Legacy and Unfulfilled Potential

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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

With the Lincoln prototype out of contention, Ford was forced to find an alternative. The chosen vehicle was the Ford Taurus, a four-door sedan. Don Miller recalls his initial skepticism about racing a Taurus, but acknowledges that it became Ford's standard NASCAR car. The video then transitions to a reflection by the interviewer, who notes the irony of the Taurus being seen as an "ugly" NASCAR car by many, while the un-raced Lincoln prototype held superior performance potential. This leads to broader observations about NASCAR's history and rules. The video briefly showcases an actual 1998 Ford Taurus NASCAR race car and a 1969 Dodge Daytona rear wing, which was confiscated by NASCAR for being "heavily modified," highlighting NASCAR's strict regulations regarding car modifications and manufacturer involvement.

Goal: Conclude the narrative by detailing the consequences of the Lincoln's rejection and its indirect impact on NASCAR history.

Tools and materials

1969 Dodge Daytona Rear Wing Dodge — Illustrating NASCAR's strict modification rules
Ford Taurus NASCAR Race Car — Illustrating the car that replaced the Thunderbird in NASCAR
NASCAR Rulebook NASCAR — The official guidelines governing car design and modification in NASCAR

What they say

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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

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