Walk Around: 70 Superbird

The 1970 Plymouth Superbird was not styled, it was shaped by a wind tunnel and a NASCAR rulebook, and every strange proportion on it exists for a reason. Fewer than 2,000 were built, three engines were offered, and only one of them is why collectors chase these cars today. Dealers could barely give them away when they were new. Read on to find out how a car nobody wanted became one of the most valuable Mopars ever built.

Park almost any other 1970 Plymouth in a driveway and the neighbors nod politely on their way past. Park this one and they stop the car, roll the window down, and ask what on earth happened to it. The nose is longer than it has any business being, the rear wing sits high enough that you could rest a coffee cup on it, and neither detail was drawn by a stylist chasing attention. Both were forced onto the car by a wind tunnel and a rulebook. Plymouth built it for one season, for one purpose, and largely for one driver in particular. What the sanctioning body did next tells you more about how well it worked than any spec sheet ever could.

A Shape Forced on Plymouth by a Rulebook

The Superbird existed because NASCAR homologation rules of the era required a manufacturer to build and sell roughly one street copy for every two of its dealers before the racing version was legal. Plymouth took the 1970 Road Runner, kept the 116-inch B-body wheelbase, and then added a pointed fiberglass and sheet metal nose cone that stretched overall length to roughly 221 inches, along with the rear wing that everybody remembers. The commonly accepted production figure is 1,935 cars delivered to United States dealers, though Chrysler planning documents and later research have pushed estimates as high as 2,783, and Mopar registries still argue the point today.

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Why That Wing Sits So Absurdly High

The wing height is the detail people assume is pure theater, and it is the one thing on the car with the most practical justification. Mounted low, the wing would have sat in the turbulent, separated air coming off the roofline and rear glass, where it would have produced far less useful downforce. Raising it on those tall vertical pylons put the airfoil up into clean, undisturbed air. It also had a mundane secondary benefit that engineers were happy to accept, the pylons sit high enough that the trunk lid can still open fully underneath the wing, which would have been impossible with a low-mounted design.

Three Engines, and Only One Everybody Wants

Three engines were offered, and the split between them explains the modern price spread almost by itself. The standard fitment was the 440 Super Commando four-barrel rated at 375 horsepower. Buyers could step up to the 440 Six Barrel, Plymouth’s triple two-barrel setup rated at 390 horsepower, or go all the way to the 426 Hemi at 425 horsepower. Using the accepted 1,935 total, the widely cited breakdown is roughly 1,084 cars with the four-barrel 440, 716 with the Six Barrel, and just 135 with the Hemi. That last number is the entire reason a Superbird conversation eventually turns into an argument about money.

The Richard Petty Problem

There was also a competitive problem Plymouth badly needed to fix. Richard Petty had left the brand after the 1968 season and gone to Ford, in no small part because Dodge got the winged Charger Daytona for 1969 and Plymouth had nothing comparable to offer him. Building the Superbird was not just an engineering exercise, it was a recruitment pitch. It worked. Petty came back to Plymouth for the 1970 season, and the car that brought him home is the same one sitting in this walk-around, minus the roll cage and the number on the door.

What Actually Happened on the Superspeedways

On track the aerodynamic package did exactly what the wind tunnel promised. Pete Hamilton took the 1970 Daytona 500 driving a Superbird, and the winged Mopars spent the season being genuinely difficult to beat on the big, fast ovals where drag and high-speed stability matter more than anything else. That was the whole point of the exercise, and it is also why the cars had such a short competitive life. A car that dominant invites a rule change, and the rule change arrived almost immediately.

NASCAR Wrote the Winged Cars Out of Existence

For 1971 NASCAR effectively legislated the aero cars off the track by restricting winged models to 305 cubic inches, a displacement limit that made them uncompetitive against conventional-bodied cars running full-size engines. Nobody was going to campaign a 305-cubic-inch Superbird against a 426 Hemi Charger, so the winged cars simply stopped appearing. The entire aero war, from the first Charger Daytona to the last Superbird, lasted barely two seasons.

The Cars Dealers Could Not Give Away

The street cars had an even less dignified time of it. Superbirds were expensive, enormous, and visually shocking in a way that most 1970 showroom traffic was not prepared for, and a good number of them sat unsold on dealer lots well into 1971 and even 1972. There are well-documented cases of dealers removing the nose cones and wings and converting the cars back into ordinary Road Runners just to move them.

Living With a Nose Cone and a Vinyl Roof

Owning one when it was new also meant living with compromises that had nothing to do with how fast it went. Every single Superbird left the factory with a vinyl roof, and that was not a styling choice, it was there to hide the bodywork where the rear window area had been reshaped and plugged to smooth the airflow. The nose cone made the car awkward to park, vulnerable to anything taller than a curb, and impossible to fit with a conventional front bumper. Forward visibility over that long snout took getting used to, the wing made the car a conversation every time it stopped for fuel, and the whole package added meaningful length to a car that was already large. None of that mattered at 190 miles an hour on a superspeedway. All of it mattered on a Tuesday.

From Lot Orphan to Six-Figure Icon

The cars that survived all of that are now among the most valuable production Mopars in existence, and the hierarchy is exactly what you would expect from the production split above. A documented Hemi car with its original drivetrain sits in a different market entirely from a four-barrel 440 automatic, and because so many of these were modified, converted, or simply used up in the years when nobody wanted them, provenance and paperwork carry enormous weight. A walk-around like this one is worth taking slowly, because the details are the whole story. What would you want under the nose of yours, and does the Hemi premium still make sense to you? Let us know in the comments below.

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