Ford’s Torino Won Two NASCAR Titles With David Pearson – Then Became TV’s ‘Striped Tomato’ in Starsky & Hutch

The Ford Torino spent nine years as one of Detroit’s most versatile nameplates — a 375-horsepower street racer, a NASCAR championship winner, and eventually the red-and-white Gran Torino that made Starsky & Hutch famous. Here’s how one car pulled off all three.

Paul Michael Glaser took one look at his new patrol car and hated it. The Ford Gran Torino handed to him for Starsky & Hutch was bright red with a thick white stripe down each side, and Glaser nicknamed it the “Striped Tomato” — a jab that stuck so hard Ford leaned into it and sold roughly 1,000 replica cars to the public. But six years before that car became a TV punchline, the Torino name belonged to a 375-horsepower street car and a two-time NASCAR championship winner driven by David Pearson. The 1976 Gran Torino everyone remembers from television is only the last chapter of a nine-year story that started as one of the meanest mid-size muscle cars Ford ever built.

The Video: Nine Years of Torino in One Sitting

This 29-minute walkthrough from Tony’s Fords and Mustangs covers the entire Torino production run, from its 1968 introduction as the top trim of the Fairlane lineup through its final year in 1976. The video moves chronologically, year by year, tracking the GT and Cobra performance models, the Gran Torino, the Brougham luxury trims, and even the Squire wagons — along with the drivelines, special editions, and options that came and went as the car evolved. It’s a rare piece of content that treats a mid-size Ford as a full nameplate with its own arc, rather than reducing it to a single famous model year. That range matters here: the same Torino badge that sat on a 429 Cobra Jet fastback in 1970 also sat on a wood-paneled Squire wagon built for hauling kids to school, which is part of why the nameplate is harder to pin down than the Mustang or the Fairlane it replaced.

What makes it worth the full runtime is the detail: the 1969 redesign and Cobra introduction, the Torino’s NASCAR dominance that same era, the complete second-generation redesign for 1970, and the slower drift toward safety regulations and softer performance through the mid-1970s. Viewer comments on the video are full of first-hand ownership stories — drivers tests taken in Gran Torinos, first cars bought used decades ago, and more than one commenter who still owns the car they learned to drive in. One viewer recalled a neighbor’s black-and-gold 1968 GT with a 428 Cobra Jet that chirped its tires shifting from first to second on every pass down the street, a detail that influenced them to buy their own Cobra Jet Mustang years later.

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The NASCAR Titles Nobody Remembers

Before the Torino name meant anything to television audiences, it meant winning races. Driving for Holman-Moody, David Pearson took a Ford Torino to 16 victories and 36 top-five finishes in 1968, enough for his second NASCAR Grand National championship. In 1969, Ford answered homologation rules by building the aerodynamic Torino Talladega — a limited-production, nose-extended variant built specifically to run faster at NASCAR’s new high-banked superspeedways. Pearson took the Talladega to another championship that year, with Richard Petty finishing second in a Talladega of his own. Ford won 26 Grand National races and the manufacturer’s title in the process, a two-year run that made the Torino/Talladega one of the most successful NASCAR platforms of the era.

That racing pedigree fed directly into the street cars. The 1969 Torino Cobra came standard with a 428 Cobra Jet V8, and buyers who checked the right boxes could add Ram Air induction for a genuine muscle car that shared its underlying architecture with a national championship winner. It wasn’t a badge-engineered image car — the same basic platform that beat Petty at the track was sitting in Ford showrooms with a warranty.

The 429 Cobra Jet Years

Ford redesigned the Torino completely for 1970, giving it a longer, more sculpted second-generation body. The performance flagship was the Torino Cobra, and the one to have came with the 429 Super Cobra Jet — a 375-horsepower four-barrel V8 with Ram Air induction and, on Drag Pack cars, a 780-CFM Holley carburetor built for the strip rather than the street. Paired with the optional shaker hood scoop poking through the bodywork, it was as visually aggressive as it was quick, and it remains the year collectors chase hardest today.

The muscle car era’s decline hit the Torino the same way it hit everything else in Detroit. A 1972 redesign grew the car and introduced the Gran Torino name across the lineup as the performance-first Cobra trim faded into history. By 1974, tightening federal bumper-impact and emissions rules had reshaped the car again, trading horsepower and manual-transmission options for compliance. The Torino nameplate soldiered on through 1976 before Ford replaced it entirely with the LTD II for 1977, closing out a run that had started as a NASCAR champion and ended as a mid-size family car with a famous paint job.

How a Muscle Car Became a TV Punchline

That final 1976 model year is where most people actually meet the Torino, even if they don’t know it. The three Gran Torinos built for Starsky & Hutch production were equipped with a modest 351-cubic-inch V8 making about 154 horsepower and a three-speed automatic — nothing like the 429 Cobra Jet cars that came before them. But the show’s popularity was enough that Ford built around 1,000 “Starsky & Hutch” package Gran Torinos for public sale in 1976, painted Bright Red with Wimbledon White stripes, minus the black outlining seen on the TV cars. The nickname Glaser coined as an insult became one of the most recognizable paint schemes in muscle car history, and those replica cars now draw serious money at auction purely on nostalgia.

That’s the real value of tracing the Torino’s full run rather than just one year of it: the same nameplate that won NASCAR championships and carried a 375-horsepower street engine also became a pop-culture icon driving a completely different image a few years later. Few Ford models packed that much range into a single decade — race winner, muscle car, family wagon, and TV star, all under one name. Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.