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.
1965 Ford Thunderbird Landau in Honey Gold / Mecum Auctions
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.)
1965 Ford Thunderbird Landau / Mecum Auctions
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.
1965 Ford Thunderbird Landau in Honey Gold with Ivory vinyl interior / Mecum Auctions
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.
1965 Ford Thunderbird Landau / Mecum Auctions
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)
I had a 65 Thunderbird. After a tune up, new carb and repaired dual exhaust ( factory) flat out I reached 118 top speed.
I tend to agree with every thing they wrote. The rear seat was better with one person sitting in each seat, or even better with just one total. The vent system was the best in the business as far as I was concerned. Mine was a non A/C car. But working those vents, both from and back, interior fogging wasn’t an issue.
As far as long distance travel, the seats were too thin. They just were not comfortable. And I do remember the ride was so smooth that the guy I was traveling with from Florida to Indiana used to set his cup on the console and poor coffee- never a drop!
The 1964-66 “Flare Birds” aren’t my favorite, by a long shot, but the addition of front disk brakes is noteworthy. It would take the advent of sliding piston calipers with a cam actuator for the parking brake to make rear disc brakes cost competitive with drum brakes. Four-wheel disc brakes are now almost universal on even the most basic economy cars, but even my Mom’s 2010 Honda Fit retained rear drum brakes as a cost-saving measure. As far as I am concerned, drum brakes of any kind deserve to be consigned to the same trash bin as carburetors, breaker point ignition systems, recirculating-ball steering and solid rear axles!
“Ford still considered power assist mandatory, and so either packaged the discs with power brakes”
Interesting to know, as I once owned a Ford with non-assisted (front) disc brakes. I only learned much later that using disc brakes without power assist was a bad idea.
However, I don’t recall ever having any braking issues with that truck. I guess an ’84 Ranger was light enough and slow enough that it didn’t really matter.
Disc brakes without power assist just need more pedal effort, I have such a car righ now it stops just fine but at less than half the weight of a Tbird, same age though, Ford US was behind in brake tech.
C’mon, I think the parameters of the statement (in the ’60s, for big U.S. Ford passenger cars with a gross weight of 3,500 lb or more) ought to be clear enough from the context. Ford of England and Ford of Germany offered unassisted front discs in this period (and started getting complaints for excessive brake effort), and Ford U.S. did later on some lighter and cheaper models.
I own a ‘65 Thunderbird landau. It’s a good car for me and the way I drive – just a cruise down the boulevard. I don’t ask it to do anything special…just start, drive and enjoy the ride.
I know it’s not the ideal car for everyone. There are shortcomings like any other car. It’s not everyone’s favorite – that status is reserved for the first years.
One day I’ll be too old to enjoy it anymore. One day it’ll be beyond my skills at repairing.
Until then, I’ll have fun with an unrestored original that still turns heads (it could be because some goofy old guy is behind the wheel).
How I wished my ‘64 Lincoln had the disc brakes of the ‘65s. The grabbiness and lack of directional control of the ‘64 Thunderbird brakes described in the article was all too evident in hard stops. I never encountered any noticeable fade (the Lincoln’s front drums were aluminum a la Buick) but I never made two quick stops from 80, either. I have to admit that they were okay in more normal use, and were not overboosted…something I believe a previous Car Life Lincoln road test republished here noted. But I soon learned not to cut things too close.
The graphs are more ammunition for damning Chrysler’s decision not to use a proportioning valve in their early disc-braked cars.
Nice to see it had a proportioning valve, but what it and essentially all American cars to come lacked was a height-sensitive rear brake proportioning valve, like my Peugeot 404 got along with disc brakes in 1965 or so. It was mounted to the body and had an arm that attached to the rear axle, so that as the distance between the two increased under ever-harder braking, the rear axle’s share of the braking force was reduced. No rear wheel locking, which would be a major issue in the coming front-disc, rear drum brake era. An extreme example being the GM 1980 X cars.
Yes, and the Car Life review of the early disc-braked Mustang found that even with the Ford proportioning valve, the rear drums would still lock too easily on a hard stop, so it wasn’t a panacea. (I suspect from context that Ford was primarily focused on the Thunderbird and Continental and the lighter Mustang was something of an afterthought for the program.)
Although CC has published quite a few Car Life and Road & Track (same publishers and I suspect some of the same editorial staff) road tests, for some reason this one, with its mention of deceleration in feet per second per second, got me thinking about their road test data, which baffled me for many years after I started reading these around age 8 or 9.
