Obsessive Compulsive: Winged Cars I

This Site Is Dead! Last updated some time in 2002. Here for archival purposes. This is where the action is.

In spring time, a young man's fancy turns to... slot cars. At some point in the early 70's, before Pokemon and Play Station there was slot car racing. My introduction to slot car racing came from my Uncle who after trading the jungles of Vietnam for suburban Atlanta did what any traumatized vet would do: he parked his Rambler in front of his swinging bachelor's pad and converted his shag carpeted living room into a sprawling HO scale raceway. Quicker than I could turn on his black light, I was hooked. Christmas came and soon I was a racing fool. The attraction of minature hand controled race cars is obvious, but what really made an impression on me was one particular car, Dodge Charger Daytona.

My own model was like the one pictured below, except that it had a dark gray blue and flat black color scheme. The number seven car looked physically faster than all the other cars, the perfect embodiement of speed, and an archetype of what all fast cars seek, barely controlled flight on ground. It looked dangerous. It looked like a buzz bomb. The Charger Daytona would even influence my infatuation with another unique winged beast, one the Luftwaffe called a "forked-tail devil". This U.S. muscle car in the skies was named the P-38 Lightning, and it had an equally checkered past. Stick around and if you're interested in learning a little bit about the Dodge Charger Daytona and the Plymouth Superbird. I'll give you a little history of the cars on and off the race track and talk about what your options are if you can't pony up the 48,000-75,000 bucks it takes to buy one. To further probe my obsessive behavior, you can view the gallery of over 60 different minature Daytonas and Superbirds in my collection. Or, you can also check out a QuiickTime VR movie of a Charger Daytona.

Pre-history: The forces behind the first winged car.

If you think NASCAR racing is as pervasive now as Michael Jordan's face was a couple of years ago, you're right. What you may not know is that this is NASCAR's second coming. In the 60's the honchos in Detroit used to adhere to a very simple marketing plan: Win a race on Sunday and you'll sell the car on Monday. The first winged car, the Dodge Charger Daytona, was conceived and built for one purpose - to win NASCAR. In 1967 Petty ruled in his Plymouth with 27 wins. In 1968, Ford was kicking everyone's asses and Petty dropped to 16 wins. Chrysler wanted to win. Engineering teams worked hard on smoothing out the existing Charger to reduce drag and get some extra speed. They even rented out the wind tunnel that NASA used for the Apollo program, marking the first time full-scale wind tunnel testing had ever been done on a car. Event though they were able to eek out an extra 5mph, the Charger 500 as it was called still lost it's first race at Daytona to a tweaked Ford. To say that the team was disappointed would be an understatement. Automotive companies typically updated the look of their models every couple of years. Despite the closeness of the race, the Charger 500 loss was seen as a major failure for the program. In 1968 preliminary work had already begun on Charger prototypes that were scheduled for production in 1970. The Daytona track loss in '69 quickly led to a mid-March decision that the '70 Charger would have to be ready to race in September of '69.

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