It’s likely that not even longtime, die-hard, trivia-obsessed NASCAR fans would immediately recognize the name Gary Romberg.



Indeed, the “Old Man” (a second-generation nickname of which he was enormously proud) was among those wondrously creative souls who have always toiled quietly behind the scenes developing every major motorsports innovation in our lifetime.

In this case, it was the famous Plymouth Superbird that NASCAR legend Richard Petty and a handful of other Mopar loyalists raced with some notable distinction in the 1970 Grand National stock car season.

Gary Romberg shows off the Plymouth race cars he helped design. Kurt Romberg Courtesy Photo

Romberg died two weeks ago at age 85 in his adopted hometown of Mooresville, North Carolina. He is survived by Bonny, his wife of 62 years; sons Kurt, Val and Leif; daughter Heidi; 12 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. A native of Buckley, Washington, and 1957 graduate of Cal State Poly-San Luis Obispo, the Old Man didn’t miss much during his time on this good earth. We should all live as large and accomplish as much.

He spent his first three years after Cal Poly-SLO as an aerodynamic engineer and flight test engineer at Boeing aviation near Seattle. He worked at NASA throughout the 1960s, helping build America’s space program from postings in Huntsville, Alabama, and New Orleans.



Romberg was instrumental in developing the Saturn B-1 booster that sent astronauts into outer space, including the first visit to the moon. Of all his professional accomplishments, he considered his role in that historic project his finest moment.

Gary Romberg played a key role at NASA in the Saturn rocket program in the 1960s. Bettmann Getty Images

Race car aerodynamicist Gary Romberg, center, shows off a scale model of the 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird. Courtesy Kurt Romberg

In early 1969, several months before the July moon landing, Romberg moved from NASA to the motorsports division of Chrysler Corp. He had thrived and enjoyed his years as a Chrysler employee farmed out to NASA, but the Apollo project was winding down just as aerodynamics were becoming the next big thing in stock car racing. He worked in Detroit for 36 years, lured by the challenge of making race cars as aerodynamic as the rockets he’d helped develop at NASA.

Those who know Chrysler’s NASCAR history will recall it was Romberg and his teammates who designed, built and delivered the 1970 Superbird that lured Richard Petty back into the company’s arms after his 1969 dalliance with Ford Torinos.



Richard Petty left Chrysler for a one-year fling with a Ford Factory program and the Ford Torino Cobra in 1969. RacingOne Getty Images

The backstory with Petty goes something like this:

Except for several Oldsmobile starts early on, the seven-time champion, 200-time winner and Hall of Fame driver raced street-based Plymouths almost exclusively from 1958 through 1968. Midway through that season, Chrysler unveiled plans for a radically different version of its popular Dodge Charger for the 1969 NASCAR season. (Being a Plymouth man, Romberg wasn’t part of that project).



The new creation had a low, snout-like pointed nosepiece and a huge spoiler sticking almost 40 inches above the rear decklid. With its emphasis on aerodynamics, the Dodge Daytona was unlike anything ever seen on any of America’s stock car circuits.

At the time, Chrysler’s racing programs weren’t united. Each brand went its own way, doing its own thing, competing not only with GM and Ford on the racetracks, but also with themselves.



The 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona. RacingOne Getty Images

So, while Dodge was presenting something new and forward-looking to its drivers and fans, Plymouth was staying with the same tried-and-true Belvedere model that had taken Petty to 43 (!) combined victories in 1967 and 1968. Angry that Plymouth wasn’t keeping up—he’d repeatedly asked for a winged car—the sport’s biggest name announced late in the 1968 season that he would race Fords in 1969. (His one-year deal with Ford was clear evidence he didn’t expect to stay with them for long.)

Not surprisingly, that got Chrysler’s attention. A company executive high-tailed it to North Carolina in mid-1969 to ask one question.



