The 2024 Indianapolis 500 is in the books, having logged a long rain delay, an exciting finish, and a NASCAR driver attempting the “double” for the first time in a decade. Today, IndyCar is a spec series with an aging chassis and two engine manufacturers, but in 1963, the field consisted primarily of Indy “roadsters” with Offenhauser four-cylinder engines. The “Offy” was a staple of open wheel racing, but in the decade of Total Performance, Ford decided to try its hand at the greatest spectacle in racing. It worked out pretty well for them.
In honor of the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” YouTube’s Periscope Film released this Ford video about the development of the Ford Indy V8, which was based on the Fairlane’s 260.
Ford installed the engine in two Lotus cars and hired two of the world’s most renowned drivers to wheel them: Jim Clark and Dan Gurney. Clark is pictured here: He would go on to finish second. Some say he should have won; Parnelli Jones (the winner) had an oil leak that USAC ignored for many laps, electing not to throw the black flag. It’s still a discussion point for IndyCar fans, despite the fact that Jones was a more-than-deserving winner, being an all-time Indy great himself. Additionally, Jones clearly had the best car that day and had run away with the race, rendering any Ford/Lotus complaints reeking of sour grapes. The rear-engined special’s time was coming, but not yet.
Gurney, one of the sport’s most accomplished all-around drivers/team owners/engineers in racing history, finished seventh in the second Lotus.
As a side note, Clark would eventually win in 1965; his winning car is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.
Clearly, Ford was astonishingly successful right out of the gate in 1963, but it wasn’t as if they plucked a 260 out of a Fairlane Sport Coupe and sent it on its way — this film shows the extensive modifications Ford’s engineers pursued in their quest for an Indy 500 win.
Before they got into the nuts and bolts, the film department dropped this little grenade onto the screen: a Galaxie sedan looking as if it accidentally rumbled through the gates at the Wayne County Fairgrounds Demolition Derby, headers shooting toward the sky and all.
Equipped with short rear axle gearing to keep the Indy V8 revving to the moon, was this the most intriguing test mule in Ford history? A Galaxie sedan with an Indy motor?
In this shot, one can see the Weber carburetors favored by Ford’s racing engineers; the 1963 Ford Indy engine was the last to use carburetors instead of fuel injection. The old Offy had been using injection for years, but Ford wanted to keep things as simple as possible for this first effort.
In case you were wondering, the Galaxie probably didn’t last long; the video implies that the test engineers removed the body for wind tunnel dyno testing.
Wind tunnel dyno testing? Yes, they wanted to see the effects of the wind on header design: not bad for 1963. Earmuffs must have been the order of the day: an 8000 rpm engine combined with a roaring wind tunnel would send me scattering for the Advil with the happiest headache I’d ever have.
The film goes into fairly good detail about the modifications needed for Indy duty. The block and heads were cast in aluminum to save weight. The block was “dry decked,” which means that o-rings were used rather than head gaskets for sealing the combustion chambers, along with the oil and cooling passages. You can see the metal o-rings atop each cylinder in this picture.
Additionally, Ford used head studs rather than head bolts, and increased the number of fasteners per cylinder from four (in the production engine) to six.
The cylinder heads were clearly reworked; anyone who has worked on small-block Fords will recognize that the exhaust ports on this head are significantly larger than those on a production head. You can also see the casting change for the extra row of studs along the exhaust side.
The engine was set up for a camshaft gear drive rather than a timing chain, and a (seemingly) simplified magnesium front cover finished the job. Ford used shaft-mounted rocker arms for valvetrain stability at 8000 rpm.
According to “The Ford V-8 Engine Workshop,” the crankshaft was a special forging and the connecting rods were based on those used in the new-at-the-time 289 High-Performance engine. All this work had the desired effect: the Indy V8 produced 376 horsepower on the dyno, compared to 164 in the passenger Fairlane (although a bit short of the Offenhauser’s 400).
It’s fascinating to think that the basic engine from a Ford Fairlane scored two positions in the top 10 at the Indy 500 in its maiden outing, with less than a year of development time. For 1964, Ford switched to overhead-cam cylinder heads, creating an even more potent combination that would eventually include turbocharging and some Borg Warner trophies to its credit.
Ford is no longer involved in the IndyCar series, and the spirit of rampant innovation of the 1960s that resulted in a turbine-powered car almost winning the race has been gone for a while. The Indy 500 is still a must-watch in my household, but I personally can’t stop thinking of driving a screaming Galaxie sedan with Webers and Zoomie headers down the straightaway at Ford’s proving grounds.
Additional Indy-Based Reading: Grandpa’s 1969 Indy 500 Photos – A Man With Credentials
Those pipes are insane; I love how randomly skewed they are. And sprouting out of a four door just adds to the randomness. Nice Aaron.
My first thought was why not use a lighter Fairlane? But of course the narrower Fairlane engine bay with its tall spring towers wouldn’t have had room for the upswept pipes, hence the big Galaxie.
Thanks Don! Paul, you’re right about the comparative lack of engine room in the Fairlane, a harbinger for the larger engine they’d try to cram in that space for the next decade. I wonder if anyone on the Indy engine program made any comments about that – they must have pulled out the tape measure around a Fairlane.
Still, it’s so much wilder in a Galaxie, although probably not all that fast. Regarding your comment below, I know that several people tried stock blocks at Indy, as I believe they were given a cubic-inch break in some years. I don’t know much about it past that, but it would have been cool to see a 327 beating up on the competition.
