The Interesting Story Behind NASCAR Banning The 1970 Plymouth Superbird

This did not sit well with Petty. In 1968 he only won 16 races. Despite constantly haranguing Plymouth for a new winged stallion, the car manufacturer never budged. So, in 1969 Petty turned his back on Plymouth and zipped around the track in a Ford Torino Cobra instead. Petty didn’t win the championship that year, but he came in second. Fellow Ford driver David Pearson, also driving a Torino, won it all. Dodge’s winged #6 Charger, driven by Buddy Baker, finished back in 22nd place.

But Plymouth got the hint and realized it needed to do something to entice “The King” back to the throne, so it pulled out all the stops. Enter Gary Romberg, a legitimate rocket scientist, who worked for NASA on the space program during the 1960s. Before helping out with the Saturn B-1 booster rocket for America’s space agency, Romberg worked for Boeing as a flight test engineer, and he knew a thing or two about making things go fast.

Romberg was hired in early 1969, and he and his team immediately went about banging out a new ride. They started by using the old Belvedere model Petty used to run, fitting it with a similar shark-like front end and raised wing spoiler seen on the Dodge Charger. But even after spending two months inside a small wind tunnel at Wichita State University, the team couldn’t get the aerodynamics streamlined enough.

Meanwhile, Plymouth was working on “The King” himself, sending a high-level executive to his home in North Carolina and asking Petty what it would take for him to come back. Petty’s answer was simple, “Build me a Plymouth like the Dodge teams had” (via Autoweek).