Jeff Schwartz is a car lover, but he wasn’t looking for another project when he came across this survivor 1971 Dodge Charger Six-Pack 440 Super Bee, but now he is in love with it.
This man is one of the best when it comes to car guys. A Mopar still hasn’t benefited from the handwork of Schwartz but according to his previous works it is clear that he doesn’t have favourites.
But it was known that sooner or later a Mopar would find its way in the mens garage.
As the last of the true high-performance muscle car breed, this 385hp 440 Six-Pack Super Bee is worthy of serious attention. Dodge built just 5,054 Super Bees in 1971, which was the only year of the Super Bee’s four-year history (we’re not counting the LX-platform cars) to be built as a trim level of the Dodge Charger. (It was based off the Dodge Coronet body style from 1968 to 1970.)
The 1971 Dodge Charger Super Bee was built as a V-code Six-Pack car, but years ago the original owner swapped the tri-power set-up for a single square-bore Holley 4150, setting aside the rare aluminum Edelbrock/Holley Six-Pack induction for safe keeping. Some quick checking on the interwebs indicates that this car is one-of-66 1971 Six-Pack 440 Super Bees with the 727 TorqueFlite automatic transmission, but more research will have to be done to verify its rarity.
The way Schwartz found out about the vehicle is an interesting story.
Around 1987, Jeff helped work on a friend’s 1973 Corvette road-race car. The owner of the Corvette never got around to racing it, but Jeff never forgot about it. Occasionally, Jeff would call his friend to inquire about it, hoping he could buy it with the intent of eventually racing it.
In the year 2021 (yeah, over 30 years later!), the 1973 Corvette owner finally relented, and Jeff found himself at a pole barn in Wauconda, Illinois, loading up his “new” L88-equipped C3.
The day didn’t go well though since the car spent three decades sitting on a gravel floor with no moisture barrier to protect its undercarriage left the Corvette ravaged by rust.
So Jeff was approached by the owner of the pole barn to tell him there was another car tucked away in the huge barn he might also be interested in.
The barn transformed into an island of misfit toys that nobody seemed to want. Moreover, some car owners were late on paying storage fees and the stack of unpaid storage bills was understandably becoming a problem for the property owner. The other car in question? A 1971 Dodge Charger Six-Pack Super Bee in B5 Blue.
The Bee still doesn’t belong to Jeff and still belongs to the original purchaser, who had obtained it from a Chicago-area Dodge dealer, presumably in 1971.
The Bee accumulated 19,532 miles the first four years of its life.
As you can see from the pictures, that dent was never repaired, and the car hasn’t been used since.
The old car owner is blessed that the car is at the hand of a car enthusiast like Jeff who managed that a survivor car like the 1971 Dodge Charger 440 Six-Pack Super Bee back to a usable condition without destroying years of hard-won patina.
Jeff plans to put the Super Bee into running order with its original Six-Pack induction and put it back on the road with as much of its survivor flavor as practical. (Of course, we’ll have the update here if that happens!)
What was unexpected is that Mopar experts we’ve spoken with don’t place a very high priority on 1971 Super Bees, even one with 440 Six-Pack provenance. Of the extant examples of 1971 Dodge Charger Super Bees, the Hemi cars demand the most due to the fact only 22 were ever made.