0-60 and speeds in gears were pretty clear, ditto mpg, but the braking numbers and most of the “calculated data” had me confused for a long time. In case of some of that calculated data, until just now.
The braking I figured out a long time ago. Feet per second per second is a unit of acceleration (or deceleration). I finally figured this out either in high school physics or maybe first-year college physics, though the more accepted (Imperial units) term is ft/sec squared. If the TBird was going 60 mph or 88 ft/second, and the brakes were slammed on with 28 ft/second squared deceleration, after one second the speed would have dropped to 60 ft/sec, the after another second to 32 ft/sec, etc. Coming to a complete stop would take just over 3 seconds … assuming no fade. By the way, one “g” or the acceleration of gravity is 32.2 ft/sec squared, so the TBird at 28 could decelerate at 0.87 g’s.
For some reason they never used these units to talk about acceleration. Or cornering power, which came along later when they added skid pad tests and used g’s as the unit of measure.
As for the calculated data, most of it was pretty obscure and I think got dropped from the road tests at some point. But today I found this, which clarified a few things:
https://autohistorypreservationsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/1963-09-CL-Interpreting-The-Road-Test-1-4.pdf
The cubic feet/ton mile seems to be the volume of air pumped through the engine (assuming 100% volumetric efficiency?), in cubic feet, for one mile traveled in top gear, per ton of vehicle weight. I guess a smaller number is better? The article doesn’t make that clear. The “wear index” is piston travel times revs/mile (top gear) divided by 100000. Pretty arbitrary, but at least explained in the article; here, lower is better.
I don’t see it in this CL test, but R&T also showed acceleration in lb/ton. How does that work, aren’t there always 2000 lb per ton? Well, I this case it’s pounds force, which is a pound mass times acceleration, divided by the vehicle weight in tons of mass. Assuming we’re in earth’s gravity. It’s mostly explained by former R&T tech editor Dennis Simanaites here:
https://simanaitissays.com/2014/09/06/still-off-scale-after-all-these-years/#:~:text=The%20Tapley%20Meter's%20highest%20calibration,of%20acceleration%2C%20velocity%20and%20distance.
Except Simanaites might actually be wrong in one detail … he refers to the US ton, 2000 lbs, but I found some info from the British manufacturer of the accelerometer that their meter was calibrated in British “long tons”, 2240 lbs or 20 hundred-weight (cwt, which are naturally not 100 lbs, but 112 lbs). This helps explain why the rest of the world went metric 😀. Or just uses g’s (9.8 meters per second per second).
In this case, the data in the text does also present the stopping distances in feet, which is useful. (In the ’70s, Road & Track for a while listed deceleration in gs AND stopping distances in feet, which I appreciate, but they stopped doing that around 1980 or so.)
Generally, CL didn’t do that, so unless you wanted to do some math, the deceleration figures were really only useful as a point of comparison between cars. I assume it was partly a logistical thing, since accurately measuring actual stopping distances takes a couple more steps, whereas the g-force can just be measured on an accelerometer. Also, as Huntington alludes in your first linked article (thanks for that, BTW — I had read that before, but had had trouble finding it), actual deceleration rates, especially with drum brakes, were not necessarily linear, so a simple d=½at² calculation won’t always give you the correct distance.
Stopping distance in feet (or meters) is so easy to visualize, and is much more meaningful for most of us.
Well, yes — like I said, G-force figures without accompanying stopping distances are really only useful for relative comparisons.
The uploaded driving review neglects any mention of steering or handling characteristics, something which I skim first for, when reading these articles.
It does not. It says (bottom of page 4 and top of page 5):
Granted, that’s not an extensive discussion of the Flair Bird’s handling deficiencies, but Car Life had already criticized those with the Bullet Bird, which was why they were originally not going to test the new Thunderbird at all — other than the discs, the ‘Bird hadn’t really changed since the last time they boxed its ears for its marshmallow chassis tuning.
Thanks Aaron:
Sorry but I am the type of individual who never sees the “elephants at
the zoo”, lol!
As for the ‘Bird, I don’t know what they mean by “wheels flapping”, but it is
just one example of what is considered “handling” in America: Going
fast, and getting up to speed fast, turning be damned.
What they meant by “wheels flapping” was that the T-Bird had very, very little shock damping and rather soft springs, so rough pavement or even moderately aggressive cornering would cause a lot of poorly controlled wheel motion and upset the ‘Bird’s understanding of which direction you expected the car to be going.
