This gallery includes some of the history of my (David Freiburger) '70 Dodge Super Bee, a factory Go Mango 383/727 car that was purchased for $1,800 on April 15, 1983. This photo from about one month later is the earliest pic I have of the car.

Here's me at 15 years old, scrawny and with bad hair. The knee braces are something I wore often after lots of BMX riding. My bike was stolen a couple months after buying the Super Bee and I never rode again. I waxed the car every weekend for two or three years.

Here's the 383 as it was when I bought the car, complete with a Holley 1850, a Cal Custom air cleaner, M/T valve covers with those bad wingnut valve-cover bolts, and a polished radiator. This stuff is almost retro-cool by now. But not quite.

The Bee's interior was factory burnt orange, as the steering wheel shows, with buckets and a console. Most of it had been dyed black by the time I got the car. Some girl gave me the stuffed Garfield and it took a couple months for me to figure out it was not cool to leave in the car.

Here's my garage when I was about 18 and had both the Bee and a '71 440 Six Pack Road Runner that I bought for $3,100 and sold for $3,800, thinking I'd made a killing. The day the Road Runner was picked up I offered the guy the Bee instead. No deal. My dad still has that '78 Honda XL100.

Here's the Bee and a friend's '70 Six Pack, four-speed Challenger in front of my high school (John Marshall in Silver Lake, California) on the set of Hardcastle and McCormick. Many, many films have had scenes shot right here. Van Halen's Hot For Teacher music video was shot here just months later.

I think this is the only car show the Bee has ever been entered in. It was at a school in Oxnard, California. That's my mother there with my friend Greg Parsons who had driven out in his '70 AAR Cuda. He previously had a '69 Mach 1 with a 428 Super Cobra Jet.

This is a dirt parking lot near Los Angeles' Griffith Park that we used to call "The Donut Shop" because we'd go there and do donuts in our cars. The Gene Autry National Center of the American West is now located where this photo was taken.

During high school, and in the years after, the Bee often found itself at the street races. This photo was shot under the 5 freeway on San Fernando Rd. off the Roxford St. exit, where some of the best action went on.

In the summer of 1983, my Super Bee and several clones were used in a TV after-school special called All the Kids Do It. It starred Scott Baio, featured Danny DeVito, and was the first directorial effort of Henry Winkler. Here's a shot from the set.

That's Henry Winkler next to one of the clone Super Bees. The Olds belonged to a friend of mine (it had been his grandmother's car...sadly) and was purchased by my father for the movie, as he was working as the car coordinator.

Here's the stunt Bee after a crash scene at the corner of Ranchito and Weddington in Van Nuys, California. The poor car was a '70 Coronet 500 that we painted orange, and I made a Super Bee stripe out of shelf paper to make it look real enough for the scene. That's Scott Baio near the driver door.

After the wreck scene, some friends and I worked in an abandoned lot in Atwater, California, and swapped the 383 out of the Coronet and into friend Tony Savasta's '68 Charger that we'd pushed about three miles under cover of darkness from the local Glendale Dodge dealership where Tony worked.

This is at a warehouse on Cumpston St. in North Hollywood where my father had a storage spot; there's now an apartment building there. The photo shows me taking the best parts off of a second real Super Bee (it was green before we fogged it orange) and moving them onto my own car before the Double Bee was sold.

Our local dragstrip was Los Angeles County Raceway, seen here. Looks like I was dialed at 13.60. I think the best the car ever ran there was 13.20 with a 440 and 4.10s. Pretty weak, even for 2,900-foot elevation. This looks to be after the new paint job that Henry Winkler got for me after the car was messed up during filming,

Immediately after high school I started work in the parts department of Joe Philips Dodge (Burbank Dodge) at 549 S. San Fernando Blvd. in Burbank, California. I was told it was the oldest Dodge dealership in the state. It's now defunct, but the building is there. This is at a new-car preview night, and the owner asked some of us to bring out our musclecars.

Here's a much later shot of the car at LACR. Note the peeled paint and neglect, plus the mismatched wheels and tires.

This was shot on the same day as the previous photo. I like the old open-face helmet.

In college photo class I often used the Super Bee as the subject of camera and darkroom experiments.

This burnout photo was taken during the same session as the darker photo shown previously. Note the use of skinny meats on the back. I always had a set of junk tires sitting around for burnouts. This was taken in an underpass in Eagle Rock, California, under the 210 freeway. The location is now fenced off to thwart hoodlums.

Another college darkroom experiment. I think I tilted the easel to get the warped effect.

When I applied for the job of a staff editor at Hot Rod magazine in 1991 I was given a test assignment to write a story about the basics of Mopar B-bodies. I did so, and shot this burnout as a lead photo. I got the job, and the story was printed in the magazine some time in 1992.

By 1994, Mopar Performance had decided to start reproducing Hemi blocks and came to Hot Rod looking for ink. I was lucky in that we got to build an engine at Dick Landy's place to go in my car, which I also restored at the same time. This is Dick and Mike Landy with the first of the "new" Hemi blocks. At 484ci, it made 750 hp.

Before the Hemi was installed I totally redid the car down to the last nut and bolt, including swapping to a bench seat and installing a full rollcage.

The Bee was painted by a place in Lancaster, California that claimed to be a Mopar specialist but that turned out to be a scam. The paint has always been pretty average.

The car was minitubbed to accept 30x12.50 slicks on 15x12 wheels, and I tossed in a Dana 60 at the same time.

After having the car painted, I installed the new Hemi in my driveway in Burbank.

Here's the proof sheet showing what the Hemi looked like once it was first installed and operational.

Here's the 4-1/2-inch Flowmaster exhaust system that I had custom-made for the car. Way too loud.

Some of these photos are tiny because they are scanned off of proof sheets. This shows the very first test session at LACR in 1996.

Here's another photo from LACR. The Bee ran 10.90s that day with poor 1.7-second 60-foot times.

I was caught up in Fastest Street Car racing when I rehashed the Bee in the mid '90s and installed a Harwood fuel cell and trunk-mounted battery to help play the part. I wish I hadn't.

Here's me testing at Famoso. Landy claimed that my air-cleaner tray was ballast (it was steel rather than aluminum).

Here's a burnout from the sessions at Famoso.

At 3,900 pounds, the car has never launched well. It tops out the shocks and lifts the rear tires. The best pass was 10.62 at 129 mph.

I got thrown out of Famoso once for dumping sand on the track. It was sandblasting material that fell out of the rocker panels.

Here's me at Famoso. Note the Auto Meter dual-range tach; it has a small scale from 0-5,000 rpm and more resolution from 5,000-10,000. I've buzzed the Hemi to 8,000 may times.

This proof-sheet excerpt was from when I shot the car for a story in Car Craft once I became the editor of that magazine.