Dodge Charger DAYTONA and Two Plymouth SUPERBIRDS

NASCAR’s homologation rules forced Dodge and Plymouth to build two of the wildest street cars Detroit ever sold, the winged Daytona and Superbird. This lineup puts a real Daytona next to two Superbirds, Hemi and 440 alike, side by side. Here is what actually separates Dodge’s original from Plymouth’s answer a year later.

WINGED Warriors – 1970 426 Hemi Superbird, 1969 Daytona 440 and 1970 Plymouth Superbird 440!!

NASCAR forced Mopar’s hand, and the result was two of the strangest, most aggressive cars Detroit ever sold to the public. Dodge built its winged Daytona first, in barely enough numbers to satisfy homologation rules, and when Richard Petty and the rest of NASCAR’s biggest names came calling for something similar, Plymouth answered a year later with an even wilder version wearing its own nose cone and towering wing. Getting three of these cars, a real Daytona and two Superbirds, together in one place is the kind of lineup that does not happen by accident. So what actually separates Dodge’s original winged warrior from Plymouth’s follow-up act?

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Built Because NASCAR Made Them

Dodge built exactly 503 Daytonas for 1969 to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rule requiring 500 street cars before the aero package could race, of those, 70 got the 426 Hemi and 433 got the 440 Magnum, meaning a Hemi Daytona was always the rarer catch even new. When NASCAR changed its rules for 1970 to scale required production against dealer count, Plymouth ended up building somewhere around 1,920 to 1,935 Superbirds, with 716 running the 390-horsepower 440 Six-Pack and just 135 getting the 425-horsepower Hemi.

Two Wings, Two Personalities

Richard Petty took the Superbird to eight wins in the 1970 season alone, proof the wing-and-nose combination was not just theater, both cars were genuinely engineered for stability at speeds that turned their more conventional Mopar siblings into kites. Standing a real Daytona next to a pair of Superbirds side by side makes the differences obvious fast, different nose cones, different wing mounts, and two model years of NASCAR rule changes baked directly into the sheet metal.

Why Collectors Still Chase the Wings

A verified Hemi Daytona or Hemi Superbird routinely brings seven figures at major auctions today, and even the more common 440-powered examples command serious money, a direct result of production numbers that were tiny to begin with and a NASCAR pedigree that only gets more legendary as the drivers who raced these cars pass into history.

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