“It was just him alone, and he said to me, ‘What will it take to get you back in a Plymouth next year?’’’ Petty recently recalled. (For the life of him, the 82-year-old Petty can’t remember the man’s name; after all, it was 51 years ago). “So, I told him to build me a Plymouth like the Dodge teams had. That was it … just give me something new for next year.

Richard Petty drove his Plymouth Belvedere to an incredible 43 wins during the 1967 and 1968 NASCAR Cup seasons. The Enthusiast Network Getty Images

Richard Petty and his 1970 Plymouth Superbird. RacingOne Getty Images

"I think they’d already decided to do that because it wasn’t long before they had one for me to look at. They couldn’t have done it that quick unless they were already planning to do it, anyway.”

Indeed, Romberg and his colleagues were already all-hands-on-deck designing, testing and building a winged Plymouth for 1970. They spent two months in a scaled-down wind tunnel at Wichita State University, struggling with the hood and front fender aerodynamics, and then with the size, shape and placement of the rear wing and struts.



After realizing the nose and wing wouldn’t work with the Belvedere, they switched to the popular Road Runner body. Once satisfied they had it right, Chrysler named the car the Superbird in recognition of the popular Road Runner cartoon character.



The company quickly manufactured the 1,923 “showroom units” required for NASCAR competition. (That unusual number was based on one showroom-available car for every two dealerships within Chrysler’s marketing network.)

A street version of the 1970 Road Runner Superbird. ullstein bild Dtl. Getty Images

Petty remembers Romberg as “the major guy” while Petty Enterprises was building Superbirds during the fall and winter before the 1970 season. “We worked close with him, and he knew what he was doing,” the racing icon said. “He was very involved with everything: chassis, roll cage, aerodynamics, body shape, wing, struts, everything. He made sure everything was right. He was right there, all the time, making it go forward.





“He made sure everything was right. He was right there, all the time, making it go forward.”

"He was really good with the aero end of the deal. I think they believed it might be easy because they already had the Dodge Daytona to go off … but it wasn’t that easy at all. The cars were pretty different.”

Plymouth teams quickly found success with their new toy, especially on the long, high-banked, high-speed superspeedways. (Most Plymouth teams used conventional, nonwinged cars on tracks shorter than a mile.) Pete Hamilton, part of the Petty stable, won the 1970 Daytona 500 and both 500-milers at Talladega in his No. 40 Superbird. Petty drove his No. 43 to victories at Rockingham, Trenton, Atlanta and Dover. In the meantime, Bobby Allison, Bobby Isaac, Charlie Glotzbach and Buddy Baker were winning in their winged Dodge Daytonas.



Pete Hamilton beat boss Richard Petty to the finish line at the 1970 Daytona 500. RacingOne Getty Images

After watching Ford take seven consecutive NASCAR manufacturers’ championships between 1963 and 1969, Dodge won not only the 1970 manufacturers’ title but Isaac and crew chief Harry Hyde won the drivers’ championship, as well.

But that success ruffled some feathers in Daytona Beach.



Going forward, NASCAR banned the 426-cid Hemi V8 engines from the winged Superbirds and Daytonas, and instead limited them to a 305-cid engine. Officially, the cars remained legal, but were effectively made obsolete by NASCAR’s engine rule.

Publicly, the organization expressed concerns about dangerously high speeds at the long, high-banked tracks where horsepower trumped handling. And from a marketing standpoint, Superbirds and Daytonas never thrilled the consumers, thus putting a dent in NASCAR’s “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” mantra. Additionally, insurance rates were higher and fuel economy was lower for the “muscle car” market. The engine ban came just as Detroit’s Big Three was reducing its financial and technical support of NASCAR.

For 1971, Petty was back in a more traditional-looking Plymouth. RacingOne Getty Images

“We were ready to go (with updated winged cars for 1971 and beyond) if they’d let us,” Romberg told Hot Rod magazine in 2005. “But NASCAR didn't want any more ‘funny cars’ in competition. We (the design team) were kind of cynical about NASCAR and knew they wanted to control their shows. We were disappointed because we had put together, in the 1969 Dodge Daytona and the 1970 Plymouth Superbird, cars that were more than a little bit competitive.



