Ford Put Its Meanest 1970 Engine in a Pickup — Fewer Than 5% of Ranchero GT Buyers Ordered a 429, and This Drag Pack Super Cobra Jet Is the Rarest of All

A 1970 Ranchero GT with a Drag Pack 429 Super Cobra Jet is a truck almost nobody ordered: fewer than 5% of Ranchero GTs got any 429 at all, and Ford rated this one at 375 horsepower it plainly made more of. Muscle Car Of The Week walks around an untouched Dark Ivy Green survivor, factory inspection stamps and all.

1970 Ford Ranchero GT 429 Super Cobra Jet

Ford never advertised the Ranchero as a muscle car. It was the pickup for the guy who needed to haul feed on Saturday and drive to church on Sunday, and for most of its two-decade run that is exactly what it was. But in 1970, the same year Detroit’s horsepower war hit its absolute peak, somebody at Ford let the wildest engine in the Torino catalog slip into the truck line. The result was a Ranchero GT with a 429 Super Cobra Jet, a Drag Pack rear end, a shaker scoop punching through the hood, and a bed out back that you would be a fool to actually load. Fewer than five percent of Ranchero GT buyers across 1970 and 1971 even checked the box for a 429, and the Super Cobra Jet was the rarest of those. The Dark Ivy Green example in this Muscle Car Of The Week episode is about as close as you will ever get to seeing one with its original guts intact.

The Pickup That Outran the Cars It Was Built to Serve

Muscle Car Of The Week is the video series from The Brothers Collection, and episode 325 is a five-minute walkaround of a 1970 Ranchero GT that looks like it just rolled off a dealer lot. The host does not waste time on generalities. He opens by pointing out that Ford hit a home run when it launched the Ranchero in 1957, that the car-truck became a staple for tradesmen and families alike, and that this is not the first hot Ranchero the series has covered. The ’57 with a supercharged 312 showed up in episode 15, and a blue ’68 Cobra Jet was episode 79. This one, he says, is probably the highest of the high-performance Rancheros.

The camera lingers where it should. You get a close look at the finned aluminum valve covers, the sinister finned shaker scoop sitting on top of the 429, and the oil cooler mounted on the radiator core support that is the giveaway for a real Super Cobra Jet. The exterior gets the same treatment: the full-width eggcrate grille that opens to reveal hidden headlights, the gills on the lower quarter panels beneath the GT emblems, the discreet 429 badge low on the fender, and the styled steel wheels on raised-white-letter tires. Viewers who have seen the video keep coming back to two things: the color, which several insist should be called Poison Ivy, and the little yellow factory inspection stamp still visible under the hood. It is the kind of detail that tells you this truck has never been apart.

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What “Super” Actually Meant on a 429 Cobra Jet

The 1970 Ranchero was, mechanically, a Torino with a bed. It rode on the station wagon chassis, shared the Torino’s front sheet metal and suspension, and could be ordered with the same engines. The base GT engine was a two-barrel 302 rated at 220 horsepower, followed by two-barrel and four-barrel 351 Clevelands at 250 and 300 horsepower. The big news for 1970 was the arrival of three versions of the 385-series 429 big-block: the 360-horsepower Thunder Jet, the 370-horsepower Cobra Jet with or without functional Ram Air, and the top dog, the 375-horsepower Super Cobra Jet.

Here is the part that trips up a lot of people. You could not order a Super Cobra Jet by name. As the host explains, the “super” part of the package actually started out back, with the Drag Pack option. Check that box and you got either a 3.91 Traction-Lok or a 4.30 Detroit Locker rear axle. Those steep gears would spin the engine much faster at highway speed, so Ford beefed up the 429 to survive it: a four-bolt-main block, forged pistons at 11.3:1 compression, beefier connecting rods, a solid-lifter camshaft, and a 780-cfm Holley carburetor breathing through the functional Cobra Jet shaker. The finned oil cooler on the core support kept the bottom end alive at high rpm. Officially the result was 375 horsepower and 450 lb-ft of torque, sent through a Toploader four-speed in this truck, though a heavy-duty C6 automatic was also available.

