The Winged Warrior NASCAR Wanted Banned: 1970 Plymouth Superbird

NASCAR was so tired of losing to the Plymouth Superbird’s aerodynamic tricks that it rewrote the rulebook to ban cars like it. Built to lure Richard Petty back to Plymouth, this 440 Six Pack, four-speed Superbird carried him to eight wins in 1970 alone. With only around 1,920 to 1,935 ever built, a real numbers-matching Superbird remains one of the rarest, most historically loaded muscle cars in existence.

1970 Plymouth Superbird 440 CID Super Commando Six Pack V8 A833 4-Speed Manual

MCF thanks Gateway Classic Cars for the images displayed here.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

NASCAR hated the Plymouth Superbird so much that officials rewrote the rulebook specifically to get rid of it. That should tell you everything about how serious Plymouth was when it built this car — a towering rear wing, a nose cone stretched nearly two feet past a normal Road Runner, and a top-spec engine lineup built for one purpose: making Richard Petty come back to Plymouth and start winning again. It worked. Only a few thousand of these winged beasts were ever built for the street, and finding a real numbers-matching Six Pack car today means chasing one of the rarest, strangest-looking muscle cars Detroit ever legally sold.

Built to Bring Richard Petty Home

Petty had left Plymouth for Ford in 1969 after growing frustrated that Dodge’s Charger Daytona was outrunning his Road Runner on NASCAR’s superspeedways. Plymouth’s answer was the Superbird — essentially a Road Runner wearing the same aerodynamic tricks that made the Daytona so fast, right down to the towering rear wing and elongated nose cone. The gamble paid off. Petty came back to Plymouth for the 1970 season and the Superbird carried him to eight wins, proving the aero investment was worth every dollar Chrysler spent developing it.

440 Six Pack, A833 Four-Speed, and a Rulebook Written to Stop It

This car’s 440 CID Super Commando Six Pack, fed by three two-barrel carburetors, made 390 horsepower and 490 lb-ft of torque, backed by the A833 four-speed manual for buyers who wanted to row their own gears. A 426 Hemi was also on the order sheet, though only about 135 Superbirds left the factory with it. NASCAR’s rules of the era required manufacturers to build a street version for every race car they wanted to homologate — one reason the Superbird exists at all — and the car proved so dominant that NASCAR changed the rules again for 1971 specifically to push aero cars like it off the track for good.

A Production Number Nobody Fully Agrees On

Even Superbird historians argue about exactly how many were built — most sources land somewhere around 1,920 to 1,935 units shipped to U.S. dealers, with a handful more sent to Canada. What’s not in dispute is how few of those cars survive in original, numbers-matching condition, or how much a documented Six Pack or Hemi Superbird commands today. Cars this loud, this rare, and this directly tied to a NASCAR championship don’t come around twice — which is exactly why this Gateway Classic Cars example is worth a long look.

The Winged Warriors Weren’t Just About Speed

The Superbird’s nose cone and towering rear wing weren’t styling flourishes, every inch was shaped around wind tunnel testing aimed at reducing aerodynamic lift at superspeedway speeds, since a NASCAR stock car running near 200 mph could become dangerously unstable if the rear end started to lift. That’s the actual engineering reason the wing sits as tall as it does, high enough to reach into cleaner airflow above the turbulence coming off the rear window and trunk.

Dealers Struggled to Sell Them New

As outrageous as the Superbird looks decades later, it was actually a tough sell on dealer lots when new, its exaggerated aero styling was polarizing rather than universally loved, and some dealers reportedly removed the nose cone and wing to move slow-selling units off the lot. That short-sighted decision is exactly why an untouched, numbers-matching Superbird commands such a premium today, a genuine survivor is rarer than the production numbers alone would suggest.

A Sister Car With a Different Personality

The Superbird shared its aero-warrior mission with Dodge’s Charger Daytona, the car that started the aerodynamic arms race a year earlier, but the two were never identical twins, Plymouth’s version rode on a different nose cone shape and used the Road Runner as its base rather than the Charger, giving it a distinct visual identity even among fellow winged cars. Collectors today treat the two nameplates as related but genuinely separate collector categories rather than interchangeable variants of the same car.

Why NASCAR’s Rule Change Ended the Whole Era

When NASCAR rewrote its rules for 1971, effectively requiring aero cars to run smaller engines that made them uncompetitive, it didn’t just sideline the Superbird and Daytona, it ended the entire aero-warrior chapter of stock car racing outright. Manufacturers had spent a fortune developing these cars for a homologation requirement that vanished almost overnight, which is part of why so few winged cars were built in total and why the ones that survive are treated as a genuinely closed chapter of racing history rather than an ongoing lineage.

The Six Pack Setup Was More Than a Marketing Name

“Six Pack” wasn’t just a catchy trim badge, it described a genuinely different induction system: three two-barrel carburetors mounted in a row on an aluminum intake, with the center carb doing the everyday work and the two outer carbs opening under hard throttle for extra fuel and air. That staged setup gave a Six Pack car strong low-speed drivability around town while still delivering a serious top-end rush when the secondaries kicked in, a compromise the single four-barrel 440 couldn’t quite match at either extreme.

The Wing’s Height Was Debated Even at Chrysler

Chrysler engineers reportedly tested wing heights extensively before settling on the Superbird’s towering final mount point, since a wing set too low sat inside turbulent air coming off the trunk lid and did almost nothing useful. Even with that careful engineering behind it, the sheer size of the finished wing was polarizing enough internally that it became something of a running joke at Chrysler before it ever reached a dealer lot, proof that even the engineers who built it understood exactly how strange it looked.

A Rare Factory Color on This Particular Example

Plymouth built every factory Superbird strictly as a hardtop — no convertible version was ever offered on the production line, regardless of what a given photo’s file name or caption might suggest. This cream-toned example from Gateway Classic Cars wears one of the era’s more understated factory hues rather than the louder colors most often associated with the model, but the fundamentals underneath — the nose cone, the towering wing, and the Six Pack drivetrain — are the same engineering package that made every Superbird a genuine piece of Chrysler’s aero-warrior era.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter