Over the years, Canada and the United States have been blessed with some of the coolest cars to ever roll off the assembly line. Even if they weren’t all built over here, they were still built for over here. British sports cars with the steering on the left, Italian supercars, compacts, sport compacts, pickups, etc. There’s only a handful of cars that this part of the world really missed out on. I’ve always been a fan of the Holden Ute, essentially a fast, modern El Camino from Australia. They’ve been no stranger to some cool Mopars down under, either, the Valiant Charger being a personal favourite. Mopar Mexico went ahead and shook up their own bag of names and shapes, too. They came up with something really cool and really affordable, the Dodge Valiant Duster Super Bee. There’s a lot going on there.
Basically, all was normal in Mexico throughout the sixties. The Plymouth Barracuda was (I believe) virtually identical to the American and Canadian versions. Fast-forward to 1970, when the Barracuda took on the more recognizable ‘Cuda name, along with a drastic redesign and larger price tag. The name and design weren’t a problem, likely the exact opposite, but the price was. Rather than import the expensive new ‘Cuda or Challenger as their performance option, Dodge re-worked the A-body platform to bring Mexico a much more affordable performer. Using the body of the Plymouth Duster, the 1970 model also had Duster front sheet metal. For 1971, the Super Bee received Dodge Demon front sheet metal, and I think it retained it for 1972 as well. 1973-1975 The Super Bee shared its front end with the Dart Sport, the one with the peaked grille. Some notable cool features of the Super Bee are the fact that I’ve never seen one without a hood scoop (or scoops) of some sort, and most of them had a tachometer on the hood like a Pontiac GTO, which I don’t think any other North American Mopar ever had. Under that hood, there was no choice, just one engine for the first five years, the 270hp 318. Apparently it was backed exclusively by a manual transmission, and it made that much horsepower due to the use of a lot of the leftover, hotter 340 parts. What’s cooler yet is it retained that much power right up until 1975 when the 300hp 360 was installed for the last two years of the Super Bee, now backed by the option of an automatic transmission. Big power that late in the muscle car game was due to slack emissions laws in Mexico compared to the rest of North America. I think my favourite part is the variety of stripe packages. There’s blackout quarter panels, modified hockey sticks, and a really cool one with a pitchfork design that reminds me of the Demon. Any examples I could find wore typical Mopar paint colours and wheels from the muscle car era. As a fan of the fastback A-bodies, I think these were a pretty cool use of parts.
