Plymouth Built the Superbird With No Front Bumper — Owners Needed a Jack Nobody Else Did

This 1970 Plymouth Superbird still rides with the two different jacks Chrysler had to invent because its aero nose cone left no room for a front bumper. See what else made Detroit’s strangest one-year muscle car both a NASCAR champion and a dealership oddity.

Plymouth wanted the 1970 Superbird to slice through the air at close to 200 mph on NASCAR’s biggest superspeedways, and it was willing to give up something every other car on the road had: a front bumper. The 19-inch fiberglass nose cone that made the Superbird one of Detroit’s two “winged warriors” left no room to mount a standard bumper jack, so Chrysler shipped every single one of the roughly 1,920 cars built with a second jack nobody else needed. Pop the trunk on a surviving Superbird today and you’ll still find both tools riding together — a scissor jack for the nose, a bumper jack for the tail — a small, strange reminder of just how far Plymouth bent a family sedan to win stock car races. This particular 1970 Superbird, walked through on video at a dealership showroom, still carries every one of the engineering quirks that made the car brilliant on the track and obsolete within a single season.

Why a Muscle Car Needed Two Different Jacks

The video opens with a straightforward look at a real Superbird on the showroom floor, and the detail that stops people in the comments every time is the jack situation. Because the nose cone replaced the factory bumper entirely, there was no flat bracket to hook a standard bumper jack onto up front. Chrysler’s fix was simple but telling: include a scissor jack that slots under the front subframe for a flat up front, and keep the traditional bumper jack for the rear, which still had its chrome bumper intact. It’s the kind of fix that only exists because a styling department decided aerodynamics mattered more than parts-bin convenience, and it’s a detail you won’t find explained on the window sticker of any other muscle car from the era.

The rest of the walk-around covers the basics any Superbird shopper wants confirmed: the fit of the vinyl top, the condition of the wing mounts, and the paint underneath that reflector tape Plymouth used to cover the factory seams where the nose cone met the fender. None of it is flashy, but for a car this specialized, the small stuff is exactly what separates a real restoration from a repaint with a wing bolted on.

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The Race Car Detroit Had to Sell to the Public First

The Superbird existed because NASCAR said it had to. By 1969, Chrysler’s Dodge Daytona and the earlier Charger 500 were dominating superspeedway racing on raw aerodynamics, and NASCAR responded by requiring manufacturers to build and sell at least one street car for every two dealerships before a model could race the following season — a homologation rule meant to keep race cars tethered to showroom reality. For Plymouth, that meant turning the Road Runner into the Superbird: the same 19-inch nose cone as the Daytona, a radically raked rear wing, and a vinyl roof used mainly to hide the body seams where the standard Road Runner’s rear window had to be reshaped to fit the new sheet metal.

Plymouth built the car for one model year only, and the generally accepted production figure sits at 1,920 to 1,935 units, depending on the source, with the vast majority running Chrysler’s 440-cubic-inch V8 in either four-barrel or Six Pack form. A small handful — commonly cited around 135 cars — left the factory with the legendary 426 Hemi, making those the most valuable Superbirds on today’s auction circuit. The car’s NASCAR career was short but successful: Richard Petty returned to Plymouth for the 1970 season and the winged cars swept superspeedway wins that year, exactly as Chrysler had designed them to.

The Wing Height Everyone Gets Wrong

Ask most muscle car fans why the Superbird’s rear wing sits so comically tall above the trunk, and they’ll tell you it was raised that high so the trunk lid could still open. It’s one of the most repeated stories in the hobby — and it’s largely considered a myth. The wing’s height was set by Chrysler aerodynamicist John Pointer specifically to put it into clean, undisturbed air above the car’s turbulent wake, not to clear the trunk opening. That the lid happened to swing open underneath it anyway was, by most accounts, a lucky coincidence rather than the design goal. It’s a good example of how much of the Superbird’s reputation has been shaped by garage folklore as much as by the actual engineering memos.

Why Plymouth Killed It After Just One Year

The Superbird’s downfall came from NASCAR’s own rulebook, not from Plymouth’s. After the winged cars proved too dominant, NASCAR rewrote its engine rules for 1971, effectively capping the displacement allowed on any car running the aerodynamic nose-and-wing package at a level that made the setup pointless to run competitively. With the race-winning advantage gone, there was no reason for Plymouth or Dodge to keep building expensive, low-volume homologation specials, and both the Superbird and the Daytona disappeared from showrooms after barely a season on sale. That short production run is a big part of why surviving, unmodified cars — especially Hemi-powered ones — now sell for well into six and seven figures at major auctions.

What makes the Superbird endure beyond the auction results is how uncompromising it was for a mass-production car. Every piece of its unusual shape existed to solve a problem measured in fractions of a second at 190 mph, not to look good in a dealership lot — which is exactly why it looked so strange sitting in one. The reflector tape over the seams, the oversized wing, even that second jack in the trunk were all byproducts of an engineering team chasing speed first and asking questions about practicality later.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.