Sixty Years Ago, Ford Would Happily Sell You An Uncomfortable Street-Legal Death Trap To Rule The Drag Strip

Years back, there was a David Letterman Top Ten List of “ways that cars would have been different if Ralph Nader had never been born.” It was an amusing thing, with innovations such as “piano wire seat belts” and “fasten-seat-belts chimes replaced by an electronic voice telling you to punch it.”

Such a gag only works because Nader and safety regs were and are a huge influence on automotive design and construction, but it wasn’t always the way. Before around 1968, car companies really didn’t give a crap what safety watchdogs said, and there was no NHTSA or EPA to force them to care. Honestly, a Big Three company could literally put the biggest engine they could find into a small car with a few seats and essentially nothing else if they wanted to. In 1964, Ford Motor Company did essentially just that with something they called the Fairlane Thunderbolt, and it was every bit as fearsome and terrifying as you’d think.

Race On Sunday, Sell On Monday

As with most rare Big Three performance monsters, the Fairlane Thunderbolt’s existence was all about the bragging rights of dominating competition, in this case the drag strip in the Super Stock class.

The very early sixties saw a bumper crop of factory specials, and the ones from General Motors seemed to be last-minute attempts to get around a January 24th, 1963 ban on all divisions participating in motorsports. This had nothing to do with safety concerns, of course; the Kennedy administration was trying to make good on a campaign promise of breaking up massive, nearly monopolistic companies like GE and AT&T, so GM was in the crosshairs as well. Leaving motorsports was supposedly one of the concessions they made to avoid an antitrust suit that never came. Naturally, when the GM divisions got wind that the no-racing edict was coming, feverish work was done in secret to ensure that they’d have some serious hardware for one last chance power drive, as the Boss might say.

What we ended up with was the Group B World Rally Car equivalent of bonkers drag machines. Essentially all of them were stripped-to-the-bones, full-sized rides with massive high-compression engines that roared loudly enough to drown out a freight train. Chevy’s strip weapon was the Z11 Impala. It ditched niceties like a heater and radio and featured extensive use of aluminum body panels to reduce weight by 300 pounds over a stock model. Only 57 were made.

Under the hood was a specialized 427-cubic inch “W-series” V8 engine rated conservatively at 430 hp, though it almost certainly was pumping out around 500.

Pontiac (light)weighed in with 17 examples of the “Swiss Cheese” Catalina, a name that it derived from removal of steel in places it probably shouldn’t have. I’d get into more detail, but I’m saving it for an upcoming Pontiac Pthursday.

The Super Duty 421 cubic inch V8 included a performance camshaft, lightweight valves in modified heads, and dual Carter AFB carburetors on an aluminum intake manifold. Like the Chevy, the Pontiac was rated at 430 horsepower  (wink, wink over 500).

You can be damn sure that Mopar was in the running with Dart Ramcharger. It might have been searingly ugly, but at the track it was just plain rubber-searing.

Under the hood was a 413 cubic inch “Max Wedge” V8 which, like most of these other Big Three powerhouses, featured one carb barrel for each cylinder. With a 13-5:1 compression ratio, it produced 420 horsepower.

Ford also built anywhere between 200 and 212 lightened Galaxies powered by an “R Code” 427 V8.  I’ve written about later versions of this car, but this early incarnation was purely for the strip. A whopping 400 pounds of weight was removed from this behemoth through the use of fiberglass for the hood, fenders, inner fenders, and deck lid, along with aluminum bumpers. The inside was stripped of the radio, heater, as well as any kind of carpeting and sound deadening or insulation; apparently Ford provided simple cardboard sun visors to replace the stock items.

Mechanically, it was a Ford dream spec with a 427 cubic inch R-Code V8 with dual Holley 4-barrel carburetors and insane 14:1 compression. Rated at 425 horsepower, it realistically produced closer to 500, as did the rival Impala. Add a Borg-Warner T-10 4-speed manual transmission and a 9-inch rear axle with 4.11:1 gears, and this was one solid factory dragstrip machine.

The “R Code” was competitive with the other cars, but in trying to go even faster, all of these rides had a problem. It was a big problem, literally.

Add Lightness, Not Horsepower

You don’t need to have taken Physics 101 to know that there’s only so much lighter you can make a large object, and only so fast that a weighty thing can go. The Big Three knew that the key to Super Stock domination involved using smaller cars. Over Christmas break in 1962 and literally in the 11th hour before the GM motorsports ban, Pontiac engineers dropped the Super Duty V8 into 14 examples of compact Tempests. You can read more about this little four-wheel-independent-suspension monster here.

The team in Dearborn was already hot on the case, though. Ford decided to give the Super Stock treatment to the Fairlane. This new-for-1962 mid-sized Ford slotted between the compact Falcon and the Galaxie; about a foot shorter than the full-sized car, it also tipped the scales at around 700 pounds less. Still, it wasn’t so light that it would have been below the 3200-pound minimum set for NHRA Super Stock cars.

Like the Falcon, the Fairlane was a unibody car that lacked the Galaxie’s heavy frame, and it seemed ideally suited as a basis for the next dragstrip brawler. Combined with its boring family car looks, this was destined to be a true sleeper.

