1963 Ford Galaxie: Daytona's Top Five, the 427 and a Roof in Dispute

Tiny Lund came to Daytona in February 1963 without a ride. The NASCAR Hall of Fame's account says Marvin Panch flipped a Maserati sports car in practice for a preliminary race, that Lund, then an unemployed driver looking for work as a mechanic, helped get him out of the burning car, and that Panch asked from his hospital bed for Lund to take his place in the Wood Brothers' No. 21 Ford. On February 24 Lund ran the Daytona 500 on a single set of tires, made one fewer pit stop than his rivals, ran out of fuel in Turn 4 on the last lap, and coasted home about half a lap ahead of Fred Lorenzen.^1,2

The car was a Ford Galaxie 500, and it did not win alone. Wikipedia's race record lists Fords in the first five places: Lund, Lorenzen, Ned Jarrett, Nelson Stacy and Dan Gurney. The Wood Brothers went on to the 1963 owner's championship, the only title in the team's history, yet NASCAR's all-time champions table gives that year's drivers' title to Joe Weatherly in a Pontiac with three wins. Ford's big car was fast enough to fill the top five at Daytona but had not yet turned speed into a championship, and the rest of the 1963 model year was about adding more of it.^1,2,3

Ford's answer was more engine. Over-Drive Magazine's 1963 compilation lists the 406 at the start of the year in two forms, code B with one four-barrel at 385 horsepower and code G with three two-barrels at 405 horsepower, and states that each was replaced mid-year by a 427: code Q with one four-barrel at 410 horsepower and 476 lb-ft, and code R with two four-barrels at 425 horsepower and 480 lb-ft, all SAE gross ratings. The standard axle with either big engine was 3.50:1 with the three- or four-speed and 4.11 with overdrive. The sources used here do not say which engine was in Lund's car at Daytona.⁴

Car Life put the change in plain arithmetic in its June 1963 road test. A Galaxie with the standard 260 V-8, the magazine calculated, carried 23.2 pounds per horsepower at a 3,800-pound curb weight, while a 427 Galaxie could run as low as 8.7 pounds per horsepower at 3,700 pounds and 425 horsepower. Its own test car was neither: a 289 XL Sports Hardtop that averaged 15.8 mpg over nearly 1,000 miles, against the 9 to 12 mpg the staff had been seeing from cars with more than 400 cubic inches. The big engines bought their performance with fuel, and Car Life measured the bill.⁵

Car Life's larger point was that the Galaxie's weight problem ran through the whole range, not just the racing cars. The magazine wrote that in the Galaxie, a car larger in box volume than a Lincoln, there was simply too much weight for the standard 260 V-8, particularly against Chevrolet's 195-horsepower 283. Ford's fix for ordinary buyers was one more pass of the boring bar, taking the 260 out to 289 cubic inches, rated at 195 horsepower at 4,400 rpm and 282 lb-ft at 2,400. At the top of the range the 406 and the 427 were the same answer on a far larger scale, and the racers building lightweight Galaxies were busy taking weight back out.^5,6

The other mid-year change was the roof. Ford added a Sports Hardtop fastback to the Galaxie 500 and 500 XL series, and the sources disagree about why. Over-Drive Magazine says it was primarily developed to help Fords on NASCAR's high-speed ovals after a distinct disadvantage in 1962. Mac's Motor City Garage quotes Ford studio chief Joe Oros saying the design was not influenced by racing and was meant to give the hardtop a youthful, sporty verve, while acknowledging that Ford's racers had struggled with the 1962-63 boxtop. Car Life, for its part, noted that the new slantback roof was not a true fastback at all.^4,7,5

Buyers voted for the new roof. Over-Drive's figures, which mix 'sold,' 'delivered' and 'built' wording from row to row, count 100,500 Galaxie 500 Sports Hardtops against 49,733 notchback hardtops, almost exactly the two-to-one margin Mac's Motor City Garage reports, even though the fastback arrived halfway through the year. In the 500 XL series the margin was far narrower: 33,870 fastbacks to 29,713 notchbacks. For scale, the Galaxie 500 four-door sedan alone reached 205,722. What no source found here provides is the number a performance history most wants: how many 1963 Galaxies left the factory with a 406 or a 427.^4,7

The 427's most visible customers were often at dealerships. Martyn L. Schorr's October 1963 Cars feature followed Bill Kolb Jr., a salesman at Larsen Ford in White Plains, New York, who raced a lightweight 427 Galaxie after hours and had run 116 mph in 12.7 seconds while winning Super Stock trophies at the Dover strip both times out. Schorr wrote that the lightweight was offered only as a Galaxie hardtop, with fiberglass hood, front fenders, doors and deck lid, lightweight aluminum bumpers and no sound deadening, and a caption put the finished car just under 3,600 pounds. Bob Tasca's 'Go Getter II,' he added, had run 12.0 seconds at a Rhode Island strip.⁶

The same article is candid about what Ford had not yet solved. The lightweight used a T-10 four-speed with a 2.36:1 first gear and a 1.66 second, its own clutch and an explosion-proof scattershield bellhousing, but Ford still offered only a non-locking differential on its high-performance cars, so dealers or owners had to fit a Detroit Automotive locker, a hundred-dollar-plus job. Schorr also noted that although the car was set up at the factory for drag racing, it could not be raced successfully straight off the showroom floor, and he called that one serious drawback of the Ford.⁶

Those limits pointed to the next step. The NHRA's history of Gas Ronda says the full-size Galaxie was simply too heavy against lighter Chevrolet, Dodge and Plymouth competition, and that Ford's 1964 answer was to put the 427 into the midsize Fairlane and call it the Thunderbolt. The 1963 Galaxie therefore stands as the year Ford got its biggest engine and its fastback roof into the showroom, filled the top five at Daytona with the big car, and found that the car wrapped around the engine had become the problem.^8,4,2