Ford Thunderbolt: A Fairlane With Very Different Intentions

The Galaxie Had Taught the Expensive Lesson

The lightweight Galaxie program had proved that removing pounds worked just as reliably as adding horsepower. Ford had replaced steel, deleted comfort equipment and generally treated the big car like excess baggage, only to discover that a full-size automobile remained inconveniently full-size after the easy pounds were gone.

Meanwhile Chevrolet, Pontiac and Chrysler were all becoming increasingly creative about the word “stock.” Factory drag racing was no longer about selling somebody a quick car and letting him improve it on Saturday night. Detroit had started doing the improving before the customer ever saw the thing.

Ford already owned the engine it wanted. This time it needed to choose the automobile around the engine instead of putting the automobile on a diet afterward.

The Fairlane Was About the Right Size

A Fairlane was smaller and lighter than a Galaxie, which made it an excellent candidate for Ford’s next drag-racing experiment. There was only one nuisance: nobody had designed the Fairlane engine compartment expecting somebody to shove a 427 High Riser into it.

That turned out to be an engineering problem rather than a reason to stop.

Dearborn Steel Tubing was brought in to help transform ordinary two-door Fairlanes into Thunderbolts. The shock-tower area and surrounding structure required surgery, suspension pieces changed, special headers had to snake through whatever space remained, and the battery was informed that its old neighborhood had been rezoned.

Eventually the 427 fit. “Fit” was doing a little work there, but the hood closed, and by racing standards that settled most of the argument.

Then Ford Started Removing Fairlane

Getting the engine into the car only solved half the problem. Ford had already paid good money learning that expensive horsepower should not spend its afternoon accelerating equipment nobody needed.

Fiberglass replaced steel in the hood and front fenders, lightweight material appeared elsewhere around the front of the car, heavy factory seating gave way to lighter buckets and some glass was replaced with lighter material. The comfort department received equally poor news.

The radio, heater, sound deadener and assorted trim had all enjoyed respectable careers in ordinary Fairlanes, but none of them had ever won a Super Stock race. Ford was now charging racers good money for a Fairlane containing fewer Fairlane parts.

By 1964 Detroit had become very good at that particular sales technique.

The Headlights Got Reassigned

The Thunderbolt’s front end provided a particularly fine example of what happens when racers are allowed to reconsider the original purpose of an automobile part. The inner headlights came out, leaving two large openings in the grille.

Ford could have covered the holes and moved on. Instead, somebody noticed that the openings were already pointed into the wind, so ducts were run from them toward the dual four-barrel carburetors on the 427’s high-rise intake.

The headlights had once helped the driver see where he was going. Now they helped him get there faster, which tells you roughly where night driving had landed on the priority list.

About That 425 Horsepower

Ford officially rated the 427 High Riser at 425 horsepower. It had serious compression, serious cylinder heads and two Holley four-barrels sitting on an intake that made no effort to disguise the engine’s intentions.

Calling the whole arrangement 425 horsepower was very restrained of Ford. Factory horsepower ratings during this period occasionally resembled fishing stories told backward: instead of making the catch larger every time the story was repeated, Detroit had reasons for making the engine sound smaller whenever paperwork and racing classifications were involved.

The timing slip was less diplomatic.

Then Ford Gave Them to Racers

Thunderbolts were not built to spend six months sitting under fluorescent lights while a salesman waited for somebody with a trade-in and decent credit. Ford wanted the cars where people could see them win.

Gas Ronda received one. Les Ritchey received one. Other established Ford racers around the country got cars as well, because handing specialized machinery to somebody who already knew how to use it was considerably more useful than hoping an amateur figured everything out on the drive home.

The assignment was straightforward: build the car, put a proven racer behind the wheel and make sure the crowd could still identify the blue oval after the starting lights came down.

Preferably while the other lane was getting smaller in the mirror.

Calling It a Fairlane Took Some Imagination

The Thunderbolt was still based on a Fairlane. Ford built it, Ford supplied the pieces, the body looked right and a Ford engine occupied the engine compartment. That satisfied the paperwork better than it satisfied common sense.

The Fairlane in the grocery-store parking lot still had sound insulation, a heater and all of its headlights. The Thunderbolt had fiberglass panels, air ducts where lamps used to live and a 427 wedged between shock towers that had required negotiations before allowing it through the door.

Both were Fords. Only one was likely to make conversation difficult from three pit spaces away.

Ford Wasn’t Pretending It Was a Street Car

Even Ford understood that the production-car argument had limits. Thunderbolts carried warnings making clear that they were competition machines and not intended for ordinary road use.

That was refreshingly candid for an era when factories were spending enormous amounts of engineering effort building race cars that could still be described as production cars. Here was a factory Fairlane with a giant race engine, missing amenities and headlights converted into carburetor plumbing.

Please do not commute in it.

Ford Built Just Enough

Only about a hundred Thunderbolts were produced, which was plenty for serious racers and far too few for anybody to pretend Ford expected ordinary Fairlane buyers to start demanding them in bulk.

Early cars were white and later examples appeared in burgundy. Some used four-speeds while others carried specially prepared automatic transmissions, but the basic assignment never changed: go straight, go quickly and make Ford look good.

Everything else was optional, and most of the optional equipment had already been removed.

The Thunderbolt Did Exactly What It Was Supposed to Do

The cars became immediate Super Stock threats. Ronda, Ritchey and the other Thunderbolt racers took Ford’s strange little combination around the country and demonstrated that a midsize Fairlane and an enormous 427 got along surprisingly well once passenger comfort was removed from the discussion.

There was no great mystery to the formula. Start with less car than the Galaxie, add far more engine than any reasonable Fairlane required, remove whatever weight remained unnecessary and give the result to somebody capable of leaving hard when the lights came down.

That simplicity was the clever part. Ford had stopped trying to make a big car behave like a smaller race car and simply started with the smaller car.

Racing engineering becomes wonderfully uncomplicated once nobody asks whether Grandma would enjoy the ride.

Ford Had Finally Kept the Right Parts

The Thunderbolt was the logical conclusion of what Ford had learned from the lightweight Galaxies. The 427 was worth keeping. The excess automobile was not.

So Ford began with the Fairlane, made room where there had not been room, removed weight wherever it could, reassigned the headlights and stripped away most of the reasons somebody would normally buy a family car. What remained was still recognizable as a Fairlane, but recognition was about the only ordinary Fairlane duty it performed particularly well.

For the next quarter-mile, it had one job.

Move forward very quickly.

Ford finally had a family car that had forgotten almost everything about being a family car, and at the dragstrip nobody was asking it to remember.