Mickey Thompson Bolted His Own Hemi Heads Onto a 427 Ford in 1963 — And His Galaxie Lightweight Just Fired It Up After 47 Years of Silence

One of the 212 fiberglass-and-aluminum Galaxie Lightweights Ford built for 1963 belonged to Mickey Thompson, and it carries the engine he built to beat Chrysler at its own game: a 427 FE wearing his aluminum hemi heads and three-piece pushrods. After 47 years dormant, it runs again.

Everybody knows Chrysler owned the word Hemi. Almost nobody remembers that in 1963 Mickey Thompson decided Ford should have one too, cast his own aluminum hemispherical heads for the 427 FE, and bolted a set onto a car Ford built specifically to go drag racing. That car is a 1963½ Galaxie 500 Lightweight, one of only 212 built, and it sat untouched for 47 years with Thompson’s engine still between the fenders. Then it landed at BC Auto Machine, who got the honor of waking it up. What you hear in the six minutes that follow is a valvetrain no other production-based Ford has ever used, spinning up for the first time since the Nixon administration. It sounds nothing like a stock 427, and the reason why is one of the strangest engineering stories of the muscle car era.

The Sound of a 427 Nobody Else Built

The video is short, unscripted, and shot in a machine shop rather than a studio, which is exactly why it works. BC Auto Machine describes the car as “perfectly preserved in time,” and the footage backs that up: the Corinthian White fastback, the stripped interior, and the engine bay all look like they were sealed in a garage in the early 1970s and simply left alone. The shop walks the camera over the engine, opens it up for a look at the internals, and then does what every viewer came for. The 427 catches, settles into a lumpy idle, and then cracks the throttle open with a response so sharp that viewers keep singling it out.

The comments tell you what the moment means to people who know the history. Hundreds of viewers have called the engine a work of art, pointed out that Thompson designed it without a computer in sight, and mourned a builder who was taken far too early. One viewer remembers seeing this exact car at the Ford show at Carlisle with a spare hemi head sitting in the trunk. Another notes the crisp bark of a solid roller cam. If you have ever wondered what a Thompson hemi Ford sounds like next to a regular FE, this is the only place on the internet to find out.

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Why Ford Built 212 Galaxies That Weighed 670 Pounds Less

The car underneath the engine is a legend in its own right. By 1963 the NHRA had capped “stock” engines at seven liters, or 427 cubic inches, so the only way left to win Super Stock was to remove weight. Chrysler had accidentally done it first by downsizing its full-size cars for 1962. Ford’s answer was the Galaxie 500 Lightweight, ordered under a special option code and assembled at the Norfolk plant with no seam sealer, no sound deadener, and no radio, heater, or carpet. The cars then went to Andy Hotton’s Dearborn Steel Tubing for fiberglass front-end panels and trunk lid, aluminum bumpers and brackets, and thin Bostrom bucket seats. Later cars added fiberglass doors and inner fender wells. Even the sun visors were cardboard.

The package added $1,414.15 to the price and brought the car in at about 3,480 pounds against roughly 4,150 for a standard Galaxie fastback. Under the hood was the new R-code 427, a bored-out development of the 406 with twin Holley four-barrels on a high-riser manifold and a rating of 425 horsepower that everyone understood was conservative. It ran through an aluminum-case Borg-Warner T-10 four-speed. Ford built 212 of them for 1963, all but one in Corinthian White with red interiors, and drivers like Gas Ronda put them into the 12.0-second range at 118 mph. The 1962 pilot program had produced only 11 cars, and the NHRA had bounced those into the Factory Experimental class, so 1963 was Ford’s first real shot at the weight war.

The Hemi Heads Ford Never Asked For

Thompson’s contribution was the part nobody else could buy. Hot rod lore says he simply adapted Chrysler hemi castings to the Ford block, but the heads are entirely his own design. He recognized that the Chrysler, Pontiac, and Ford FE big-blocks shared similar bore spacing and head-bolt patterns, and used that overlap to lay out aluminum hemi heads that bolt to the stock FE block using its ten head-bolt locations per bank. The intake rockers are production Chrysler 392 parts and the valve covers interchange with a Chrysler hemi, but the combustion chambers, ports, and exhaust rockers are unique. Unusually, the intake and exhaust valves are the same diameter, about two inches.

The truly bizarre part lives under those valve covers. To make room for big, straight intake ports, Thompson split each pushrod into three articulated segments that snake around the runners, with the middle piece running in a bore machined into the head and the bottom piece captured in a cage brazed to a roller lifter. It looks fragile, and engine builders today spend fortunes making pushrods short and stiff, but the engine never needed to spin much past 6,500 rpm, and one longtime FE forum member recalls watching Thompson’s hemi Ford beat the Chrysler hemis at Pomona by six or seven car lengths. Thompson ran the conversion with factory Ford backing in 1964, including a Thunderbolt Fairlane driven by Jess Tyree, but the heads were shelved within about a year. Ford’s own answer to the Chrysler hemi, the SOHC 427 Cammer, deleted the pushrods entirely and made the whole idea obsolete.

What Makes This Galaxie Irreplaceable

Any 1963 Lightweight is a serious collector car. An estimated 150 survive, values run well into six figures, and a 1,483-mile example sold for $237,600 at Mecum Indianapolis in 2015. But those cars carry the regular R-code 427. Only a handful of Thompson hemi conversions were ever made, one known survivor spent the 1960s in a ski boat, and this appears to be the one still sitting in the lightweight Galaxie it was built for. It is a factory drag car, a Mickey Thompson car, and a one-of-a-few engine all at once, which is why forum regulars debated whether it should ever make a full quarter-mile pass again for fear of breaking parts that cannot be replaced.

The bigger reason it matters is the man behind it. Thompson drove his Challenger I streamliner to a one-way 406 mph at Bonneville in 1960, fielded cars at Indianapolis, and started the tire company that still carries his name, and he and his wife Trudy were murdered in 1988 before he could see how much of his thinking became standard practice. This engine is a snapshot of that mind at work: a privateer looking at Detroit’s most powerful engine and deciding he could do better with a foundry, a lathe, and a set of pushrods nobody else would have dared to cut into three pieces.

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