The Petty 'bird clone before decals

[charge-it]

that car if u added a vinyl top and stock bird decals would look dead stock cept 4 the rear window-MATT

And change out the rear tail lights to the Road Runner style.

[THE CHARGER PUNK]

Posted by: hemigeno To my knowledge, Bobby didn't race a "regular" 1969 Charger

then what is this?

[THE CHARGER PUNK]

notice the grille and no plug in the rear-MATT

[hemigeno]

notice the grille and no plug in the rear-MATT

Ummm, yeah, I do know the difference between a regular Charger and a Charger 500.  Thanks for the tip anyway!

You are certainly right, that is a #71 Charger in "regular" trim.  However, all the stuff I have read still points to Bobby always driving a C500 when he wasn't driving the Daytona in 1969, and even for the first 1/4 of the 1970 season.

Check here.  That table (incidentally from the same site you found that picture on) doesn't show a regular Charger at all, but the C500 is all over the chart.  The race historians do admit that there is no definitive way to prove that they have accurately recorded each and every car type, especially when it comes to the subtle differences between a Charger, a Charger500, and a Charger Daytona.  Most of the race record books just list them to be a"1969 Dodge", and they have to rely on other documents such as newsclippings or other sources to determine for certain what they were driving.  It's all explained on the aerowarriors.com site.

As a result, I can't (and if you read my initial post on this subject, I didn't) say that he could never have driven one.

Think about it logically for a second, though.  It doesn't make sense that his team would change a car out from one style to another, especially considering the window plug work that would be involved.  It would be fairly labor-intensive to remove the plug, put it back in, take it out, etc.  The Charger500 was legal at ALL the tracks, so what would the advantage be to switching back?  Purpose-built Aero cars were not "outlawed" until 1971, and even then they were within the 3 year limit imposed by the rules and could have been raced if it weren't for Bill France's decree.

My guess (and for Matt's benefit, it is ONLY a guess) is that this could have been one of the 3 '68 Chargers that was lowered by 2" for the 1968 Firecracker 400.  NASCAR deemed those cars illegal after that race, which would have rendered the entire chassis obsolete.  They could have dolled it up and trimmed it out as a '69 Charger for the show car circuit.  The change from a '68 to (regular) '69 would essentially have involved changing out the grille, so it would have been an easy swap for them with a car that was otherwise unuseable.  Don't forget that Cotton Owens had what would amount to a show-car race Daytona (the one that was sold on eBay last year for $800k+), which definitely looks like it was constructed from a chassis with track history even if there was no record of that car racing in Daytona trim.  Once again - that is just a guess...

Doug Schellinger probably knows the history of that car, if anyone on this site does.

Geno


P.S.  Sorry for participating in getting this thread so far off topic, Phil!!!

[hotrod98]

Here's the pic of the car with the chrome stock car wheels that Howie said that you can buy from Summit.
I'll try to take a good pic of Howie's daytona clone with those wheels.

[THE CHARGER PUNK]

lets see sum upd8's wit howies tona ,hot rod -MATT

[hotrod98]

The only thing that we've accomplished lately is the alteration of the trunk lid. We decided to wait until my new building is finished to start on the molds. I have a small building behind my existing shop that my son keeps his 70 gran coupe in along with a lot of his personal stuff. When the new building is finished we're going to use the existing shop to store a lot of our cars in and use the small building as a stand alone fiberglass shop. Fiberglass work is extremely messy and we decided that we just couldn't do that kind of work where we're building or storing cars.