Review: 1969 Daytona and 1970 Roadrunner

A 1969 Dodge Daytona and a 1970 Plymouth Superbird — two of NASCAR’s most extreme aero-warrior street cars — sit side by side in one Jacksonville owner’s garage. Both wear the wing and nosecone combination that solved a real aerodynamic problem at 120-plus miles per hour, not just a styling flourish. Find out which one the owner says deserves the edge.

Only one manufacturer war in muscle car history produced street cars with an eighteen-inch nosecone and a rear wing tall enough to clear the trunk lid — and it did it on purpose, not by accident. Two of those cars sit side by side in this Jacksonville garage, owned by a man who believes every car enthusiast owes it to themselves to understand exactly what these machines were actually built to do. One is a 1969 Dodge Daytona. The other is a 1970 Plymouth Superbird. Neither one was designed to be pretty.

Built for NASCAR, Not the Boulevard

The Daytona and Superbird exist because of a NASCAR homologation rule, not a styling department’s imagination. To legally race the aerodynamic bodywork on the oval, Dodge and Plymouth each had to build and sell a minimum number of street versions to the public — a requirement that put genuinely radical, wind-tunnel-shaped cars into ordinary dealer showrooms. Owner Mark Mooneyhan’s decision to keep both cars together tells its own story: these were never meant to be understood in isolation. They were siblings built for the same war, wearing different corporate badges.

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The Real Reason for the Wing

The tall rear wing gets treated as a styling exaggeration by casual observers, but one commenter pushed back on that assumption with real specificity. “It wasn’t really for tire clearance, because they didn’t want anyone to know the real reason,” the comment explained. “The real reason was to prevent upward air in the fender wheel wells, so the car could hug the ground, releasing the air pressure.” In other words, the wing’s height wasn’t about looking aggressive — it was solving a genuine aerodynamic problem, keeping the rear end planted at speeds where a normal trunk lid would start generating dangerous lift.

Two Mopar Icons, One Owner’s Dilemma

Owning both a Daytona and a Superbird invites an obvious question, and commenters weren’t shy about answering it. “Both are cool, but I love the Roadrunner Superbird!” one viewer wrote, while another countered flatly, “If I had the choice, I would rather the Daytona.” The split opinion isn’t surprising — the two cars are close mechanical cousins wearing meaningfully different sheet metal and badge identities, which is exactly the kind of detail that turns casual preference into genuine, decades-long debate among Mopar enthusiasts.

What These Cars Are Worth Today

Cars built in numbers this small, for a purpose this specific, don’t stay affordable. “These cars are my dream cars,” one commenter admitted. “I wish I had the $300,000 to $500,000 to buy every little piece of one and build that bird up.” That valuation range reflects where genuine, documented wing cars sit in today’s collector market — a dramatic climb from their original showroom sticker prices, driven by scarcity, NASCAR pedigree, and the simple fact that nothing else quite like them was ever built again.

A Cousin Worth Mentioning: the Charger 500

One detailed comment brought a third car into the conversation: the 1969 Dodge Charger 500, which shared the Daytona’s flush grille and fastback rear window but stopped short of adding the wing and nosecone. “In testing above 120 mph, the back end wanted to come around,” the commenter explained, “and when they put the wing and nosecone on the car, problem solved.” That progression — Charger 500 to full Daytona — shows the aero package wasn’t developed all at once, but as an escalating response to a real, dangerous handling problem discovered at speed.

Why Plymouth’s Exit Still Stings

For Superbird fans, the car’s legacy is tangled up with regret over what eventually happened to its parent brand. “It’s a shame that Plymouth had to be shut down,” one commenter wrote. “Plymouth is probably one of my favorite manufacturers.” Plymouth would survive another three decades after the Superbird’s brief production run before Chrysler finally discontinued the brand in 2001, but for enthusiasts who grew up with cars like this one, the Superbird represents Plymouth near its absolute creative peak.

Which Wing Car Would You Choose?

Ask ten Mopar fans which car they’d take home, and expect something close to a ten-way split — that’s exactly the dynamic playing out in this video’s comments. The Daytona and Superbird were built to answer the same aerodynamic problem, but the emotional attachment people form to one badge over the other rarely comes down to lap times or production numbers. It comes down to which nosecone you fell in love with first.

A Rolling Museum in One Garage

Mark Mooneyhan’s garage is proof you don’t necessarily have to choose. Keeping both cars together, rather than picking a favorite and selling the other, turns his collection into something closer to a rolling museum exhibit than a typical private garage — a side-by-side comparison that most enthusiasts will only ever get to see in photographs, and a reminder that the Daytona-versus-Superbird debate was really always a Dodge-versus-Plymouth family argument, fought with the same aerodynamic playbook on both sides.

The production numbers behind both cars only reinforce how unusual it is to see them parked together. Dodge and Plymouth each built just enough Daytonas and Superbirds to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation minimums, and dealers famously struggled to move the leftover inventory once the wing-car era wound down — some sat on lots for months, priced well below sticker, before buyers came around to what they actually were. That slow original reception is part of what makes today’s valuations so striking; cars that dealers once discounted to clear space are now the six-figure centerpieces of exactly the kind of collection Mooneyhan has built. That reversal of fortune — from unsellable discount stock to seven-figure auction headliners for the rarest Hemi-equipped examples — is one of the more remarkable value swings in American automotive history, and it’s a big part of why Mooneyhan’s side-by-side pairing draws such a strong reaction from anyone lucky enough to see it in person. Few muscle car stories capture that swing from showroom leftover to blue-chip collectible quite this cleanly. It is, in the end, exactly why this garage is worth a second look.

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