Mistaken for his teammate’s identical car and later disguised as a Road Runner and then a Dodge Charger, this Plymouth Superbird spent decades with its true history erased, until a collector’s detective work and Richard Petty’s own crew proved The King really had driven it. A full restoration at Petty’s shop brought one of NASCAR’s genuinely lost cars back into the light.
A Mystery Nearly Fifty Years in the Making
For years, nobody could say for certain whether this Plymouth Superbird had actually been raced by Richard Petty himself, or by his teammate Pete Hamilton, whose identical car it had been mistaken for since the early 1970s. That’s not a small mix-up in NASCAR history; it’s the kind of confusion that can erase a King-driven race car from the record entirely. By the time collector Todd Werner tracked it down, the Superbird had already lived an entire second life: converted into a Road Runner, sold off mid-season, and eventually wearing a completely different body as a Dodge Charger on some other series’ oval. How do you prove a car this altered ever wore Petty’s famous blue at all?
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Erased by Its Own Twin
The confusion started because Petty and Pete Hamilton campaigned matching Superbirds for the same team, and somewhere along the way the wrong car got credited to the wrong driver, a mistake that stuck for decades. Petty himself moved on from this particular car after the 1970 season, converting it into a Road Runner for 1971 before selling it partway through that year to fellow racer Doc Faustina, who eventually swapped on a Dodge Charger body entirely and campaigned it that way until retiring the car in 1976. By the time it stopped racing, almost nothing about the car’s exterior still said “Superbird,” let alone “Petty.”
Proving The King Actually Drove It
When Todd Werner eventually acquired the car and later crossed paths with Petty, The King was intrigued enough to have his own team dig into it, pulling old photos, tapping the memories of original crew members, and hunting down a handful of unique, unfakeable features specific to this exact chassis. That research settled the question for good: this was genuinely one of the cars Petty piloted that season, not Hamilton’s. Werner then commissioned Petty’s own shop to run a full restoration, sourcing authentic period-correct parts from another collector along the way, turning a car that had spent years disguised as something else back into an unmistakable piece of Petty’s Superbird era.
Why the Winged Cars Had Such a Short Factory Life
The Superbird and its Dodge Daytona sibling existed for one reason: NASCAR required manufacturers to build a minimum number of street versions before the aerodynamic bodies could race, a homologation rule the winged cars were purpose-built to satisfy. NASCAR responded by effectively legislating them off the track within a couple of seasons, restricting engine displacement for any car running the big wing and nose cone until the whole aero-car era quietly ended. That short competitive window is part of why a genuinely race-used Superbird, driven by a driver of Petty’s stature, carries so much weight with collectors today — cars like it simply weren’t allowed to exist on track for very long.
Petty’s Complicated Relationship With Plymouth
Petty’s own career had already shown he wasn’t married to any single manufacturer when the money or the equipment pointed elsewhere, and his willingness to move on from this particular Superbird after just one season fits that same pattern. Racing organizations and factory teams in that era treated cars as tools to be reconfigured or sold once they’d served their competitive purpose, not as artifacts to be preserved, which is exactly how a car this significant ended up converted into a Road Runner and then sold off entirely. It’s a reminder that period race teams rarely thought about legacy the way collectors do decades later.
How Restorers Prove a Chassis Never Lies
Verifying a race car’s true identity decades after the fact usually comes down to details a body swap or repaint can’t erase: factory-stamped chassis numbers, weld patterns unique to a particular team’s fabrication habits, and mounting points for equipment that only that car ever carried. Period photographs matched against those physical details, cross-referenced with the memories of mechanics who actually wrenched on the car at the time, are what typically turn a hopeful claim into a documented fact. That’s the same playbook Petty’s team ran here, and it’s the standard the broader restoration hobby increasingly demands before accepting any race car’s provenance as settled.
The Street Superbirds Most Fans Actually Remember
While this particular car lived its early life as a genuine NASCAR entry, most people who picture a Superbird today are thinking of the street version Plymouth built in far smaller numbers than its regular Road Runner lineup, specifically to satisfy that same homologation requirement. Those street cars shared the nose cone and towering rear wing but were tuned for public roads rather than superspeedways, and dealers reportedly struggled to move some of them at the time despite what they’ve become worth to collectors since. The race cars and the homologation-special street cars tell two different, equally important parts of the same aerodynamic-warfare story.
Why a Verified Petty Car Changes Everything
A Superbird with no verified history is still a significant piece of NASCAR aero-war memorabilia, but a Superbird confirmed to have been driven by Richard Petty himself sits in an entirely different category, backed by the credibility of Petty’s own shop and crew rather than just a seller’s claim. That distinction matters enormously in a hobby where provenance can swing a car’s standing among collectors regardless of how well it’s been restored mechanically. Werner’s persistence in tracking down the truth, and Petty’s willingness to help settle it, turned what could have stayed an unresolved rumor into one of the more satisfying detective stories in NASCAR restoration circles.
A Nose Cone Built for One Job
Every detail of the Superbird’s aerodynamic bodywork, from the elongated nose cone to the towering rear wing, existed for a single purpose: cutting through the air at speeds regular stock car bodies simply couldn’t manage on NASCAR’s fastest superspeedways. None of it was styling for styling’s sake, every inch was shaped around wind-tunnel data and lap-time gains, which is exactly why the design looked so unlike anything else on the road at the time. That single-minded engineering focus is part of what makes a genuinely race-proven example like this one so compelling to collectors decades later.
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Bad ass bird
what a lucky guy!
This car was built to keep richard petty from going to ford dodge coudnt keep pace with the cyclone so they built exactly 500 of these cars so nascar would allow them to enter them in nascar !!!