Vintage Car Life Road Test: Disc-Braked 1965 Ford Thunderbird – Glitz And Gimmicks Galore, But Surprisingly Good At Slowing Down

After the demise of the two-seater Thunderbird in 1957, American car magazines steadily became less and less interested in the bigger four-seat ‘Birds, annoyed at their average performance, soggy suspension tuning, and growing array of luxury gimmicks. For 1965, however, Ford did something that made the enthusiast press sit up and take notice: It made front disc brakes standard equipment on the glamorous “Flair Bird” and its Lincoln Continental big brother. Here’s the Car Life evaluation of the 1965 Thunderbird, from their November 1964 issue.

By the time the redesigned 1964 Thunderbird (known to fans as the “Flair Bird”) made its debut in the fall of 1963, the editors of Car Life had become so disenchanted with the Thunderbird concept that the magazine didn’t even bother to drive the new model. The October 1963 Car Life included a four-page new model introduction, but the editors decided that with no meaningful mechanical changes since the previous-generation Sports Roadster they’d tested for the magazine’s July 1962 issue, the new ‘Bird wasn’t worth the time and trouble of putting it through a full road test. They hadn’t been very impressed with the earlier car’s performance, ride, handling, or stopping power, and the latest edition promised to be no better.

 

The addition of disc brakes for 1965, however, made the editors change their tune. Although Studebaker had offered front discs starting in 1963, and four-wheel discs became standard on the Corvette Sting Ray for 1965, most U.S. car lines still didn’t offer discs even as an option. For Ford to make front discs standard on the Thunderbird was real news, and the editors Car Life decided to try out the latest model to see how well the new brakes worked.

Stopping power had become a very sore point for the four-seat Thunderbird prior to the 1965 model year. The 1964 Flair Bird was a heavy car — the ’64 Thunderbird Landau tested by Motor Trend tipped the scales at 4,740 lb (2,150 kg) with air conditioning and all the trimmings — and its drum brakes boasted only 208 square inches of effective lining area and 381 square inches of swept area, not nearly enough for the car’s weight.

Worse, as Car Life had noted with the earlier Sports Roadster, Thunderbird styling didn’t provide much in the way of airflow to the brakes, so they would fade heavily in hard use. The CL Sports Roadster had faded its brakes almost completely in two 80 mph panic stops, and the 1964 Motor Trend car needed a lengthy 174 feet to stop from 60 mph, tending to lock its rear wheels in the process. Few American cars of the time had really good brakes, but brake performance this mediocre meant that drivers taking a road trip to Las Vegas (an appropriate destination for the Flair Bird, which looked right at home on the Strip) might be gambling a lot more than money before they even reached a slot machine or craps table.

For this road test, Car Life belated tried a 1964 Thunderbird, whose all-drum brakes only reaffirmed what they had already assumed from prior experience:

In the first stop with the ’64, serious fade was evident before the car had slowed to 65 mph; all pedal feel was lost and by the time velocity had dropped to 25 mph, the right rear shoes were grabbing and locking, forcing the car to skid sideways. Maximum reading on the CL decelerometer: 17 ft. /sec./sec., quite substandard in our view and below the average of all recent domestic cars tested. The second stop recorded a maximum deceleration of 18 ft./sec./sec. (actually less than 0.5 G) but there was quick lock-up of the rear wheels upon slowing past 70 mph; it was necessary to release pedal pressure momentarily to bring the car under control.

The text also addresses a common misconception of the layman: that sudden lockup is a sign of strong brakes. I grew up reading too many car magazines to make that assumption, so the first time I encountered someone in the real world who actually believed this, I was so startled I didn’t know how to respond. With a couple of minor exceptions, a braked wheel produces maximum deceleration at the point where the wheel is just starting to lock, but is still rotating. If one or more wheels actually lock, their braking grip becomes negligible, and directional control becomes very dicey.

What of the 1965 Thunderbird? It still had rear drums, but its front brakes were now big four-piston, fixed-caliper discs, with rotors 11.875 inches in diameter and 1.25 inches thick. These brakes were of a new design, developed by Ford and Kelsey-Hayes specifically for heavy cars like the Thunderbird and Continental. (Similar front discs were also optional on the 1965 Ford Mustang, although the Mustang rotors were only 0.94 inches thick.)

