Only 1,268 of the 15,506 Dodge Super Bees built in 1970 left the factory with the 440 Six-Pack under the hood, and this one wears a twin-loop front end Dodge used for exactly one model year before retiring it. Here is why that rare combination made 1970 the most collected Super Bee year.
Dodge redesigned the Super Bee’s face for 1970, then tore the design up and never touched it again. The car got a twin-loop front bumper — what Dodge’s own PR team nicknamed "bumble bee wings" — and wore it for exactly one model year before the Super Bee nameplate jumped from the Coronet to the Charger for 1971. That makes this the rarest-looking Super Bee Dodge ever built, and Mopar collectors know it. Underneath that one-year face sat an even rarer choice: the 440 Six-Pack, a triple-carbureted big block that only 1,268 of the 15,506 Super Bees built in 1970 actually left the factory wearing. This Top Banana Yellow example from the Brothers Collection, featured on Muscle Car of the Week, is one of them — white interior, factory stripes, and a hood that causes a stir on the street anywhere it goes.
The video walks the car from front to back the way only a dedicated Mopar channel can, lingering on the details that separate a real numbers-driven 440 Six-Pack car from a clone: the twin-scooped "power bulge" hood, the bumblebee stripe wrapping the tail, and the factory white bucket-seat interior that most 1970 Super Bee buyers skipped in favor of black. It’s the kind of car that draws a crowd the moment it rolls into a parking lot, which is exactly the reaction Dodge was chasing when it built the Super Bee in the first place.
Viewers who know the model inside and out flagged the same detail the moment the car appeared: that split-grille, twin-loop front end only showed up on the 1970 model year. Commenters who grew up around these cars pointed out how underappreciated the styling is compared to its Road Runner and Charger stablemates, with more than one calling the "coke bottle" body and distinctive grille the best-looking year the Super Bee ever had.
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The Grille Dodge Only Built for One Year
Dodge launched the Super Bee in 1968 as its answer to the Plymouth Road Runner — a stripped-down, big-engine muscle car built on the mid-size Coronet platform and priced to get young buyers into a genuine performance car without the options-list markup of a GTX or a Charger R/T. For its first two seasons the Super Bee wore a fairly conventional Coronet face. That changed for 1970, when Dodge gave the car a new twin-loop front bumper design, integrating the bumper into two separate circular loops around each headlight cluster. It was bold, it was unmistakable, and it lasted exactly one year: for 1971, Dodge retired the Coronet-based Super Bee entirely and moved the name over to the Charger line, where it became a trim package rather than its own model. That makes the 1970 front end a true one-year-only design, and it’s a major reason values on well-preserved 1970 Super Bees have pulled ahead of the 1968 and 1969 versions in recent years.
The Coronet underpinnings mattered as much as the styling. Dodge kept the Super Bee’s curb weight and price down by treating it as a performance package rather than a fully loaded model, which is exactly why buyers could option a 15,506-unit production run of 1970 Super Bees with everything from a mild 335-horsepower 383 Magnum — the engine that found its way into roughly 14,200 of them — all the way up to the 426 Hemi. Sitting between those two extremes was the 440 Six-Pack, the engine that turned an already-quick car into one of the fastest things Dodge sold that didn’t wear a Hemi badge.
Why the 440 Six-Pack Became the One Everyone Wanted
The 440 Six-Pack option bolted three two-barrel Holley carburetors onto an aluminum intake manifold, feeding Dodge’s 440-cubic-inch RB big block a rating of 390 horsepower and 490 lb-ft of torque — identical torque, on paper, to the 426 Hemi’s own 490 lb-ft rating, even though the Hemi’s 425 horsepower and higher-revving nature gave it the edge everywhere else. Buyers who wanted the Six-Pack look and sound without Hemi-level maintenance costs and insurance premiums gravitated toward it, but it was still a genuinely exclusive option: just 1,268 of the 15,506 Super Bees built in 1970 left the factory with it, a little over 8% of total production. That scarcity is exactly why a documented, numbers-matching 440 Six-Pack car like the one in this video draws so much attention today — most Super Bee buyers never got anywhere near one.
Visually, the Six-Pack cars gave themselves away with a fiberglass or steel Ramcharger hood featuring a functional scoop, along with "Six Pack" call-out decals so nobody at the stoplight could mistake it for the base 383. Combined with the one-year-only front clip, a genuine 1970 Super Bee 440 Six-Pack sits at the intersection of two different kinds of rarity — a rare engine option on a rare model year — which is part of why values for clean, documented examples have climbed steadily as the pool of unrestored originals shrinks.
A Sleeper With a Secret in the Dash
One detail from the video’s comment section is worth knowing if you’re ever shopping for a real four-speed Super Bee: that small amber dash light some buyers mistake for an oil-pressure warning is actually a reverse-gear indicator, a factory feature wired to the backup lamp circuit on 1968–1976 Mopar A-, B-, and E-Body cars equipped with a four-speed manual. It’s a small thing, but it’s exactly the kind of detail that separates someone who’s spent real time around these cars from someone reciting spec sheets, and it’s the sort of trivia longtime owners bring up before they mention horsepower.
That owner culture is a big part of what makes the 1970 Super Bee special today. More than one commenter on the video described owning a 440 Six-Pack Super Bee decades ago — buying one as a teenager, spec’ing it with a Dana 60 rear end and buckets, then losing track of it over the years — the kind of story that plays out across Mopar forums and car shows every summer. Add in a production run that was already modest by muscle car standards, a front-end design Dodge abandoned after a single year, and an engine option fewer than one in ten buyers actually chose, and it’s easy to see why the 1970 Super Bee 440 Six-Pack has become one of the more quietly desirable muscle cars from Detroit’s golden era — a genuine performance bargain in period that’s anything but a bargain to find in this condition now.
Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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