Written by independent automotive journalist Steve Statham

One of the documented 100 produced, this historically significant 1964 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt (Lot #1364) will be selling at the 2020 Scottsdale Auction with No Reserve.

Cars like the Ford Thunderbolt are often classified as American “muscle cars,” but let’s not fool ourselves. A Ford Thunderbolt was not some mass-market performance car built for cruise night. It wasn’t intended to be a go-to-work driver during the week that you could sometimes take to the strip on weekends.

It was a full-tilt factory-built race car.

The Thunderbolt represents the extreme end of the Detroit automakers’ cut-throat competition for racing dominance in the 1960s. The Big Three waged war on almost every motorsport front, sometimes openly, sometimes through the back door of the engineering department. The saying “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” wasn’t created in a vacuum ‒ it was conventional wisdom among auto executives and the enthusiastic engineers who designed the cars.

In the early 1960s there was a particular focus on the Stock and Super Stock classes of drag racing. These were race cars that certainly looked like the kind of coupes you could buy at the local Ford or Dodge dealer. Underhood, they carried the largest, most powerful engines automakers built at the time, and clever advertising did its part to convince the public the racing V8s were only a half-step removed from what could be ordered in their street cars.

One of the tactics used to shave every last tenth of a second off the ET was to develop “lightweight” versions of production cars for use in drag racing. This gave us the “Swiss Cheese” Super Duty Pontiacs, lightweight HEMI Mopars and Z11 Chevy Impalas with aluminum front sheet metal. Ford jumped in, too, swapping steel body panels for fiberglass pieces to create a lightweight Galaxie.

The Thunderbolt was Ford’s follow-up to the slimmed down Galaxie. It was the ultimate expression of dragstrip Total Performance from Ford. An award-winning Wimbledon White 1964 Ford Thunderbolt (Lot #1364), one of the documented 100 built, will be offered with No Reserve at the 2020 Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Auction. Whoever wins the bidding will be purchasing a true piece of performance history.

The Thunderbolt was based on the intermediate-sized Fairlane 500, a much lighter car than the bulkier Galaxie. To trim weight even further, the original steel hood and front fenders were replaced by fiberglass pieces. The cars were delivered with without heater or radio, sound-deadening materials or armrests, and had Plexiglas side windows. A driver’s-side sun visor and single driver’s windshield wiper were about the only convenience items left.

The trim profile was combined with maximum power. The engine compartment was crammed with a 427ci high-riser version of Ford’s FE big-block V8 with dual 4-barrel carburetors, fed by air intake ducts snaking in from openings where the inboard headlamps were once mounted. Concealing that monster engine was a fiberglass hood with teardrop-shaped hood scoop, the Thunderbolt’s most distinctive styling feature. In case anyone didn’t get the point, the Thunderbolts were delivered with racing slicks, and with the battery relocated to the trunk.

Since the raw material for the T-Bolt was the Fairlane 500 with high-performance K-code 289, the cars were equipped with the largest brakes available, along with the stout Ford 9-inch rear end. In keeping with their special status, the conversion from regular Fairlane to Thunderbolt happened away from the regular production lines, at Dearborn Steel Tubing.

The car offered at Scottsdale spent its racing heyday at drag strips in the Ohio Valley. As with most race cars, this Thunderbolt did not remain in factory-delivered spec for long. The original automatic transmission was quickly converted to a Toploader 4-speed, a common swap.

At some point after its brief racing career ‒ the odometer shows less than 400 miles ‒ the Thunderbolt was put into storage for an estimated 30 years. The current owner purchased it from a collector’s estate in 2015 and treated the car to a meticulous nut-and-bolt concours restoration to bring it back to “as-campaigned” condition. It was then displayed at Concours d’Elegance events in California, where it won numerous awards, including the Historical Vehicle Association’s National Automotive Heritage Award at the Carmel-By-The-Sea Concours. It comes with a letter of authentication from the Thunderbolt Owners Association and a Ford dealer memorandum dated February 21, 1964.

A Thunderbolt could storm the quarter-mile in a flash in the 1960s. This one’s trip across the auction block should be no less brief, and every bit as memorable.

For up-to-date information on this vehicle, click HERE. For a look at all the vehicles on the 2020 Scottsdale Preview Docket, with more being added daily, click HERE.