1966 Ford Fairlane: The GT, the GTA and a 427 Built for Super Stock

For months, Hot Rod reported in July 1966, a 427 Fairlane had been only a rumour around Detroit. Then Charlie Gray of Ford's Performance Division called to say Ford was about to spring a 427 Fairlane 'street package' on the world, and two days later the magazine's Eric Dahlquist was at the door of Engineering Building No. 1 with Bill Holbrook of the Performance and Economy Section, listening to a Nightmist Blue Fairlane idle around the U-drive. Driver Rolf Kvamme took it out onto Rotunda Drive, and the sound of eight Holley barrels, Dahlquist wrote, said something he had heard before: brute power.¹

That car was possible because the 1966 Fairlane was a new, wider car that could take Ford's big-block V-8 for the first time. The mainstream result was the GT and its automatic twin, the GTA, with a 390 rated at 335 gross horsepower at 4,800 rpm and 427 lb-ft at 3,200 as standard. Over-Drive Magazine's fact sheet calls the GT part of the Fairlane 500 series, while its own production table files the GT under the Fairlane 500 XL line as body codes 63D and 76D, at factory prices of $2,843 for the hardtop and $3,068 for the convertible. Milder 390s at 265, 275 and 315 horsepower were offered in other Fairlanes.^2,3

Buyers took the GT seriously. The Over-Drive compilation counts 33,015 GT and GTA hardtops and 4,327 convertibles, 37,342 cars, without separating the manual GTs from the automatic GTAs. Against the 317,274 total in Over-Drive's production table, that is about 11.8 percent of all Fairlanes; against the 337,792 'delivered' figure on the same site's fact sheet it is about 11.1 percent, and the site does not explain why its two totals differ. No source found in this research counts 390s installed in Fairlanes other than the GT, so how many big-block Fairlanes were sold overall remains unknown rather than estimated.^2,3

The magazines were less impressed than the buyers. Car Life's March 1966 road test was headlined 'Genuine Imitation Joins the Supercar Spectrum,' and it judged the GTA against the Pontiac GTO and the two-year head start Pontiac had enjoyed. 'It just isn't competitive in output,' the magazine wrote, blaming a 390 bred for the Thunderbird that flattened out beyond 4,400 rpm. Its GTA hardtop, listed at $2,843 and $3,499 as tested with a 3.25:1 axle, weighed 3,880 pounds with test equipment and ran from 0 to 60 mph in 8.6 seconds and through the quarter mile in 15.4 seconds at 87 mph, with a 115-mph top speed.⁴

Car Life was not simply unkind. It disliked the Sportshift automatic's pauses between gears and its near-useless downshift into low, and it saw about 12 mpg on premium fuel, but it praised the Firestone Super Sport tires and the new body's solid, quiet structure, and concluded that the GTA came closer to being a 'pretty fair family sedan' than an earth-shaking supercar. It also noticed that its California test car had no Thermactor emissions pump and reported that Ford's legal department pointed to an exemption for high-performance cars, a category the GTA qualified for because, among other things, it had a four-barrel carburetor.⁴

Car Life also explained what a GTA owner could do about it. Pontiac, it pointed out, sold hotter engines straight off the order blank, while the Fairlane GTA offered one four-barrel carburetor 'or nothing.' The remedy lay with the parts counter and the speed shops: Ford's Parts Division had marketed a three-two-barrel manifold for the engine in the past, and the larger shops offered reworked heads and headers. With drag slicks, good headers and a 3.50:1 or numerically higher axle, the magazine estimated, elapsed times in the 14s, possibly the high 13s, should be within reach of a good driver, and a four-speed in place of the automatic would cut more. That was a forecast, not a timed result.⁴

Car and Driver's March 1966 comparison of six super cars offers a different lesson about period testing. Its Fairlane GT/A was prepared by Holman and Moody, just as its GTO came from Royal Bobcat and its Comet Cyclone GT from Bud Moore, and on the first runs at Bridgehampton the Comet, the Fairlane and the Chevelle all overheated. The data panels in the surviving scan are too faint to read with confidence, so none of that test's numbers appears here; the preparation list is the point. A specialist-prepared test car is evidence about that car on that day, not about a showroom GT.⁵

The 427 Fairlane itself was a homologation exercise. Over-Drive Magazine records 57 special Fairlane 500 two-door hardtops built mid-year with the R-code 427, rated at 425 horsepower with two four-barrels and fitted with a four-speed, to qualify the engine and transmission combination for Super Stock drag racing, and describes them as white with fiberglass hoods. Wikipedia gives the same 57, citing a different web page, and the two may share a lineage. A single-four-barrel W-code 427 at 410 horsepower also appears in the compiled engine list as a special order, with no production count found.^2,6

Hot Rod's test car was, by the magazine's account, one of three Fairlanes assembled for production evaluation. It had Mustang-type front disc brakes, 2.25-inch exhaust pipes, a nine-grand tachometer, the heavy-duty four-speed and a fiberglass hood held by four NASCAR-style pins, with a C6 automatic promised later and street weight aimed at about 3,600 pounds. What it did not have was a timed quarter mile. The Chrondek timers could not be set up, so Hot Rod judged its runs by speedometer, just under 100 mph on the first pass and about 101 to 102 indicated with power shifts. Those are impressions, not measurements, and they stay that way here.¹

Set side by side, the year's numbers describe two different Fairlanes. There were 37,342 GT and GTA cars for buyers who wanted the look, the stripes and a big-block, and 57 R-code hardtops for racers who needed Ford's wedge engine legal in Super Stock. Car Life thought the first too tame to match the GTO; Hot Rod's opening caption predicted the second was 'likely to become one of the year's sensations.' Both began from the same fact, the one that made 1966 matter for Ford's intermediate: for the first time, the Fairlane was big enough to take a big engine.^2,4,1