Riding In Richard Petty’s Superbird

Todd Werner’s restored #43 Plymouth Superbird carries the STP livery and race history tied directly to Richard Petty, one of the most recognizable combinations in NASCAR history. Filmed from the passenger floor of the car itself at Atlanta Motor Speedway, this ride-along captures what made Plymouth’s aero-war weapon so intimidating before NASCAR regulated it out of competition after a single season. Watch to see why fans call it the greatest NASCAR machine ever built.

There is a very short list of cars you can ride in that once carried Richard Petty to victory lane, and an even shorter list where the person driving you is also the man who spent years bringing it back from the dead. On October 22, 2015, at Atlanta Motor Speedway, someone climbed into the space where a passenger seat should be, held a GoPro at floor level, and rode along as Todd Werner put his fully restored #43 Plymouth Superbird through its paces. What that camera captured is not a museum piece being babied around a parking lot. It is the reason Plymouth built the strangest-looking car in NASCAR history in the first place.

The Car Plymouth Built to Win Petty Back

Richard Petty spent nearly his entire career driving Plymouths, but a contract dispute pushed him to defect to Ford for the 1969 season, a defection serious enough that it rattled Chrysler’s motorsports program. Plymouth’s engineers were already working on an aerodynamic answer to Ford’s Torino Talladega and Dodge’s own Daytona, and the finished car, the Superbird, became the centerpiece of the effort to bring Petty back into the fold for 1970. It worked. Petty returned to Plymouth for the 1970 season behind the wheel of a car built almost as much to win him back as it was to win races.

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A Nose Cone Nobody Else Would Copy

The Superbird’s signature feature is impossible to miss: a nose cone stretching roughly 19 inches out front, a shade longer than the Daytona’s own 18-inch schnoz, bolted onto a standard Road Runner body, paired with a rear wing mounted high enough on vertical struts to clear the trunk lid when it’s open. Both pieces were shaped using wind tunnel data gathered from Chrysler’s aero program, designed to cut drag and generate rear downforce at the 190-plus mph speeds NASCAR’s superspeedways were producing by 1970. Because NASCAR required manufacturers to build and sell a matching number of street versions to homologate a race car, Plymouth had to produce roughly 1,935 street Superbirds for public sale, which is the only reason the car exists as a road-going model at all.

STP, #43, and a Season Fans Still Talk About

Petty’s Superbird carried the #43 and ran under the STP banner, a pairing that became one of the most recognizable liveries in NASCAR history. The car in this video is a faithful restoration of that specific combination, not a generic tribute build, which is part of why one commenter called it a priceless piece of racing history. Petty’s return to Plymouth in a car this visually radical turned 1970 into one of the more talked-about seasons of his career, giving the Superbird a permanent place in NASCAR lore well beyond its short competitive lifespan.

The Rule That Killed the Aero Wars

NASCAR’s response to the Superbird and Dodge Daytona’s speed advantage was swift: for the 1971 season, winged cars were restricted to a 305 cubic inch engine, a displacement small enough to make them uncompetitive against the unrestricted engines allowed in conventional-bodied cars. The rule effectively ended the aero-car era after just two seasons, which means the Superbird’s entire competitive NASCAR life amounts to little more than a single year. That brevity is a large part of why surviving, correctly documented race and street Superbirds carry the historical weight they do today.

Bringing #43 Back From the Dead

Restoring a real former Petty race car, rather than building a tribute from a standard Road Runner, requires tracking down period-correct wing and nose cone hardware, verifying chassis documentation, and rebuilding a car that was originally built to survive a single racing season, not decades of storage. Todd Werner’s ownership and restoration of this Superbird reflects that level of commitment, and driving the finished car himself, rather than handing it to someone else, says something about how personally invested he is in the result.

Riding Shotgun at Atlanta Motor Speedway

Filming this ride-along at Atlanta Motor Speedway rather than a parking lot or a car show wasn’t incidental. Atlanta is a real NASCAR superspeedway, the same type of high-banked track the Superbird was engineered to dominate, and putting the car back on pavement like that, even informally, gets closer to the conditions the car was actually built for than any static display could. The reaction from viewers leans heavily on superlatives, and for a car with this specific pedigree, that’s not surprising.

Why Fans Call It the Greatest NASCAR Machine Ever Built

Combining Richard Petty’s status as NASCAR’s winningest driver with a car built specifically to keep him in a Plymouth, wrapped in the most extreme aerodynamic bodywork the sport ever legalized, is a combination few other machines in racing history can claim. One viewer described the pairing of car and driver as priceless, a sentiment echoed across the comment section by fans who see this specific Superbird as something closer to a museum artifact than a restoration project. Petty’s stats back up that reverence: by the time he retired, he had accumulated more career wins than any other driver in NASCAR history, a record that still stands, which means every car he drove during his prime carries a share of that legacy regardless of how long it actually spent in competition.

A Survivor of Its Own Success

The Superbird’s rarity today is a direct result of how quickly NASCAR regulated it out of competition and how few buyers wanted the outlandish styling on dealer lots in 1970, where many sat unsold for months and were eventually discounted just to clear inventory. Decades later, those same qualities, low production, short competitive relevance, and a design too extreme for its own showroom era, have made surviving examples, especially ones tied directly to Petty, among the most valuable and recognizable American race cars ever built. A restored, documented Petty Superbird sits at the intersection of two collecting worlds, NASCAR memorabilia and street-legal muscle cars, which is part of why interest in cars like this one extends well beyond the traditional Mopar crowd and into NASCAR historians who might otherwise have no interest in a road car at all.

Watch the full video and drop your thoughts in the comments below.

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