Strong Sting – Stephen Burke’s 1968 Dodge Super Bee
Stephen Burke’s ’68 Dodge Super Bee is rare – one of roughly 125 built with the powerful 426c.i. Hemi. But how the car came to be his is just as rare. He’s only the third owner of this 16,210-mile muscle car. Between the original owner and Stephen, the car sat on jack stands from 1977 to 2017.
And the Hemi? The story is that the original owner drag-raced the car in the Indianapolis area until the Hemi blew at some point in the early-’70s. He pulled the engine and sent it to a shop to be repaired, but at some point, the hefty Hemi went missing. When owner Number Two bought the car in 1977, the engine was still to be found.
After Number Two put the Super Bee in his garage, owner Number One contacted him a week later to see if he could retrieve the new wheels and tires he’d recently installed. Number Two said yes. That’s when the car took up residence on the jack stands. Meanwhile, Number Two spent the next 20 or so years searching for the original Hemi. He eventually found it sitting in the back of a machine shop, barely five miles from his house. The wounded Hemi was included in the deal when Stephen bought the car in 2017.
Stephen restored the Super Bee using the original sheet metal, drive train, interior, and suspension. The major work was repainting the car to its original Medium Gold hue because the original owner had painted the car white with blue stripes.
The Super Bee is as stock as stock can be. The original dual-four-barrel-carbureted Hemi was rebuilt by Scott Henderson. Stock heads and a dual-point distributor work with stock exhaust manifolds and dual exhaust system. A Torqueflite 727 automatic transmission transitions the power to a stock rear with 4.56 gears. Steel wheels are wrapped in reproduction Polyglas redline tires.
The interior is spartan: a bench seat covered in vinyl; stock steering wheel on a stock column with a stock shifter; stock gauges with a Tic Toc Tach. A stock solid-state AM radio resides in the center of the dash.
By 1968, many of the muscle cars of the era were adopting loud graphics (see a GTO Judge) or distinctive horn sounds (see Plymouth Road Runner). Stephen’s sleeper is understated visually with a Super Bee decal and stripe wrapping the back of the car. But competitors weren’t fooled. The Hemi under the hood gave this Super Bee a strong sting.
Photos by John Jackson
