Winged Warriors: The Dodge Charger Daytona and Plymouth Superbird

An Aero Answer to Ford's Speedway Dominance

By 1968, the standard Dodge Charger's handsome fastback roofline was creating as much lift as style at 190 mph, and Ford's slippery Torino Talladega was winning the speedway races that mattered most. Dodge's fix was radical: an 18-inch pointed steel nose cone grafted onto the Charger's front end, a flush rear window filling in the old tunnel roof, and a two-strut rear wing standing roughly 23 inches above the trunk lid to keep the tail planted at speed. NASCAR required 500 street examples to homologate the package for competition, and Dodge built 503 of them for 1969 — the Charger Daytona was born.

Two Birds, One Mission

Plymouth needed its own version for 1970, and rather than restyle the Road Runner from scratch, engineers grafted Daytona-style aero onto it — with a catch. NASCAR had raised the homologation bar to one car per two dealers, meaning Plymouth had to build around 1,920 units just to qualify, versus the Daytona's flat 500. The resulting Superbird added about 19 inches to the Road Runner's nose, wore a standard vinyl roof to hide where the reworked backlight met the old roof stamping, and even carried a horn that mimicked the cartoon Road Runner's "beep beep." Look closely and the wing gives it away too: the Superbird's sits angled back a bit more than the Daytona's steeper, more upright mount. Both cars offered the same running gear — a 375-hp 440 Magnum standard, a 425-hp 426 Hemi on option — and the Superbird added a middle choice, the 390-hp 440 Six Pack. Plymouth built 1,935 Superbirds in all: 135 with the Hemi, 716 with the Six Pack, and the rest on the base 440.

200 MPH and a NASCAR Championship

The aero worked. On March 24, 1970, Buddy Baker took a Chrysler Engineering Daytona to Talladega Superspeedway and became the first driver in NASCAR history to top 200 mph on a closed course, running consecutive laps over 200 with a best of roughly 200.4 mph. That same season, Bobby Isaac drove the #71 K&K Insurance Dodge Charger Daytona to the 1970 NASCAR Grand National championship, then set a closed-course speed record of 201.104 mph at Talladega that November — a mark that stood until 1983.

The Rule That Grounded the Wing Cars

Winning that decisively was the aero cars' undoing. Worried about the speeds and the lift they generated, NASCAR mandated restrictor plates at high-speed ovals starting in 1970, then rewrote the rulebook for 1971 to cap any winged car at a 305-cubic-inch engine — or force it to carry heavy compensating weight. Either way, the Daytona and Superbird were no longer worth racing, and Chrysler quietly let the wing-car program end. The aero war that had defined 1969 and 1970 was over within a single rules cycle.

From Unsellable to Untouchable

Back on dealer lots, the Superbird's looks were a hard sell to everyday buyers — the wing and nose made for a car nobody could parallel park with confidence, and plenty sat unsold well into 1971 and 1972. Some dealers reportedly "de-winged" leftover cars back to standard Road Runner trim just to move them. Six decades on, the math has flipped completely: Hagerty's valuation guide puts a numbers-matching Superbird anywhere from about $192,000 in fair condition to $371,000 for a concours example, while a documented Hemi car set a $1.65 million world auction record at Barrett-Jackson in 2022. The Daytona, rarer still at just 70 Hemi cars out of 503 built, has done even better at auction — Mecum sold a Hemi Daytona for $3.3 million at its 2024 Monterey sale, a record for the wing-car breed. The cars that dealers once couldn't give away are now some of the most expensive Mopars in existence.