatic Superbird trailing the action. That car pulled the count right after passing an Ohio Highway Patrol trooper who, in a detail that still makes viewers laugh decades later, had already pulled someone else over on the same stretch of highway.

From Alpine White Stocker to Sox & Martin Tribute

The Superbird seen racing in 1985 wore its original Alpine White paint and stock trim at the time. Today, according to the owner, it’s been reworked into a red, white, and blue tribute to the Sox & Martin Superbird, one of the most recognizable drag-racing liveries Chrysler ever fielded, and it’s currently being fitted with an Indy Cylinder Head all-aluminum 451, a significant step up in both weight savings and airflow over the factory 440 it once carried.

The Cuda’s Journey From 340 Four-Speed to Hemi Power

The 1972 Cuda that raced alongside it has undergone an equally significant transformation. Back in 1985 it ran a 340 backed by a four-speed manual; today, per its owner, it’s been converted to Hemi power. Both cars, remarkably, are still owned by the same two friends who raced them on I-75 nearly forty years ago — the Superbird’s owner still has his, and his buddy Dave still owns the Cuda.

When a Superbird Was Just an Unusual Used Car

One of the video’s most striking comments came from a viewer who bought an Alpine White Superbird in 1978 — the same color and general vintage as the car in the footage — for $1,600, despite it having a damaged nose cone and only 20,000 miles on the odometer. At the time, he noted, it wasn’t a collectible; it was simply an unusual used car nobody particularly wanted, a valuation that would be almost unrecognizable set against what a genuine numbers-matching Superbird commands today.

A Snapshot of Muscle Car Culture Before It Became Nostalgia

Another commenter described growing up on a cotton farm in north Alabama, watching two Chrysler-powered cars — an LS6 Chevelle and a 440 Six Pack GTX — run side by side down a two-lane road in front of his family’s house, hitting well over 120 mph before backing off at a blind drop in the road. Stories like that one are what surface in a comment section under footage like this: not nostalgia manufactured for a car show, but memories of a time when this kind of driving was simply how enthusiasts spent an afternoon.

Why This Footage Still Matters Decades Later

What makes this video more than a curiosity is the documentation trail behind it — two specific, identifiable cars, still owned by the same people who raced them on camera in 1985, both since transformed into more serious builds than they were that day on I-75. It’s a rare case where a piece of amateur home video connects directly to two cars whose full ownership history, mechanical evolution, and even their original selling prices are still traceable almost forty years later.

The CB Radio Culture That Made Trips Like This Possible

CB radio culture was practically inseparable from long-distance Mopar road trips through the 1970s and into the 1980s, giving convoys of enthusiasts a way to coordinate, warn each other about traffic and law enforcement, and, apparently, call a three-count for an impromptu quarter-mile between friends without ever having to pull off the highway. That kind of camaraderie, built entirely around a shared interest and a shared radio frequency, is easy to romanticize decades later, but this footage is proof it genuinely happened exactly the way old-timers describe it.

The Superbird’s aerodynamic package — the pointed nose cone and towering rear wing that made it instantly recognizable even at highway speed in grainy 1985 home video — was designed for NASCAR superspeedways, not interstate cruising, which makes footage like this even more novel. These were street-legal versions of genuine race cars, built in low numbers specifically so Chrysler could homologate the aero package for competition, and by the mid-1980s they were affordable enough that regular enthusiasts were driving them cross-country for a weekend car show rather than trailering them like the six-figure investments they’d eventually become. Watching one get driven hard on a public highway, rather than displayed behind velvet rope, is exactly the kind of footage that’s become nearly impossible to recreate today. Every mile of that footage is a small window into how differently the muscle car world treated its most iconic machines before the collector market decided what they were actually worth. That gap between then and now is really what this clip preserves best.

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