A car feature on a 1971 Plymouth Super Bird? You got it. So what if Mopar never built such an animal, Gary and Pam Beineke did, and this one’s loaded with a 472ci Hemi wth a Six Pack. Yeah, Chrysler never made a Six Pack Hemi, either.
If you’re hungry for details, jump here for a photo gallery of the 1971 Super Bird, or watch the video below. Meanwhile, here’s how it all began.
The vaunted “aero wars” in NASCAR came to a crashing halt in 1970 with the announcement by Bill France that all of the “special cars,” or those that had factory aerodynamic enhancements would be limited to a mere 305ci. Fielding a miniscule small-block in a field of big-inch stompers was not going to be productive, so the manufacturers killed their aerodynamic projects and went back to big cars with big frontal areas and big motors to punch through the air.
What gets lost in the mix is the simple fact that everyone, Ford, Chrysler, and GM, had skunkworks programs well in progress for the 1971 season and beyond. Although they were stopped after the announcement, testing had been done and documents created about the wind-tunnel prowess of the cars.
This is where Gary and Pam Beineke come in. After learning of the existence of Chrysler internal documents showing the wind-tunnel performance of a 3/8-scale model of a Plymouth 1971 B-body aero car, they became fixated on the idea of actually building it. To say they pulled it off would be an understatement. Maurice Petty, who knew the model was tested in the wind tunnel, was left awe-stricken after seeing the Beneke’s clone car back when it debuted in the early 2000s.
Gary and Pam take this stuff seriously and have literally built this car and their others while method acting as Chrysler designers and engineers. It’s all in the details, and that’s what the couple works so hard to achieve.
This car and matching 1971 Charger Daytona launched Gary and Pam’s G-Series Collection. We were lucky enough to shoot four of their cars and will be bringing you the skinny on all of them in coming weeks. We already had feature and video on their Buick GNX, the only non-Mopar in the fleet.
Click here for the photo gallery on the 1971 Plymouth Super Bird. After you finish the gallery, watch the video below to hear that big Hemi bellow and wreck tires.
Click the button next to the time counter to watch in fullscreen mode.
