Meet the Fleet – Muscle Cars: ’64 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt

• BODY: Auto World
• WHEELS & TIRES: Road Race Replicas

There’s even more history with this car than is obvious. That’s saying a lot, because let’s state the obvious: with only 100 cars ever built-the minimum required to win the 1964 NHRA Super Stock championship for Ford-the Thunderbolt is not just one of the rarest muscle cars in the world, but packed with a 427 R-code dual 4-barrel Holley equipped full race big block, it is also one of the fastest.

This was an Auto World “special edition” released under their “Legends of the Quarter Mile” from Release 16. It is modeled after an actual ’64 Thunderbolt raced by Rhode Island Ford dealer Tasca Ford, which is believed to be the first car built.

The Thunderbolt is such a legend that there’s probably nothing you don’t already know: built from a 2 door sedan version of the mid-size Fairline with the exterior trimmed to “500” specs and the interior stripped beyond anything Ford would ever sell to the public, the lightweight Thunderbolt was one of many “factory race cars” which made for one of the most exciting chapters of the muscle car era. The NHRA “Super Stock” category was a cheater’s dream come true: a class for “stock” cars that weren’t stock at all, the factory racers from Ford, Chevy, Pontiac and Dodge were all custom made cars with aluminum front ends, plexiglass windows, and every single item that added weight removed to the degree that the car could still appear, at a cursory glance, to be something a customer could actually buy at a dealership. That meant stock dashboards and steering wheels, stock gauges and controls, and stock colors…but that was about it. Bumpers that were chrome plated steel on real stock cars were replaced with aluminum, hoods were liftoff aluminum or fiberglass without hinges or latches, and the engines-while built on a block that was at least structurally stock-were balanced and blueprinted and packed with every top shelf part each manufacturer had.

Of course a tremendous amount of re-engineering had to be done to shoehorn the monster FE series big-block into a car that was designed for nothing larger than a 289. The 427 Ford R-Code was a fearsome power plant, perhaps the hairiest and scariest engine available in 1964, with only the Chrysler Hemi coming close. Although the horsepower rating of the Thunderbolt was claimed to be 425, most believe it was much closer to 600. And who knows whether the claimed compression ratio of of 13.5:1 was accurate or not. No doubt it would only run on super-high octane race fuel, so while it was technically a street-legal vehicle, no one in their right mind would have tried to drive one of these on the street!

Our featured car is one of the 49 T-bolts made with a Borg Warner 4-speed manual and one of the first 11 painted in “Vintage Burgundy.” The remaining 89 cars were “Wimbledon White,” making this a rarity amongst rarities! And that brings us to the special history of this special car, a history indelibly connected to Drag City: for the owner and driver of this car here in the 1980’s is none other than Sturgill “Smokey” Rutherford, the son of Thomas “Tommy” Rutherford, a former manager of Drag City Raceway, LLC before the track was demolished and rebuilt into its present “Mark IV” form. Tommy Rutherford was a racer himself back in the early 1960’s, campaigning Cobras in both small and big-block forms on both street and strip, and he grew up around the track that became Drag City, watching it grow and morph and change through the years until finally taking it over when the business was in financial trouble in 1980. Appointed by then new owner Whyte Investments to run to show, it was Rutherford who oversaw the track’s renaissance and eventual 3^rd and 4^th expansions into the monster road course it is today. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and Sturgill, one of Tommy’s 2 sons, took up racing Fords just like dad. He sought out and obtained this rare car himself, buying it from the 2^nd owner who had purchased it as an ex-factory racecar from the famous Tasca Ford dealership in Rhode Island. The car made the long trip west by truck where it was deconstructed and turned into a road racer, with the original 4:57 drag rear axle updated to a 3:91 and the BW 4-speed re-geared and strengthened for repeated slam shifting. After putting it all back together, the car was christened with the appropriate name “Exterminator.”

To this day, “Smokey” is the only person known to have converted an example of this famous straight-line racer into a road-course terror. And terror it is, so fast that it’s all he can do to keep the car on the track. Whether in straight line or in the turns, the legend of the Thunderbolt lives on at Drag City!