The Daytona was Dodge's NASCAR aerodynamics weapon for the 1969 season — Charger 500 body with a pointed steel nose cone added forward of the front wheels and a tall (23-inch) airfoil rear wing mounted on backward-swept stalks. The wing's height existed for one engineering reason: to clear the trunk lid for the spoiler's pivot mechanism, since shorter wings didn't pass the trunk-lid test. The aero math worked. Buddy Baker drove a Daytona to the first 200-mph lap on a closed course at Talladega in March 1970.
Production: 503 cars on the street, the minimum NASCAR required for homologation. Built October to December 1969 by Creative Industries (Detroit), who handled the nose cone + wing fabrication on Charger 500s sent over from the Hamtramck assembly plant. 70 cars carried the 426 Hemi; the rest ran the 440 Magnum. Steve Lehto's research is the canonical reference on the program.
Designer — the production Charger body was Richard Sias's 1968 reskin (covered in the Charger entry). The aero addenda — nose cone, wing, A-pillar gussets, flush rear window — were engineering not styling work, led by John Pointer with input from Bob Marcell, Dick Lajoie, and the Chrysler Special Vehicles team. The wing design is engineering pragmatism wearing a costume.