The Superbird was a 1970 model whose homologation construction had to be completed before December 31, 1969 due to upcoming changes in the highway headlight and bumper laws. Unlike the 500 units Dodge had needed, the carrot that brought Petty Blue back to the Plymouth camp required almost 2,000 vehicle units to go legal for racing. At an almost psychotic speed unheard-of in Detroit, the cars went from an exploratory meeting in June to the nation’s stoplights by December.
Sales were not spectacular; it was one thing to see it at the track or in the showroom; dropping a hard-earned $4,000+ to have the neighbors wonder what was in your Kool-aid was another. Indeed, rumors have persisted that some desperate dealerships actually converted some of the wild machines back into standard 440 Road Runners to get rid of them. Six-figure collector values these days may be making them wish they had held onto them.
 Gary Beineke making a hole in the wind at Atlanta |
With that introduction out of the way, here we are looking at two wing cars that Chrysler never did build. The powers at NASCAR quickly realized how dominant the wings could be, and by 1971 had instituted a 305-inch limit on them and Ford’s special cars. With no replacement for displacement, the breed almost immediately faded away after Daytona that year. The new Dodge and Plymouth B-bodies were swoopy enough when powered identically with their competition; the small-inch wings were not worth the effort.
Aerostylist Gary Rohmberg was already familiar with the new G-Series B-bodies by then. In 1970, the factory had sent him and the Chrysler Aerodynamics Group crew to Wichita State’s wind tunnel where they used some 3/8 scale models of the new body designs to play with wings and noses for the new cars. This, of course, was before NASCAR pulled the plug on the aero specials with their pencils.
Moreover, Chrysler was by then feeling the effects of the era’s economic uncertainty and radically scaled back their racing involvement for the ’71 season. Ford, whose King Cobra project had already been stillborn, moved out of racing altogether at the end of 1970.
For Massachusetts couple Pam and Gary Beineke, the release of the rumored G-Series report from those 1971 tunnel sessions was enough to make them decide to finish what the factory had started. Combining the aero proposals with their favorite Mopar body styles to create a muscle car nobody had ever seen was irresistible.
“We HAVE to build this thing,” was Gary’s response after looking at the files. “This project was never done with a thought to selling them when we were finished; we have built these cars because they were too cool not to build.”
This 1971 Daytona was the first ‘what if’ machine to come from the fertile minds of Dayclona, using customized versions of some of the parts that had already been developed as real Daytona replacements.
To that end, they hooked up with Mike Goyette, whose company called Dayclona (www.dayclona.com) had been doing reproduction wing car parts since the early 1980’s. Mike had originally shown them the G-Series info, and together, they began bolting up some pretty impressive cars starting in 2001, all of them different. This effort has included some extensive fabrication in both fiberglass and metal.
