The Winged Plymouth Superbird Sat Unsold on Dealer Lots for Years

The Plymouth Superbird looks like the wildest muscle car ever sold, yet dealers struggled to move them. Here is the surprising truth about its giant wing and its short life.

Picture a car so bold that the people paid to sell it were embarrassed to park it out front. It had a nose like a rocket, a wing taller than most of its passengers, and a horn that went “beep, beep” like a cartoon bird. Today it sits near the top of many collectors’ wish lists. In 1970, a lot of buyers walked right past it.

This is the story of the Plymouth Superbird, and it is full of details that make you sound sharp at the next car show. Even better, some of the things people repeat about it turn out to be wrong.

A Race Car That Had to Be Sold to the Public

The Superbird was built for one reason: NASCAR. Chrysler had already tried an aerodynamic version of the Dodge Charger in 1969, called the Charger Daytona, with a pointed nose cone and a towering rear wing. The Superbird was Plymouth’s follow-up for the 1970 season, based on the Plymouth Road Runner and refined with lessons learned from the Daytona.

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Why would a race car show up in a dealership at all? Because NASCAR required it. To race a car in the top series, a manufacturer had to sell a minimum number of them to ordinary customers through dealers. For 1970 that minimum went up to one car for every two of the maker’s dealers in the country. So Plymouth had to build a street version, whether or not anyone wanted to drive one to the grocery store.

There was a second motive, and it had a famous name attached. Richard Petty, the biggest star in stock car racing, had left Plymouth for Ford at the end of 1968. It has been widely speculated that the Superbird was meant to lure him back. If so, it worked. Petty returned to Plymouth for 1970 and won more races than anyone else that season, 18 of the 40 he entered.

The Wing Myth Everyone Repeats

Here is the first surprise. Ask a Mopar fan why the Superbird’s wing sits so high, and you will probably hear that it had to be tall so the trunk lid could open underneath it. It sounds sensible. It is also a myth.

The story seems to have spread in the 1990s, when a retired Chrysler engineer said it in public. The real reason is more interesting. The wing was mounted on tall vertical supports to lift it into cleaner, less turbulent air, up near the height of the roofline. Air coming off a roof is messy, and a wing sitting in that mess does very little. Put it up high, and it can actually press the rear of the car down at speed. That is what racing wings are for.

The Surprise: It Barely Helped on the Street

Now the counterintuitive part. All that aerodynamic hardware was designed for superspeedways, where cars run flat out for hours. On normal roads, and even at the drag strip, the benefit was tiny. The nose cone and wing only began to matter at speeds above about 60 miles per hour.

In fact, a regular 1970 Road Runner was reportedly just as quick, and by some accounts quicker, in the quarter mile and in standard acceleration tests than the winged Superbird. The most powerful version used the legendary 426 Hemi engine rated at 425 horsepower, and even a stock Hemi Superbird could get from zero to 60 in around five and a half seconds. That is fast, but you could get similar thrills without the wing. The wing was for the show and for the track.

Why Buyers Said No Thanks

Showroom customers in 1970 mostly saw what you see in a photo: a long, pointy nose with pop-up headlights, a wing that rose far above the trunk, and cartoon decals. The styling was simply too extreme for the time, and many shoppers preferred a normal Road Runner for less hassle.

The result was a problem nobody at Plymouth wanted. Many Superbirds sat unsold on dealer back lots, in some cases as late as 1972. Some dealers reportedly converted them into regular 1970 Road Runners just to clear them out. Think about that for a moment. A car now treasured for its wild design was once so hard to sell that dealers tried to disguise it.

A Short Life and a Long Legend

The Superbird did not get much time to prove itself. For 1971, NASCAR changed its rules so that aero cars with large engines had to meet a tight engine size limit or carry much more weight. Those changes, along with rising insurance costs and stricter emissions rules, helped end the experiment. The Superbird was built for a single model year, 1970, and its Dodge cousin, the Charger Daytona, for a single year as well, 1969.

Both cars still left their mark. A Dodge Charger Daytona was the first car in NASCAR history to break the 200 mile per hour mark, with driver Buddy Baker doing it at Talladega in March of 1970. The Superbird, for its part, went on to win races of its own. Today collectors prize it for exactly the reasons dealers once complained about: the nose, the wing, the decals, and the sheer nerve of the thing.

What to Take Away

The Superbird exists because NASCAR made manufacturers sell race cars to the public.
Its giant wing was set high to reach clean air, not to clear the trunk lid.
On the street, it was no quicker than a regular Road Runner, and by some accounts it was slightly slower.
Dealers struggled to sell many of them, which is hard to believe now.

The next time someone tells you the wing is tall so the trunk can open, you will know better. And if you ever stand next to a Superbird at a show, listen for the horn. It really does say beep, beep.

Photo: 1970 Plymouth Superbird Low LC23.jpg by MrWalkr (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons).