AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
The T-Bird, with its Mercury-sourced 292-cubic-inch V8 and roll-up windows, plus a host of other available convenience options, seemed to fit most Americans' idea of what a sports car should be. And for the whole of 1955, the T-Bird outsold the Corvette nearly 25-to-1. The Korean War was over, the economy was in good shape, and Chevrolet's Corvette was a fiberglass flop, its six-cylinder engine and annoying side curtains simply not cutting the mustard. The Thunderbird's introduction in the fall of 1954 was fortuitous. The Corvette's introduction added a sense of urgency, and Henry Ford II gave the project his official blessing after the 1953 Los Angeles Autorama. History doesn't record what sports car on whose stand he was looking at, but Crusoe remarked accusatorily to Walker, "Why don't we have anything like that?" Although knowing full well that nothing was in the works, Walker represented that his team was working on "something."īefore returning to Dearborn, Walker contacted designer Frank Hershey and told him to get to work on a Ford sports car. Lewis Crusoe, a Ford exec, and George Walker, Ford's chief stylist at the time, were attending an auto show in Paris. The final straw came when arch rival Chevrolet introduced the Corvette in June of 1953, though really, the Thunderbird story started a few years before that with a subordinate's fib to his boss. By the early 1950s-in addition to foreigners like MG, Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Ferrari-Ford had to stomach American independents and upstarts dabbling in sports cars, most notably tiny manufacturers like Kaiser, Hudson, Nash, Crosley, Kurtis, and Muntz. The immediate post-war era saw sports cars enter the American consciousness for the first time since the days of the Mercer Raceabout and the Stutz Bearcat.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |