La Plymouth Road Runner Superbird de 1970 :

Plymouth Road Runner Superbird:

To understand the origin of this quite bizarre car, it is necessary to go back to 1963 when the Chrysler groups decided to impose itself in the NASCAR Races disputed on ovals tracks.

Chrysler had an engine, which dissociated competition by its modernity. This engine was the 426 Hemi V8. The "Hemi" name stand for hemispherical combustion chamber, whereas the engine of competition had combustions chambers punts.

In 1964, this engine was classified on the 500 Miles of Daytona. But, this engine, essential to the victory was not enough. In 1968, Ford carried out a pole position with 304 km/h of average speed whereas the Dodge Charger obtained an hard "297 km/h". What penalized Dodge was its line.

Dodge developed, on the base of the Charger, a Charger Daytona, which received new appendix, the result was great, it carried out a record of the turn with 321,793 km/h of average speed!

Thanks to the experiment of Dodge, Chrysler developed the concept on Plymouth Road Runner, neater than the Daytona on the aerodynamics; they sold some 1971 specimen in 1970.

But of these two cars unpleased the leaders of (lucrative) NASCAR series, who did not like that domination. They imposed new rules for 1971; if a car was aligned with aerodynamic appendix the engine output were to be reduced of 25%. That stopped net the production of this two cars.