History

The 500 plus Dodge Daytona's were designed and built strictly to pass the NASCAR rule of a minimum 500 production cars built and sold in order to race it. At the time, Fords were dominating because of their better aerodynamics. The Dodge Chargers weren't competitive at the high speed tracks and Chrysler needed to turn that around. With winning in mind, Chrysler set up a rush program to produce enough of these aerodynamic racers to pass the rule and to get them on the tracks as soon as possible. Only 75 were built with the Hemi engine and the majority of those were headed to the race tracks such as Daytona Beach, Florida and Talladega, Alabama.

For the 1970 racing season, Chrysler designed a purpose built Plymouth that appeared to be the same as the 69 Dodges but was a completely different car. Also, NASCAR changed the rules to require a minimum 2 per dealer which meant over 3,000 had to be built. This explains why there are significantly more Plymouth Superbirds than Dodge Daytona's today.