The results in the right column of the page above speak for themselves: In 10 successive stops from 80 mph, Car Life‘s disc-braked Thunderbird test car managed deceleration rates ranging from 26 to 28 feet per second per second, a dramatic improvement over the all-drum ’64 ‘Bird. Stopping performance was still marred by some uneven lockup from the rear drums — which under the circumstances sounds like a pad glazing issue — but stopping distances actually improved as the brakes heated up, whereas the earlier all-drum brakes quickly became ineffective when subjected to too much heavy use.

As the third paragraph of the text on the above page explains, one of the ways Ford was able to obtain such good results while still retaining rear drum brakes was that they used a proportioning valve to limit brake line pressure to the rear brakes in a hard stop. (Some other early U.S. front disc applications omitted this feature, saving a few dollars at a great cost in braking control.)

Why a proportioning value was necessary is illustrated by the following graph from a contemporary Ford technical paper about the development of the brakes. The graph charts brake pedal effort (in pounds-force) against brake line output (in pounds per square inch). The top line is for disc brakes, the lower line for drums; the circles (which I’ve filled in with green to make them a little easier to see at a glance) show the pressure required to achieve wheel lockup with 40 pounds of pedal effort. As you can see, the pressure required to lock the disc-braked wheels is close to double the pressure needed to lock the drum-braked wheels, so if both sets of brakes receive the same output pressure, the drums will lock very readily. The reason is that expanding drum brakes are self-energizing while caliper discs are not.

The graph below shows the way the proportioning valve modulates rear brake pressure, showing input versus output pressure in pounds per square inch. The heavy dashed line is for the Mustang system, where rear line pressure restriction starts sooner (at 300 psi rather than 450 psi), reflecting the car’s lighter weight.

Although the Car Life editors don’t stress it, the point that Ford and Kelsey-Hayes regarded as vital in making disc brakes practical for cars as heavy as the Thunderbird and Continental was that the rotors were ventilated: essentially two iron plates separated by a series of 40 radial cooling fins. These were combined with splash shields that deflected water and mud away from the caliper while also guiding cooling air into the cooling fins. Ford called this “the key to disc brake lining life on vehicles over 3000 lb,” giving 250 percent greater heat rejection area than a solid disc of the same diameter and providing not only better fade resistance, but also much greater lining life.

According to the same paper, Ford had actually been experimenting with caliper disc brakes since 1950, but had been repeatedly deterred by the problems of lining life, pedal effort, and noise. Solid discs of the Dunlop or Girling type (or the Dunlop-licensed Bendix discs offered on 1963–1964 Studebakers) couldn’t dissipate heat well enough to cope with cars weighing over 3,500 lb without either unacceptably short pad life, excessive noise, and/or high pedal effort. Ventilated discs addressed the first two problems, although Ford still considered power assist mandatory, and so either packaged the discs with power brakes or added them to models where power assist was already standard. Cost was obviously also a factor, maybe THE factor, but there were technical challenges as well. Still, disc brakes are now ubiquitous on vehicles vastly heavier than even the porky Flair Bird — when I read that Ford had been working on discs for almost 15 years by 1965, my uncharitable first thought was, “Well, you must not have been working very HARD!”

(That technical paper suggests that four-wheel discs probably wouldn’t be far off, but the Thunderbird wouldn’t offer rear discs until the ’70s. The holdup there, so far as Ford saw it, was trying to come up with a more satisfactory (and less-expensive) parking/emergency brake arrangement than the separate rear drums used by the disc-braked Sting Ray.)

 

 

With the matter of the brakes dealt with, Car Life goes on to offer some more complete driving impressions: effortless if not especially muscular performance from the four-barrel 390 cu. in. (6,381 cc) V-8 and three-speed Cruise-O-Matic; relaxing long-haul comfort for front-seat passengers; and a certain amount of cordial agony for inmates of the cramped rear seat:

A single passenger in the rear can straddle the console for a short time, but this seats him atop the driveshaft tunnel, an area without adequate padding and one which soon gets unbearably hot and hard. Experimentation proved the only long-term comfort available in the rear seats was by assuming a lounging position across the seat, impossible of course if more than one passenger is riding there.

The editors also didn’t love the gauge layout or the lack of a conventional glove box, a triumph of style over substance.