As with other lightweight specials, the total production run could fit in a grocery store parking lot. Ford shipped 100 partially built Fairlanes to a local outside facility called Dearborn Steel Tubing for the work to be done; the first 50 were in Vintage Burgundy while the remaining cars were treated to Ford Wimbledon White paint. Around half were equipped with Lincoln automatic transmissions while the others received a top-loader four-speed manual.

To fit the huge motor, the front suspension components were modified, and the battery moved to the trunk. An electric fuel pump fed the monster gasoline, and the thing breathed heavily through massive intake tubes. Tubular exhaust headers helped on the other end, and output was humorously stated to be 430 horsepower. As with the other Big Three purpose-built speed machines, that figure was vastly understated; real horsepower was considered to be at least 460 and even as much as the magic 500.

Actually, with the big motor in place, the Fairlane still could use some more weight reduction, so Ford went all-out with a crash diet. Fiberglass hood, doors, and front fenders replaced the steel items. That hood was pinned in place and featured a “teardrop” shaped scoop to accommodate the engine in a car designed for nothing bigger than a small-block Windsor.

Side windows were plexiglass plastic instead of glass, and the front seats were either lightweight police-package items or crude ones from the Econoline van. You got extra instrumentation but very few comfort features. Ford went ahead and removed anything and everything non-essential ahead of it to lower weight. By “everything,” I really mean “everything:” the sun visors, radio, heater, wheel covers, passenger-side windshield wiper, armrests, mirrors, sound deadening material, and carpeting were all removed.

I’m surprised that they even kept the rear seat, but that’s probably a Super Stock regulation. At least they removed the rear window cranks for weight savings. I’m guessing you could keep one in the glove box and hand it to back row passengers if they wanted some air?

Front bumpers or early cars were fiberglass as well, but regulations soon deemed that these needed to be aluminum items. Now you can see where those ducts on the air cleaner end up: mesh-covered intakes where the Fairlane’s high beam headlamps used to be (the outer headlamps now did high/low beam duty). Talk about a once-boring family sedan that suddenly looks like a thing of nightmares.

The steel rear bumper was kept in place to keep mass at the back, one of the few items not replaced with fiberglass or aluminum.

Don’t get a flat tire in a Thunderbolt, since the lug wrench, jack, and spare tire were missing as well, sacrificed to the successful effort to get the thing down to the 3200-pound minimum.

With such a low production run outside of the Ford factory, the company was well aware that these speed machines were a little rough around the edges. A plate inside the glovebox door stated:

This vehicle has been built specially as a lightweight competitive car and includes certain fiberglass and aluminum components. Because of the specialized purpose for which this car has been built and in order to achieve maximum weight reduction, normal quality standards of the Ford Motor Company in terms of exterior panel fit and surface appearance are not met on this vehicle.

This information is included on this vehicle to assure that all customers who purchase this car are aware of the deviation from the regular high appearance quality standards of the Ford Motor Company.

In a testament to how regulations have changed, even with all of these modifications, the Thunderbolt was indeed street legal at the time. Of course, with low gearing and zero comfort features you’d simply never want to use it that way. No, the Thunderbolt was made to snag wins on the drag strip, and that task it very much accomplished.

Don’t Let The Dull Looks Fool You

Did putting the Galaxie mechanicals in the smaller Fairlane get the job done at the “Christmas tree” turned green? In a word, yes. At a November 1963 test at Lions Drag Strip, a Thunderbolt ran the quarter mile in 11.61 seconds at 124.8 mph, as tested with a four-speed transmission – almost unimaginable for a factory-backed street car then. Here’s a period shot from the ad for that white car above sticking to a Mopar.

The finals of the 1964 NHRA Winternationals were comprised of two Thunderbolts, driven by Butch Leal and Gas Ronda. Ronda won with a time of 11.78 seconds at 123.40 mph.

Below is a rather accurate Thunderbolt re-creation doing a relatively mild acceleration run, though this clone has stainless steel exhaust and not the open headers of the real thing, so it’s pretty quiet. Even though he’s barely “taching it up,” the car seems like a terrifying beast to ride in. It’s glorious.

The Thunder Is Gone But Not Forgotten

For whatever reason, Ford didn’t create a replacement for the Thunderbolt. Maybe the fact that GM essentially left the drag racing game and Ford was deep into kicking Ferrari around meant that there was little incentive to make a successor. Today the remaining 60 or so generally sell for around $200,000 to $250,000; a lot of money, but with million-dollar ‘Cudas out there, that’s a figure a lot lower than I imagined. This has to rank as one of the greatest factory specials ever made; I’m not going to go into the same old rant about Ford muscle machines being underrated and undervalued compared to the other Big Three brawlers, but assume that I just did.

Existing Thunderbolts today are a reminder of the final days of no-holds-barred cars that brands were willing to get behind, regardless of the cost and a glorious total disregard for things like safety, fuel economy, and environmental concerns. Sure, you can buy ultra-high-performance hypercars now, but I can virtually guarantee that riding in a Bugatti at 300 mph would be a joke compared to being strapped into a Thunderbolt going 120 at the end of a quarter mile. That real fear of death is the kind of thrill we’ll never have again, and we are lesser people for it.

Top graphic image: Barret-Jackson