Ford ALMOST Made a "SuperBird" for NASCAR in 1996 With Lincoln Parts..Here's Why It Never Happened

he said i know that there's people been thinking about racing lincoln and he looked at it kind of shook his head and said okay well that's what you want to do that's what we'll do and that car as it sits right now was better than any t-bird we had i wonder how much different my life would have been than some of your lives would have been if this car made it to the track there's a car behind you that not very many people know about and we want to hear more about it straight from the verge of smile the car behind me is uh is a car that never was it's it's here but as far as nascar and racing is concerned it never was because it never got on the on the racetrack the background from that whole situation was that back in the 80s and early 90s the you know we were racing the fort thunderbird and it was a very successful automobile but one day in the in the mid 90s ford motor company and the leader of the of the ford teams you know the guy that was in charge of ford performance at the time was a man by the name of dan rivard and he called me and said now we have a situation i want you to be aware of it and i need your help and i said well we'll do whatever we can you know we're a poor demon and i like dan especially you know he's a good guy and he said at the end of next year we're going to stop building thunderbirds and said what you got to be kidding me what are we going to race and he said well that's what i'm here to talk to you about that's what i want to talk to you about this is the pen preface this you were like the main guy at penske we didn't say that's the president of pennsylvania okay yeah i just wanna i know that but these guys don't know that and so anyway um you know dan said you know we we're thinking about lots of options you know chevrolet has been able to you know build us almost a special car for nascar racing and market it you know in the to the public under the premise that it is the car that they're racing on the racetrack which of course we know it isn't but i said yeah at the time it was going to be the lagoona oh they were so they were doing this too they were doing this too oh where's theirs at anyway so we'll look into some options and he said well here's what we want to do we want to make sure that we're it's something that we can build at the factory so that that car that whatever it turns out to be is something that can be marketed to the public when we're done because that's you know there's no sense of us embracing something that that we don't have so i said okay i understand that he said he said i know that there's people been thinking about racial lincoln and i said yeah i know i've looked at that but the lincoln it's not a car that as it is it's built right now it's not a car that can be raised successfully because the deck lid you know is tapered it goes downhill so i mean that just wipes out all your downforce your rear down door so we have to find something else he said well let me do this he said if we sent you a you know a piece every piece of sheet metal that we're making right now and you took that sheet metal and and repositioned it on the current chassis uh could you you know come up with a combination that we could you know build at the factory as a particular car you know i said i i really don't know but we'll try so we got we got the sheet metal shipped into penske racing and david little who was in charge of our of our fabrication department at penske racing he looked at it kind of shook his head and said okay well that's what you want to do that's what we'll do and so we started we started that he and david kenny and and dave roberts were the primary guys that were involved with it and uh he started assembling the sheet metal and and what you see behind me is as a combination of those parts and pieces it's got a lincoln mark a hood a reproduction of it really custom-made front fascia that looks somewhat like a lincoln or a combination between lincoln and the existing thunderbird and and then the side panels on it are just ham fabricated like they always were back then you know just a flat sheet metal the the deck lid on the car is from a lincoln town car and we may re-fabbed the rear fascia off of a lincoln uh talon car as well so and the roof is just an existing thunderbird piece of sheet metal which would we could use that or we could use you know something off a lincoln or something of a for current ford whatever it was real simple so we put all the pieces together tried to stay within the limits of uh of the rulebook as far as heights and widths and everything go because and the end result is the car that you're seeing behind us now when it was all done the people at our shop looked at it it was split about 50 50 as to whether this thing could be a success or not you know because it was actually about four inches longer than the existing t-bird but we could shorten that up a little bit with not much trouble at all so we kind of shortened it up and rubbed down a little bit and then told the ford motor company to take a look at it and they sent their guys out and they looked at it and said no whatever and we took it we took it to the to the wind tunnel and uh and put it in wind tunnel and everyone was shocked because that car as it sits right now was better than any t-bird we had had more downforce and it had less drag which was phenomenal because that just doesn't happen you know usually you have to give up one to get the other you know yeah and a lot of people attributed it to the total length of the car and i mean there was a thousand different reasons why you know according to all the experts but anyway the fact of the matter was it was really good so the next step was to say okay if we make you know a hundred of these like they do the laguna or whatever would it be legal so the first thing we had to do was show it to nascar and of course when we showed it to nascar they looked at it and looked at it and gary nelson came to look at and gary and i never did see really eye-to-eye on a lot of things but he said dan you can't you can't really say that i said why he said because you don't build it before it doesn't build it i said well they will build it well still you know we'd prefer you didn't do that so i say yeah okay and he said the other thing is i want to see the wind tunnel numbers well at this point i didn't realize that you know all that information had leaked out that it was really really good