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NASCAR’s homologation rules forced Dodge and Plymouth to build two of the strangest, most aggressive cars either company ever sold to the public: the winged Daytona and its follow-up act, the Superbird. With production numbers in the hundreds and a NASCAR pedigree that only grows more legendary with time, these cars now command seven figures at major auctions. Read on to find out what actually separates one winged warrior from the other.
Genuine 1970 Plymouth Superbirds are nearly impossible to find and even harder to afford, so this build started from a Plymouth Satellite instead and became a hand-crafted tribute complete with the aero car’s iconic nose cone and towering rear wing. Featured on Muscle Car of the Week, it lives in The Brothers Collection alongside vintage NASCAR racers and bone-stock originals. Watch to see how close a tribute build can get to the real thing.
Tom Lembeck has owned this 1970 Plymouth Superbird — one of roughly 135 built with the 426 Hemi — since 2007, and Lou Costabile catches up with him in Chicago for ‘My Car Story.’ Finished in Plymouth’s High Impact Vitamin C orange, the car draws no shortage of comments calling it the most memorable muscle car of the 1970s. Watch to hear Lembeck’s decade-plus history with one of Mopar’s rarest homologation specials.
Deep inside a Wisconsin barn, under a stripe of bird droppings and a small mountain of collapsed hay, sat two of Mopar’s rarest aero warriors: a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 and a 1970 Plymouth Superbird, untouched for the better part of thirty years. Their owner found each one through a different stroke of luck, a vague classified ad and a tip from a wing car club, decades before either car ever left the barn. Read on to find out how both cars ended up parked together, and why one of them still wears its original barn hay to car shows.
A 1970 Plymouth Superbird spent nineteen years sitting before anyone put real miles on it, and it still shows just 674 on the odometer today. The factory B5 blue paint has never been touched by a repaint gun, and the numbers-matching 440 Super Commando under the hood still traces back to the original build sheet. Only 1,920 Superbirds were built for NASCAR homologation, and this one may be among the best-preserved survivors left. Is a car this original meant to be driven, or protected?
A 1970 Plymouth Superbird carrying the number 43 turned up at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois — and it wasn’t a tribute build. This is one of the actual NASCAR racers Richard Petty piloted during Plymouth’s aero-war campaign, left largely untouched since its racing days. From the nose cone engineered to chase 200 mph to the cartoon character it inspired decades later, there’s more to this car than its paint job lets on.
Real 1970 Plymouth Superbirds are nearly impossible to buy — Plymouth built fewer than 2,000 to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules, and survivors now sell for prices most enthusiasts will never reach. So The Brothers Collection built their own from a plain 1970 Plymouth Satellite, recreating the wing car’s nose cone and towering rear wing on a more attainable platform. Featured on V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week, the build raises a real question about what a tribute car needs to get right to earn respect. Watch to see how close a handmade Superbird can get to the real thing.
Muscle cars didn’t start with a Pontiac GTO or a Hemi — the arms race traces back to a 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 and escalated for two decades before ending in a nose cone and a 23-inch rear wing on the 1970 Plymouth Superbird. This rundown traces that full arc: the early V8 pioneers, the cubic-inch wars of the 1960s, and the aerodynamic homologation specials that finally forced NASCAR to change its rules. Read on to find out how a mid-sized Oldsmobile led, decades later, to a winged Plymouth built purely to win.