At 18 He bought a Six Pack, A Superbird With 18,000 Miles On It

Plymouth only built the Superbird because NASCAR homologation rules forced its hand, every road car existed to make the racing version legal. Here’s how the Charger Daytona sparked the rivalry, and why 1970 turned out to be the Superbird’s only model year.

Here is a pretty cool story about one of our Muscle Car Fans Alan S. He has owned an amazing original Superbird for over 32 Years. This is his storywritten by him,
Back in 1984 when I turned 21 friends told me “go buy a Six Pack” so, I did, an 18,000 mile Superbird in need of restoration from damage, not from the great ‘salt-belt’ obviously this car was know it would be “special” and was never driven in the winter. It still has it’s all original drivetrain, the desired ‘V’ Code for 440+6, bucket seat with console automatic, tic-toc tach, 3.55 rear gears & the original 14″ Road Wheels (Magnum 500), + the original spare is still in the trunk. I’ve put a total of 8,000 miles on this car in the 33 years of ownership, in 2009 at the 40th Wing Car Reunion at Talladega Superspeedway I pushed the 200mph barrier as the needle went past the 150 mark and down to the ‘P’ in the MPH logo at the bottom of the speedometer. And to think this is the second Road Runner in my collection…..the first is even more rare.As a side note, my first muscle car (& I still have it) is a 1970 Road Runner convertible, 1 of 824 built as well as the last year for a Road Runner convertible, which I have owned since 1981 or 36 years of continued ownership.

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Alan’s Superbird wasn’t built to win concours judging — it was built to win NASCAR races, and the road-going version you see in his story is really just the minimum number Plymouth had to build to make that legal. Homologation rules of the era required manufacturers to sell a set number of race-derived cars to the public before those cars could compete, and the Superbird’s nose cone and towering rear wing exist purely because of aerodynamics, not styling preference. Getting there meant Plymouth had to answer a rival automaker’s move first — and the response changed stock car racing more than either company probably expected.

Answering the Dodge Charger Daytona

The Superbird was Plymouth’s follow-up to the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona, Chrysler’s first aero-focused NASCAR entry, and it incorporated engineering lessons learned from a full season of Daytona competition. Both cars shared the same basic mission: reduce drag and add downforce enough to compete at NASCAR’s newly punishing high-speed ovals, where every mile per hour mattered more than showroom looks. Plymouth built roughly 1,935 Superbirds for the street in 1970 to satisfy homologation requirements, split mostly between 440 cubic inch engines — 716 of them with the six-barrel carburetor setup like the “Six Pack” Alan describes — and a rare 135 cars with the 426 Hemi.

One Year, and Then It Was Over

1970 turned out to be the Superbird’s only production year. Rising insurance premiums on high-performance cars, tightening emissions regulations, and NASCAR’s own rule changes effectively banning the aero-car body style combined to kill the program almost as fast as it started. That short window is exactly why surviving, unmolested Superbirds like the one in this story carry the weight they do — cars driven and preserved by a single owner for over three decades are an increasingly rare window into a purpose-built racing homologation special that never got a second act.

Built Partly to Win Back Richard Petty

Plymouth’s aero program wasn’t purely an engineering exercise — it was also a recruiting tool. Richard Petty had left Plymouth for Ford for the 1969 season, frustrated that the Charger 500 and Daytona couldn’t keep pace with what Ford and Mercury were fielding on the superspeedways. Chrysler’s answer for 1970 was to build a Plymouth aero car good enough to win Petty back, and the plan worked: Petty returned to Mopar for the 1970 season and campaigned a Superbird, giving the car instant credibility with fans who’d followed the rivalry. A Six Pack Superbird like Alan’s carries that same DNA, even without a famous name on the door.

Why the Wing Sat So High Above the Deck Lid

The Superbird’s towering rear wing looks almost cartoonish parked next to an ordinary Road Runner, but its height was dictated by function, not showroom drama. Engineers raised it well above the trunk lid so it could clear the deck when the trunk was opened, and so the wing’s endplates could reach cleaner air above the turbulence rolling off the roofline and rear glass at speed. A wing mounted lower, closer to the bodywork, would have been fighting dirty, disturbed air instead of a clean airstream, undermining the whole reason it was there.

Built for a Track Just Getting Fast Enough to Need It

Talladega Superspeedway, the track where Alan attended his 40th Wing Car Reunion in 2009, had only opened the year before the Superbird arrived, built by NASCAR specifically to be its fastest track yet. That push toward ever-higher qualifying speeds is exactly what forced the aero war between Chrysler and Ford in the first place — a car stable at 190-plus mph needed real aerodynamic engineering, not just a bigger engine. Alan’s own account of watching the speedometer needle sweep past 150 and toward the 200 mark during that reunion is a fitting modern echo of the high-speed stability the wing and nose cone were built to deliver five decades earlier.

A Survivor Story That Outnumbers the Cars Themselves

With roughly 1,935 Superbirds built for the street and only a fraction of those carrying the six-barrel “Six Pack” 440 like Alan’s, an unmolested, single-family-owned example with its original drivetrain intact is rarer today than the raw production figures alone suggest. Decades of road salt, casual resale, and plenty of owners who simply didn’t know what they had have thinned the surviving population far below the original build count, which is exactly why a car with 33 continuous years under one owner’s care stands out even among other genuine Superbirds.

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