I remember well at the time being impressed that the rather wimpy 145hp 221 V8 in our ’62 Fairlane was the basis of this very potent Indy competitor. It gave me some respect for Ford that had been a bit missing from me, a I was rather smitten by GM and especially Chevy’s Corvette at the time, although the Corvette was sporting 375 hp and FI for the street then (albeit with more displacement).
Amusing the juxtaposition of collar-and-tie man over the engine bay of what looks a wild-man Matchbox funny car!
I do wonder what would be the relevance of having the engine on a road car at all, and for whatever reason that is, why they didn’t then just plonk it in some disused open-wheeler. Perhaps Ford had some NASCAR ideas for the engine?
Impressive as the work (and result) on the 260 is, it IS rather re-engineered from any production one, what with the aluminium block and so on, not to mention the huge resources of the FoMoCo that lay behind it, and I say this with something in mind.
Fifteen or so minutes walk from where I live in Melbourne, Australia, across the river there’s a dull ’30’s industrial building in what was once an industrial area (now inner-posh), and inside that building in 1965, a tiny group of men – sometimes including Jack Brabham – working for Repco, got an Olds 215 aluminium V8 block, screwed a thick stiffening plate to the sump flange, put extra bolts in (like Ford), a heavily-ribbed cast sump, cast their own heads and pistons, used modified production Daimler V8 conrods, a bespoke UK crank, converted it to simple (2-valve) SOHC with added-on mag castings for the chains covers, iron-sleeved it to be 182c.i., and proceeded, in just 51 weeks, to get 285 bhp at 8,000rpm out of it. It proved so reliable that Jack Brabham, famously in his own chassis, won the World Championship in its debut in 1966, and Denny Hulme did the same in the same in ’67. (I should mention the engine was run in later and larger form at Indy on one occasion, and was a failure, so there’s that). I suspect the total budget was about the same that Fords was for that there film they made about how they made their engine…
It’s amazing what CC turns up, and what I end up reading and watching – I’d rather munch on gravel than watch Indy, but this post was very enjoyable, thanks Aaron.
You’re welcome! I love the story of the Repco V8 (although being a Buick guy, I wish it would have been based on the Buick version – I know they’re almost the same). Your comment reminds me that I need to learn more about Jack Brabham; few guys have won F1 races in a car of their own construction, and only he has won a championship.
Here’s a great article online about the engine development (you might note I had understated the changes they made, ahem, but anyway). As for Brabham, I don’t know much more than he was hard, ultra-competitive, strategic – including probably not selling really excellent Repco V8’s to competitors – and something of a curmudgeon, but he had a remarkable understanding (or instinct) for engines and cars. Hope you get a chance to look at the article.
https://primotipo.com/2014/08/07/rb620-v8-building-the-1966-world-championship-winning-engine-rodways-repco-recollections-episode-2/
Thank you for the link – that is a great article. Repco was quite a resourceful team, and Oldsmobile certainly gets more credit than they deserve for that engine. It was even further removed from the 215 than the Indy Ford was from the Fairlane 260.
I wouldn’t assume the Engine and Foundry Division had “some disused open-wheeler” just lying about. They essentially simulated around-track driving patterns based on data provided by A.J. Watson and Roger Ward and did a lot of the development work on paper. The race cars that were to carry the engine hadn’t yet been built. The executive engineer said they installed it in a Galaxie because they needed to work out some carburetion issues under actual G-loads rather than just on a dyno.
Obvious, now you say that.
Interestingly, the Repco V8 was the opposite: it was kept simple (single cams, etc) so at 3 litres, it could fit into a car that WAS already built, the existing Brabham BT19, where the Cooper Climax 1.5 flat 16 – good god! – engine would have been.
Here are the heads free-standing, so you can more clearly see the extra studs and the enlarged ports.
And they used the rocker shafts from the old Y-Block! That must have been an easy retrofit considering that the bore spacing of both engines was the same, and you can see the addition of bases for the rocker stands in your picture.
Those combustion chambers also look even smaller than those on your garden variety 260 heads. They must have been under 50ccs.
The specs don’t indicate the combustion chamber volume, but its compression ratio was 12.5:1. It was also reshaped by changing the position of the plug and by doming the pistons, which looked like this:
The cutaway gives a sense of the shape of the combustion chambers:
I also didn’t see any references to valve sizes, although they probably weren’t too impressive considering the 255’s small bore. The pop-up pistons are no surprise – it’s tough to get much compression out of a small block without them.
This was right up my alley. The early 1960s was when I started taking notice of Ford activity with Indy, NASCAR, etc. I had forgotten the first incarnation of the 255 Indy engine didn’t yet have the DOHC setup (the “Ford Indy V8″ Wiki article doesn’t even mention it!).
Nice that the film mentioned modified metal patterns (to produce casting molds) and cores from my father’s Cleveland Foundry. He bought another 1963 Galaxie (Corintian White also) from the company which had a few experimental-casting-code parts on the engine, and which had the 289 even though VIN suggested the 260. Confused a few mechanics!
In today’s film, fun signs of the times:
*Engineer with slide rule
*”Powered by Ford,” etc. being hand-painted onto racecar
Drafting table with the French curves and such
Great movie—I’ll surely watch it again. The old-style “tall” Offenhauser Indy cars sure look like dinosaurs now!