To the casual muscle-car fan, seeing a pointy nose and a tall rear wing on a big-body Mopar heralds the arrival of a Plymouth Superbird. This winged warrior might be yellow, but it’s no Big ‘Bird; instead, it’s the earlier Dodge version, a 1969 Charger Daytona, and it’s up for auction on Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos). The first stock car to crack 200 mph, the Daytona was faster than Plymouth’s best efforts, and this roadgoing version has a wonderful backstory.
Plymouth built more than twice the number of Superbirds than Dodge built Charger Daytonas, both intended to homologate an aerodynamics package for high-speed oval racing. The Daytona was slipperier, designed in a wind tunnel with a coefficient of drag of 0.29 as compared to the ‘Bird’s 0.31. That might not seem like a lot, but squeaking out an extra couple of mph per lap over a 500-mile race really adds up.
This example was awarded to Don Tarr, a veteran racer who competed in dozens of NASCAR races through the late 1960s into the early 1970s. It was his prize for setting a record during qualifying at the Alabama International Motor Speedway in 1969, driving a 1967 Dodge Charger.
Tarr was a pretty interesting guy. Born in California, he grew up in Africa before returning to the U.S. to train as a physician. Settling in Florida, he soon took up oval racing, driving Fords and Chevys. In 1969, he started driving a Dodge and managed a career-best sixth place at the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina.
Pretty good for a mid-field gentleman driver for whom racing could have been just a sideline, but Tarr was pretty committed to hurling big-bore power down those banked turns. He has the pioneering status of being the first driver to broadcast from inside a car during an actual race, as heard on ABC’s Wide World of Sports in 1970, at Daytona. By all accounts he was a kind and effective physician to boot, and lived into his early nineties as a pillar of his rural community.
Dr. Tarr kept this car until 2016, and you have to hope he took it for a boot around the block or two well into his eighties. The current owner lightly refreshed the car recently with some cooling work and changing out the plugs and wires, and it looks to be pretty original. It has 77K miles on the odometer, so it was actually driven rather than being cocooned, though this Charger does have the distinction of being an actual museum piece: in the mid-1990s, it was on display at the International Motorsports Hall of Fame at Talladega.
Under that big yellow hood is a 440-cubic-inch V-8 with a four-barrel carburetor, good for a factory rating of 375 horsepower in 1969. A three-speed TorqueFlite automatic gets power to the ground with a limited-slip differential out back.
Just over 500 Charger Daytonas were built, making them very collectible these days. This one has great provenance, being owned by the kind of driver who knew how to handle a big beast like this at high speed.
The auction ends on June 25.
