The most prized, rare, and crazy designs of the muscle-car era are the Fords, Mercurys, Dodges, and Plymouths made for the NASCAR aero wars in 1969 and 1970. Starting with flush grilles and aero Band-Aids, it quickly wound out of control with the otherworldly Daytona Chargers and Plymouth Superbirds. The rules said you had to “homologate” aero-friendly iterations with a production run of 500 cars available to the public. Ford and Mercury were also on the crazy aero train track with the likes of the Mercury Cyclone above and just behind the similar Torino Talladega, neither of which made it into competition, as NASCAR put the brakes on the whole homologation wackiness. NASCAR saw that sanity was quickly giving way to aero-insanity. Many viewed the street versions of the aero-Mopars as ungainly and, well, ugly. The beaks up front and “towel racks” on the trunks of Daytonas and Superbirds had turned some of Mopar’s finest designs into cartoons.
But as we’ve seen, their outrageousness and racing roots turned weird into wonderful as time progressed. So don’t you wish the insanity never stopped? If the aero ban never happened or had been put off until, say, the mid-1970s, can you imagine what aero ugly Detroit might have wrought? And we’d also have a whole different crop of aero warriors to drool over, with different bodies and crazier ways of cheating the wind than their forbearers.
We thought we might see a new flood of aero crazy in the mid-1970s with the sloped-beak Olds 442s and again in the mid-1980s with Monte Carlos and Grand Prix 2+2s and their peculiar fastback glass, but alas, these were but ripples in the cosmic collector-car consciences.
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