Those numbers were, in the fashion of the day, a polite fiction. Period testing and later dyno work put a stock Cobra Jet closer to 380 or 390 horsepower and a Super Cobra Jet north of 400. The 5-horsepower gap between CJ and SCJ on paper was mostly about insurance rates; the real difference was that the SCJ was built to live at redline all day. In an intermediate coupe like the Torino Cobra, that combination made for a legitimate 14-second car with a decent set of tires and 13s within easy reach of a few bolt-ons. In a Ranchero, with less weight over the rear axle and a bed full of nothing, the challenge was simply getting it to hook up.

Why So Few People Ordered One

Ford built 21,640 Rancheros for 1970, and only 3,905 of them were GTs. Across the 1970 and 1971 model years combined, Ford sold just under 8,000 Ranchero GTs, and fewer than five percent of those carried any version of the 429. Narrow that down to the Super Cobra Jet with the Drag Pack, and you are looking at a car that most Ford dealers never saw once. Exact SCJ Ranchero production has never been reliably documented, which is exactly why survivors like the one in this video matter so much to the hobby.

Part of the reason is obvious: a man buying a pickup in 1970 was usually buying it to work, and a 4.30 Detroit Locker with a solid-lifter cam is a miserable way to tow a horse trailer. The other part is that Chevrolet was selling the El Camino SS 454 across the street, and the LS6 version carried a factory rating of 450 horsepower against the Ranchero’s 375. The El Camino outsold the Ranchero every year they competed, and in the collector market it still does. That has kept the Ranchero GT 429 something of a sleeper: a pristine 360-horsepower 429 example sold at Mecum for $45,100 in 2022, a Ram Air 429 CJ went for $55,000 through a Milwaukee dealer, and estimates for a numbers-matching Super Cobra Jet survivor now run well past $70,000.

If you want to see what the same drivetrain does in coupe form, we covered a bone-stock 1970 Torino Cobra that ran 12s on 7-inch tires, and the truck’s cross-town rival gets its own modern twist in the Hellcat-swapped El Camino we featured earlier this summer.

The Ranchero Story, From Hauler to Hot Rod

The Ranchero predates the El Camino by two years. Ford introduced it in December 1956 as part of the 1957 full-size line, essentially a two-door Ranch Wagon with the roof cut off behind the cab and a steel bed floor dropped in. It was clever, cheap to build, and immediately popular enough that Chevrolet copied the idea for 1959. Poor sales in 1959 pushed Ford to shrink the Ranchero onto the compact Falcon platform for 1960 through 1965, then onto the intermediate Fairlane for 1966 and 1967, and finally onto the Torino from 1968 through 1976. The last Rancheros, built from 1977 to 1979 on the LTD II chassis, closed out Ford’s car-based pickup experiment in America.

Of all seven generations, the 1970 and 1971 Torino-based GT is the one enthusiasts point to as the peak. It got the coke-bottle body, the pointed nose with the optional hidden headlamps, the laser stripe graphics, the shaker hood, and the full Torino engine list at the exact moment that list included a 429 with a Drag Pack. The 1971 model carried the same look with a mildly revised grille and stripe, and then the 1972 redesign, tightening emissions rules, and skyrocketing insurance premiums ended the party. A 429 was still available in a Ranchero for 1972 and 1973, but never again in Super Cobra Jet form.

What Makes This One Worth Five Minutes of Your Life

Beyond the engine, the GT package gave the Ranchero a genuinely sorted chassis for its era: heavier springs and shocks, a front sway bar, power front disc brakes, and power steering. The host is candid that the practical use case for a Super Cobra Jet Ranchero is almost nonexistent, joking that you had better have your load strapped down tight, or better yet wait until after work to go mop the streets with the competition. That tension between truck and terror is the whole appeal. It is a vehicle that makes no sense, built by a company that briefly stopped caring whether it did.

Viewers in the comments back that up with their own stories: a friend who came home with one in 1975 to the shock of everyone on the block, a brother whose red Shaker Ranchero was mysteriously “stolen” by a father who feared for his life, a GM lifer who admits he could love a big-block Ford forever. Nearly every one of them mentions the same thing: 1970 was the year, and nothing since has matched it. Looking at a Drag Pack 429 in a pickup truck bed, it is hard to argue.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.