when tunnel wise and of course they they knew where we did and how we did it and they wanted to see it and he said you know we're not going to give you this car i said well doesn't you know mr france have to be part of the decision he said i'm going to present it to him so you know i was a little bit disheartened and i knew that when he saw it he was going to talk to the guys at ford and eventually get back to you know dan rivard and and uh and probably maybe even go as high as uh as one of one of the ford family and so as time went on and that wasn't very much time it's probably a week it came back to us and they said well we were contacted by the ford people i think dan rivard's office called me and said look you know they came to us and they told us they're not going to give us that that car that you built because it doesn't uh fit the requirements that that nascar is laid out as a guideline for a car like that for the winston cup series i just shook my head and kept going but then i heard from from dan rivard and dan ribard said look he said we're we're whipping a dead horse he said we can't go further with this because of two things number one yeah we'd have to build 150 or 200 of them which wouldn't be the end of the world he said but the one thing that that is a real ripper is mr ford looked at it and said uh and i'm talking edsel ford he said uh look we're not gonna do that we're gonna race what we build and and sell every sunday so we're gonna we're gonna build we're gonna race a uh in the in the very near future we're gonna we're gonna raise a taurus it's a taurus that's a four-door you know he said we're gonna race the taurus because that's what we build and you need to get thinking about it so it wasn't too much longer and i was notified by all the powers that be that this thing was dead and so this was a from first from then on in it was to be called an aerosteady care so it was dead it was never going to race and that we needed to start looking for a new car in that new car was going to be a nascar taurus now outside this building right now on the outside of museum itself you'll see there is a taurus out there that's one of one and that's the second part of the story you want to hear the story behind this car and the role it played in the taurus's development leave a comment uh i'm not gonna say anything but if you know you know what you're looking at and you know why it's different i do have some questions about this though yeah do you think if this if the order of operations of this car were handled differently that it would have made it to the track like if you didn't involve nascar at all and you just built this and then ford built it wasn't going to work because ford didn't want to do it now ford was not gonna do that because they wanted to make sure it was approved before they put millions of dollars behind building one moving a car like that they wanted they wanted to guarantee that it was going to be able to be erased when you're building one of these things you build the whole car and then you you then you kind of tweak it until you make it as good as it can be it's almost better to have a transition from the from the roof down to the decklid and the swale so is this this part of what made it so much better than a thunderbird you know it's everything the tighter the roof the back window that one of the things that gave it so much rear down forces look at the tops of these quarters and that in the flatness of that deck that it's like it looks like the landing strip and the aircraft carrier so then what's the timeline on this car the project was axed it was arrow study it where did it sit until it ended up here it read it was in a warehouse for a while and then they said what are you going to do with it and i said i'll just take it over and put it in the museum we're glad you did that was there anything else like that that never made it to a museum oh i'm sure there's plenty of them but you'll never hear about them you know just hearing that story makes me think what could have been with this didn't you say there was some kind of dispute as to what the what brand the car would be or what it would be called if it got built for ford and and lincoln and mercury you know they all they all had their representatives you know lincoln mercury people wanted to call it a marauder and a uh in the ford division wanted to call it a monika super super bird i think but of course then you know everybody'd say well super birds dodge you know yeah you know so but you know that's a lot of supposition there not all you guys a lot of you guys are around my age 25 you grew up looking at the nascar ford taurus which just to be completely honest it's no surprise or secret that that is a just not a good looking car it was just weird looking i was a little kid i thought the taurus was like the ugliest nascar on the track it was just bad that guy was headed towards chevy's i thought the monte carlo was cooler so what if they did make the thunderbird super bird and our whole generation grew up not thinking that the taurus was the ugliest car ever made how many more of us i could be wearing a you know a motorcraft looking shirt right now and i'm not i don't know i got nothing against ford i like ford but i really wish their cars were cooler looking because i didn't want to have a toy tourist they were stupid like it was just not a cool looking car aluminums were cool monte carlos were cool the taurus was just but i wonder how much different my life would have been than some of your lives would have been if this car made it to the track what do you think disgust yeah mark martin would have won a lot more races yeah that'd be cool no he talks about in his podcast how they couldn't get him to hang the bodies low enough to get downforce right on those things they got so much cool stuff in here you're really worth checking this out and this museum is not for profit everything that this place generates gets donated to the abused children of north carolina so if you're in the mooresville region you're going up and down i-77 for something help off exit 36 and check this place out also they got a bunch of cool old stuff for sale in the gift shop like die casts and things like that you can pause and read that this is what he was talking about it's got all kinds of little holes drilled in it and also if you like the shirt we're wearing and the hats and stuff we have other uh other things too check out staplesworks.com 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