Ford Galaxie 2nd Gen

The 1960 car is the odd one out. Drawn in Joe Oros's Ford studio as a reaction to what Chevrolet had done for 1959, it went longer, lower and much wider, 81.5 inches across, which pushed it past the eighty-inch limit several states used to separate a car from a truck. It wore half-moon taillights instead of Ford's traditional round ones, and for 1961 the fins were gone, the round lights were back and the width was back under the limit. The lasting piece of 1960 was the Starliner's fastback C-pillar, drawn by Jim Powers. Powers then designed the whole 1963 car: a three-eighths clay he built in early 1961 that Oros approved on sight and that was scaled up almost unaltered. In March 1962 Powers revived his own 1960 fastback pillar as a proposal, and it went into production in mid-1963 as the Sports Hardtop. Oros said the reason was a youthful, sporty verve and maintained that Ford's styling and racing programmes were not talking to each other, which is hard to square with a roof that solved Ford's NASCAR problem within weeks of arriving.

This is the generation where Ford stopped pretending. The Starliner carried the marque through 1960 and 1961 under Holman and Moody, who had inherited the factory team's equipment when the 1957 racing ban shut it down, and Ford took 15 Grand National wins in 1960 and seven in 1961. Then Ford dropped the fastback, and the square-roofed 1962 hardtop that NASCAR crews called the Box Top gave Ford its worst season since 1955. The response was the Starlift, a lift-off fiberglass fastback roof for the Sunliner presented as a dealer accessory. Fred Lorenzen won with one at Atlanta on 10 June 1962; NASCAR's Norris Friel and Bill France outlawed it, and it never raced again. The next day Henry Ford II tore up the AMA agreement. With the 1963½ fastback and the 427, Ford won 23 races in 1963, more than any other make, and swept the top five at the Daytona 500 on 24 February, Tiny Lund winning on four pit stops in the Wood Brothers car after standing in for the injured Marvin Panch. In Britain, Jack Sears took the 1963 saloon car title partly in a Willment Galaxie, and Jim Clark, Dan Gurney, Graham Hill and Jack Brabham all drove one. Chrysler's 426 Hemi ended the run in 1964.

The Galaxie's cultural life is largely a matter of ubiquity, which is its own kind of fame. The producers of The Andy Griffith Show put a new Ford outside the Mayberry courthouse every season, so the sheriff's car is a 1962 Galaxie, then a 1963 Galaxie, then a 1964 Custom, and for a generation of American viewers that shape simply is what a police car looked like. In Britain the Galaxie did something louder. When John Willment's team put a 500-horsepower American saloon on the grid at Silverstone in May 1963 and it walked away from the Jaguar Mk2s that had owned British racing for two seasons, it did not just win a race, it ended an era, and every serious British driver of the day queued up for a go in one. Twenty-five years later three musicians in Massachusetts named their band after a friend's car. Galaxie 500 made three albums between 1988 and 1990 and are still cited as the start of American slowcore, which is not what Ford had in mind for the nameplate.

A big early-sixties Ford rusts where every big early-sixties car rusts, and the good news is that none of it hides. Floors, trunk floor, lower rear quarters, rockers and cowl come first; on the 1963½ and 1964 fastbacks add the rear window channel, which is its own pressing and holds water behind the trim. The frame rails are heavy and generally survive. The FE engines are a large part of why people keep these cars: the 352 and 390 are close to indestructible and every machine shop in the country knows them. The exceptions are at the sharp end. Early 406 blocks cracked, and the 1963 and 1964 427s use the top-oiler block Ford replaced for 1965 with a side-oiler that feeds the mains first, so a hard-driven top-oiler wants its oiling looked at before it wants anything else. The rest is honest period hardware. Points, a generator, drums at all four corners and a two- or three-speed automatic mean the car asks you to think ahead, and rewards a set of hand tools and a Saturday rather than a diagnostic laptop.