"When the factory-backed racing program went away in 1971, we (the aerodynamics team) reinvented ourselves and became the production car aerodynamics group. We lobbied and got two wind tunnels: a 3/8 scale in 1992 and a huge full-sized in the Auburn Hills complex in 2002.”

Romberg retired from Chrysler Corp. the day the full-scale tunnel went into production operation in 2002. He had spent the previous 35 years improving aerodynamics on race cars and production cars, and in working to get the wind tunnels.

Petty and his 1970 Superbird were featured on Season 3 of Jay Leno’s Garage. CNBC Getty Images

Regrets? If any, they were too few to mention.

“Before 1969, Chrysler was getting beat all the time in racing,” he once pointed out. “The battle cry was ‘beat Ford’ because they had David Pearson and even Petty there for a while … until we got him back with the Superbird. We loved Ford. They were great enemies, great competitors. We worked our hearts out to beat them. They were great motivators for us. We were disappointed it couldn’t go on.”

In the case of the Romberg clan, the apple didn’t roll far from the tree. Kurt Romberg, now 61, drafted his father into aerodynamics, too, getting his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering in the late 1980s at Wichita State University. He spent countless hours in the school’s Beech Wind Tunnel, where his father had helped develop the Superbird that Petty raced in 1970. Romberg was hard at work there when a colleague called from Detroit late that season with news that NASCAR had effectively killed the next edition of the winged cars.



“We loved Ford. They were great enemies, great competitors. We worked our hearts out to beat them.”

Kurt briefly—and with some success—raced hydroplanes before studying engineering at WSU. He worked briefly for the March F1 team in England, came home to work with GM’s Production Car Division, spent five years tweaking aerodynamics at Petty Enterprises and 15 more doing the same at Hendrick Motorsports. He went to current employer Roush-Fenway Racing late in 2015 as its technical director of aerodynamics.

He has some memories of his own.

“It was late in ’69 when Dad came home from work driving a Plymouth Superbird prototype,” he said. “I was—what? 10 years old at the time. He and my mom and my (two) brothers and (one) sister went riding around Garden City in that car. I mean, nobody had ever seen anything like it on the street. It drew so much attention it almost stopped traffic. It was like, ‘Wow!’ I have a picture of our whole family standing beside a winged Dodge Daytona on a dealer’s lot in Detroit.

“Dad was proud of the Superbird, but after family and faith he was prouder of the Moon Shot than anything else. He felt that was a very big deal, and he had been part of it. And he was awfully proud of getting the wind tunnels at Chrysler. The Superbird? Not so much because the Dodge Daytona was already out there (when work began on the Superbird).



“Race cars were changing so frequently that it wasn’t a big deal when they had to quit working on another version. He was a little upset, but it was like water off his back; he didn’t dwell on it. You know, it was just another NASCAR rule change.”

The 1970 Plymouth Roadrunner Superbird for the street was on display at the Denver Auto Show that year. Andy Cross Getty Images

At the time of his death, Romberg was generally acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on the black art of wind tunnels and vehicular aerodynamics. He had used his post-Chrysler retirement years to travel the world, examining and learning about wind tunnels of every size, shape and capacity. “Worldwide,” he said, “my dad was in the top three of all wind tunnel experts.

“When he retired and moved to Mooresville (in 2006), he was too busy to just sit around. He worked at the Aerodyn Wind Tunnel (where many NASCAR teams take their cars) because he wanted to, and he worked there when he wanted to. If he wanted to take off somewhere to see another tunnel, he did. If he wanted to go to work every day, he did. If he wanted to stay home, he did. You know how it is: Why quit if you enjoy it?”

The Old Man was wise, indeed.