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Engineering the Lincoln NASCAR Body

2:55
16:40
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At 2:55 in

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

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What happens here

Miller describes how Penske Racing responded to Ford's request. Ford provided them with the necessary sheet metal, which consisted of production body panels from a Lincoln Mark VIII. The fabrication department at Penske Racing, primarily David Little and Dave Roberts, took these standard Lincoln body pieces and modified them to fit a regulation NASCAR chassis. They specifically adapted the hood and created a custom front fascia to resemble the Lincoln Mark VIII, and the rear fascia was refabricated using parts from a Lincoln Town Car. The objective was to create a race car that adhered to NASCAR's dimensional rules (heights, widths) while still being recognizable as a Lincoln product.

Goal: Detail how the Lincoln prototype's body was constructed using existing Ford/Lincoln components.

Tools and materials

  • Lincoln Mark VIII Production Car — Showing the source of the front end design
  • Lincoln Town Car Production Car — Showing the source of the rear fascia design
  • NASCAR Chassis — The foundational structure onto which the body panels were mounted
  • Sheet Metal — The raw material from which custom body parts were formed

What they say

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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

Auto-generated from the video audio.