Along with the front discs, another notable new Thunderbird feature for 1965 was the now-famous sequential turn signals, described in the text above as “a series of lights across the broad Thunderbird lens, … much like those flashing arrows used by roadside restaurants.” As the Car Life introduction had mentioned a year earlier, Ford intended for the Flair Bird to use the sequential signals from the start, but had delayed for a year in order to work out certain vagaries of state lighting laws, lest Thunderbird buyers be cited for unlawful turn signals. Car Life obviously considered the sequential turn signals rather tacky, although they are striking.

 

The editors were unimpressed with the Thunderbird’s swing-away steering wheel, which they thought less useful than a tilt/telescopic steering column would have been, but they had some praise for the flow-through ventilation system. This had been a new feature on the Flair Bird for 1964, coinciding with the adoption of conceptually similar flow-through systems for English and German Fords. (The full-size Ford also got this system for 1965, although I think it was initially only available on four-door hardtops.)

 

The Thunderbird ventilation system had a vacuum-controlled rear extraction vent that could be opened with a dashboard control to maximize interior air flow, a feature Car Life thought should “warrant imitation by other makers.”

The final page offers the expected complaints about the Thunderbird’s ride and handling, noting that the big ‘Bird lost its composure on anything other than smooth, straight, dry pavement.

If you don’t feel like squinting at the white-on-black text of the data panel above, I’ll summarize some pertinent points:

• Price: $4,589 list / $5,924 as tested
• Curb weight: 4,615 lb
• Acceleration, 0 to 60 mph: 10.3 seconds
• Standing quarter mile: 17.5 seconds at 79 mph
• Top speed: 115 mph at 4,500 rpm
• Engine revs/mile: 2,360 (25.4 mph / 1,000 rpm)
• Fuel consumption, normal: 13 to 16 mpg

(One point I find annoying about Car Life reviews of this period is that they were often bad about specifying whether their listed top speed is actual or estimated. The 115 mph figure doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility for a well-tuned 390 Flair Bird, but I suspect it’s a calculated value rather than an observed top speed.)

The editors conclude with this frequently quoted bit of effusively backhanded praise:

But then, the Thunderbird has been around long enough in substantially its present form for few Americans to expect much else from it. It has, after all, more symbolism than stature. Only the blessedly ignorant view it as any thing more than what it is: A luxury-class car for those who want to present a dashing sort of image, who worry about spreading girth and stiffening arteries, and who couldn’t care less about taste.

Even when viewed in that light, however, the Thunderbird must be admired. It is extremely well done for its purpose. Its roofline, its bucket seats and console have inspired dozens of lesser imitations which, by their very imitation, prove the ‘Bird a better beast. And certainly when viewed from outside, the body lines of the present version have an overall cohesiveness and sense of dynamism that few mass-produced automobiles seem able to match. With brakes now capable of coping with modern traffic conditions, the T-Bird has taken a great step forward as an investment for those whose inclinations lie toward this sort of luxury car.

I know that there are some current or former Thunderbird owners among regular CC readers and contributors — and probably many more Thunderbird fanciers — whose reaction to those last two paragraphs will be, “And what exactly is wrong with THAT?” Which is fair: There were many cars in 1965 that were far more sensible and less gimmicky than the Thunderbird, but so what? Even today, the Bullet Bird and Flair Bird still have the power to make little kids exclaim “WOW!” and, judging by the contemporary sales figures, the cars had a similar effect on middle-aged and affluent Americans of the early to middle 1960s.

 

One could still argue that a bit more body control wouldn’t have gone amiss even within the Flair Bird’s mission parameters, but the ’65 Thunderbird could now both go and stop with reasonable confidence, which was by no means universally true of big American cars of this era — and if anyone felt there wasn’t quite enough go, the 428 cu. in. (6,990 cc) FE engine would become optional for 1966, offering an extra 45 gross horsepower for a mere $64.77.

For all the limitations of the Thunderbird format, Ford unarguably understood its market very, very well.

Related Reading

COAL: 1965 Ford Thunderbird — My First Classic! (by Chip Downs)
Car Show Classic: 1965 Ford Thunderbird—Unique in All the World (by Aaron65)
Car Show Classic: 1965 Ford Thunderbird Special Landau – What Might Have Been (by Aaron65)
Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1961 Thunderbird – “The Choice Of The Person Who Wants To Be Envied” (by Paul N)