It seems I read quite a while back that Petty's '74 Charger actually had less aerodynamic drag than the wing cars. Is that true? ???
??? I find that hard to believe.
i seem to remember reading that a few years back , in a magazine ,or might of been in (THE STORY OF THE DAYTONA & SUPERBIRD book)
not sure witch ,but it said that the (3rd generation charger) body stile had as good as if not slightly better aero aerodynamics, than the wing cars, i don't think was ( down force / handling at speed ) it was more to do with the 3 rd generation being a more slippery shape due to some thing about the way the windshield curved at the sides to meet the door glass and the angle of the back glass to the roof and deck lid, I'm not 100% sure but it was some thing like that. :-\
I bought my first 3rd gen charger a few months ago, a rust free 74 hardtop non SE car. I keep studying the shape of that car and what I notice is that it looks like the chrysler engineers shaped that car like that for a specific purpose...nascar. It's as if they specifically improved every area of the 2nd gen car that they felt was deficient as far as drag was concerned. The front fenders are long and sloped as if they had planned to be able to do away with the nose cone or at least build a smaller version. I'm sure that they fully expected the wing cars to be penalized or banned eventually for not being a regular production vehicle. The back of the car is higher right where they were having the most problems. The chrysler engineers were never able to get the back glass on the superbird up to where they wanted it. The wing would not have had to have been quite as tall either with the top of the quarters already higher. In my opinion, a 3rd gen wing car would have been a much better race car all of the way around.
As much as I love the 2nd gen wing cars, I like Mike and Gary's 3rd gen wing cars more all of the time.