Lincoln Continental 4th Gen

The story starts with a rejected Thunderbird. Elwood Engel's two-door proposal was turned down by committee, then rescued a week later when Robert McNamara walked through the studio and saw the full-size clay, and the finished Lincoln kept the essentials of that drawing intact. What makes it work is restraint. There are no fins, no scoops, no side spears. The flanks are a single unbroken surface, and the entire ornamental budget is spent on one thin chrome moulding that runs from the front wheel arch to the tail and turns the corner at each end, framing the car like a picture. The grille is low and wide, the roof is thin and formal, and the proportions are symmetrical enough front to rear that the sedan reads almost like a scale model of itself. The rear-hinged doors were a packaging decision as much as a styling one. With no B-pillar interruption at the leading edge, a short car could still be easy to get into. For 1964 the roof was squared and the glass area grew, and the 1966 restyle stretched the nose. Neither undid the original idea, which is the highest compliment available.

There is none, and the absence is structural. Lincoln ran no factory competition programme in the 1960s, the 1957 AMA recommendation against manufacturer racing was still shaping Ford policy when the car launched, and no series existed for a two-and-a-half-ton luxury sedan. The MEL V8 was built for silence and low-speed torque and never became a performance engine in anyone's hands. Lincoln also had somewhere else to put its engineering effort, and it did. The whole 1961 programme was a durability exercise: every engine got an extended dynamometer run-in, every finished car got a twelve-mile road test, and the division backed the result with a two-year, 24,000-mile warranty at a time when American manufacturers offered ninety days. That was the competition Lincoln chose to enter, and it won it. The nearest thing to a racing connection is at the end of the run. The 460 fitted from 1968 belongs to Ford's 385-series big-block family, and the same architecture carried the Boss 429 cylinder heads Ford built to homologate an engine for NASCAR against Chrysler's Hemi.

No car of the 1960s carries more weight, and most of it attaches to a single example. SS-100-X was a 1961 four-door convertible built at Wixom and listed at 7,347 dollars, lengthened about three and a half feet by Hess and Eisenhardt, fitted with three interchangeable roofs and a hydraulic lift that raised the rear seat ten and a half inches so the president could be seen. Ford leased it to the federal government for 500 dollars a year and delivered it to the White House in June 1961. What surprises people is what happened afterwards. The car was not retired. It was rebuilt, repainted black, given 1,600 pounds of armour and a fixed enclosure of thirteen bulletproof glass panels, and returned to presidential service with Lyndon Johnson in October 1964. It carried Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter until March 1977, covering roughly 105,942 miles, and has been on display at The Henry Ford since 1981. The shape had a second life on screen. Goldfinger crushed a Continental sedan into a cube in 1964, and The Matrix put its characters in a black 1965 in 1999.

The good news is that this is a genuinely usable old car. The V8s are understressed, the automatics are durable, parts support for the mechanical side is decent, and a sorted sedan will cross a state without complaint. Most owners drive them far more than they expected to. The convertible roof is where the real ownership story lives. Two hydraulic cylinders, a pump, solenoid valves, relays, limit switches and the deck lid all have to work in sequence, and the original system used brake fluid that degrades seals over decades. Owners either convert to modern fluid with a full component refresh or spend years chasing intermittent faults. Cylinders get replaced as a pair; one working harder than the other slowly bends the top frame. Rust is structural. Unitised construction means the floors, rockers, torque boxes and cowl carry loads, and convertibles trap water around the well. Trim and glass are year-specific, and the 1961 to 1963 cars are hardest to supply. Everything else is a normal 1960s American car: rebuild the brakes, rebuild the suspension bushings, keep the cooling system honest and enjoy it.