The other ’65 US production car to have power front disc brakes standard was the ‘new’ Rambler Marlin. Even the 6 cylinder versions got the front discs. These did not get a proportioning valve, but AMC put non-servo rear drum brakes on them to accomplish the same thing. The discs were Bendix 4-piston solid rotor brakes, which stopped very well, but weren’t so good at shedding heat. In ’66, the standard front disc brakes were dropped-certainly as a cost cutting measure on a model that wasn’t selling like hotcakes.
Great article on the Bird and its brakes, Aaron! Keep up the good work.
That’s true, but the Marlin arrived as a mid-year introduction (it went on sale in March 1965), and it hadn’t yet been announced when this issue of Car Life went to press. I have a later CL test excoriating the 1967 Marlin (also with disc brakes), which will run on CC later this month.
I always get a kick from reviews complaining about back seat comfort in cars like the T-Birds. As a child my parents had new 1960, 1963, 1966 Birds and granted I was smaller but traveled many long miles in the backseat, in comfort. I don’t think most T-Bird buyers bought these cars to carry four adults in comfort for long drives. For its time these T-Birds weren’t full size cars. As for handling of this era most all luxury cruisers had a soft ride and take those corners slow as you might get sea sick with body roll. I currently have a 1966 T-Bird conv. and a late model Camaro and you better believe I take corners much slower in the Bird. But everyone drove a little slower back in the day. Bias-ply tires were still standard in 1966 and when I bought my current Bird ten years ago it had expensive reproduction bias-ply tires. In short order I replaced those tires with new expensive radials that look like original factory stock. These radials greatly improved handling. My first car was my parents 1963 Bird, later I received their 1966 Bird. And yes, the 1966 disc brakes were a big improvement. Just wish Ford changed to duel master break cylinders earlier as I still fear a break fail, no backup system. There is no quick fix to update the system on my 1966. This fear goes back to the late 1960s, driving my 1963, the breaks failed completely, thankfully on a Miami city street. Break pedal to the floor, nothing, emergency break, little to nothing. Don’t expect relief by turning off the ignition, you have to have arms like the ‘Hulk’ to steer a car that heavy without power steering (LOL). Flat streets, I did come to a stop after running through one red light but the memory still scares me to this day when I hit the breaks on my 1966.
Well, no, but given the sales demographics of these cars, I think it likely that people did carry other adults in the back seat for shorter trips — golf partners to the club, bridge club members to luncheon, that sort of thing — and the design of the rear seat made that unnecessarily uncomfortable, even taking for granted that actual space was not going to be generous.
Oddly, the single piston front discs standard on 1971 GM half ton pickups did not have vacuum boost standard. Pedal pressure was a bit high, but not unacceptable. However the standard GVWR of 4400lbs (5400 optional) was less than the 4700lb curb weight of the Tbird.
Thelma and Louise drove a 1965 convertible – I really love the clean profile with roof down.
Edit – Thelma and Louise car was a 66 :-/
We had a ’64 T-Bird, and the brakes were one of the things my dad complained about, that car had other issues that overshadowed the bad brakes. Head gaskets started failing almost as soon as he picked it up. I remember watching the steam coming out of the passenger side of the 390, and my dad swearing at the car. Before it got cold out, it blew it’s second set, both sides almost at once this time, and I knew the car would soon be gone. At about the 22 month mark, it was traded on a ’66, which made the first car look good. No head gasket issues, but endless electrical and transmission stuff. I don’t know how many times it was towed to the dealership, but it wasn’t around for long at all, before being traded in on a new ’67. My dad swore the ’67 would be the last Ford he would ever buy, but in ’69, he bought a Lincoln MKIII, in the (IMHO) awful avacado green that was popular back then. Two weeks later, it was gone, traded to his brother for his last car ever, a ’69 Caddy Sedan De Ville, in almost the exact shade of green as the Lincoln. The Caddy was a great car, zero issues until my dad passed out and hit a power pole at about 60mph, exploding a transformer, and knocking out power to a fairly large area of Toledo. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and came out of the wreck with a couple of loose front teeth and a broken nose. That he even survived was a real miracle, as the car was just pulverized. His insurance was cancelled, and he never drove again. I got my license a day after his wreck. Everyone who lived near the wreck was talking about it at school the next day, and when I told them it was my dad driving the car, a lot of them said, “Your dad or your grandfather?”. Yeah, he was old, but damn.
I had a 1966 fairlane gta 390 early model with drum brakes all around, it was actually dangerous at high speeds slowing down , it would come down from 120mph to about 60 then there was nothing left,Ford should have known better under equiping a powerful street drive muscle car with those paltry skinny drum brakes, after all this is the same bunch of bean counters that decided that they would just wait for the law suits on the Pinto rear end coolision deaths! That was my last Ford!