Motor Trend Named the 1970 Torino Car of the Year — Only 1,475 Buyers Got the 429 That Turned It Into a 13-Second Monster

Ford’s 1970 Torino won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award for its comfort and styling, but hidden in the order form was a solid-lifter 429 Super Cobra Jet built to run 13-second quarter miles. Only about 1,475 buyers ever combined the Drag Pack option with the Torino Cobra trim before Ford killed the combination for 1972. Here’s the story behind one of Ford’s rarest, most overlooked muscle cars.

Motor Trend doesn’t often hand its Car of the Year trophy to something that can also run a 13-second quarter-mile. In 1970, it did anyway. The award went to the redesigned Ford Torino lineup — bigger, wider, and dressed up for suburban driveways — but tucked inside the sportiest trim, the Torino Cobra, Ford was quietly building something closer to a factory drag car. Order the right box on the sheet and a buyer got a solid-lifter, forged-piston 429 that Ford rated at 375 horsepower and everyone with a dyno suspected was making quite a bit more. Only about 1,475 people ever checked that box. This 1970-1971 Torino Cobra 429 is what they drove home.

The video comes from OldCarMemories.com, a channel that spent a year off the air before this upload — the creator explained in the description that family circumstances kept him away, and he’s promised to be back on a weekly schedule. The comments under the video read like a welcome-home party: longtime subscribers thanking him for coming back, several calling the 1970-1971 body style their favorite Torino generation, and more than one person zeroing in on the Magnum 500 wheels as the detail that makes this particular car. One commenter put it simply: “you don’t know what you have ’til it’s gone” — a line that could apply just as easily to the channel as to the car. Another brought up the Mercury Cougar Eliminator, Ford’s sportier in-house cousin to the Torino, noting it deserves just as much credit — a reminder that FoMoCo’s performance lineup in this era ran deeper than the Mustang most people default to.

That affection for the styling isn’t nostalgia talking. The Torino earned it.

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Motor Trend’s Car of the Year Had a Split Personality

The Torino wasn’t a new nameplate in 1970 — it had spent the two previous model years, 1968 and 1969, as the sportier upper trim of Ford’s mid-size Fairlane before Ford promoted it to top billing, with Fairlane demoted to a Torino subseries. That promotion came with a clean-sheet redesign.

Ford completely reengineered the Torino for 1970, stretching it onto a 117-inch wheelbase and giving it a wider, heavier stance than the 1969 car it replaced. The name itself was a nod to Turin, Italy — the “Italian Detroit” — and the redesign leaned into that European flair with a longer hood, a tunneled SportsRoof fastback roofline, and sheetmetal that looked as at home on a boulevard as it did at a stoplight. Motor Trend rewarded the effort with its 1970 Car of the Year award, praising a lineup that ranged from a plush Brougham hardtop down to the performance-focused GT and Cobra.

That range was the point. Most Torino buyers in 1970 wanted comfort, not cubic inches. But Ford built the Cobra trim specifically for the ones who didn’t, and it backed that trim with an engine bay that could swallow the biggest big-block in the company’s lineup. That put the Torino Cobra squarely in the middle of Detroit’s fiercest street fight — the same model year Chevrolet was shipping the 450-horsepower LS6 Chevelle SS454 and Plymouth was fielding the 440-powered GTX. Ford’s answer wasn’t the biggest number on paper, but on the strip it didn’t need to be.

The 429 Cobra Jet vs. the Drag Pack Secret

Every Torino Cobra came standard with a 429-cubic-inch V8, and Ford let buyers dress the order up further with a fiberglass Ram Air hood and a Hurst-shifted four-speed manual — the combination the era’s magazine testers gravitated toward whenever they wanted to see what the car could really do. Which 429 ended up under that hood depended on how the rest of the order form was filled out. The base 429 Cobra Jet used a hydraulic-lifter camshaft and a single four-barrel carburetor, good for a factory rating of 370 horsepower and 450 lb-ft of torque — already serious numbers for a car that started life as a family sedan. Check the Drag Pack option, though, and the Super Cobra Jet arrived automatically: a 4-bolt main block, a mechanical solid-lifter cam, forged pistons, a larger four-barrel carburetor, and an engine oil cooler, all backed by either 3.91:1 Traction-Lok or 4.30:1 Detroit Locker rear gearing. Ford advertised the SCJ at 375 horsepower, but the era’s notoriously conservative factory ratings meant the real number was widely believed to run well past 400.

The rarity is what makes this video worth watching closely. Ford built 7,675 Torino Cobras for the 1970 model year, and only roughly 1,475 of those left the factory with the 429 Super Cobra Jet and Drag Pack combination this car represents. That’s a fraction of a fraction — a car most Ford dealers in 1970 never even saw come through the lot.

What Makes the 429 Torino Cobra Special Today

On the strip, the numbers backed up the hype. Motor Trend’s own test of a four-speed, 3.91-geared SCJ Torino ran 0-60 mph in 5.8 seconds and covered the quarter-mile in 13.99 seconds at 101 mph — factory-stock times that embarrassed plenty of cars with flashier badges. Independent outlets running the same combination on slicks recorded times in the 13.3-13.6 second range, numbers that hold up against nearly anything else Detroit built that year.

For 1971, Ford kept the formula mostly intact. The Cobra held onto its distinctive blacked-out grille from 1970 — every other Torino trim got a new vertical divider bar — though Ford did add a small Cobra emblem to the center of it. The bigger visual change was out back: the split, rounded taillights of 1970 gave way to a full-width lens that stretched across the entire rear panel, a look that would carry into later Torino generations. Under the hood, the 429 Cobra Jet and Super Cobra Jet carried over largely unchanged, giving 1971 buyers one more model year to order the same drag-strip-ready combination before Ford discontinued the 429 option after that season. By most accounts, fewer buyers checked that box in 1971 than in 1970 — the muscle car market was already cooling as insurance premiums climbed, which makes surviving 1971 Torino Cobra 429s, if anything, an even tighter needle to find in a haystack than their 1970 siblings.

What’s left of that run today is scarce, and increasingly hard to find in the kind of unmolested condition the video shows off. The comment section says as much — enthusiasts who grew up around these cars, or who simply appreciate a fastback silhouette that Ford never quite matched again, treating a clean survivor as something closer to a reunion than a car show.

Why the Window Closed So Fast

Part of what makes the 1970-1971 Torino Cobra 429 feel special is how quickly Ford shut the door on it. Tightening emissions rules and the industry’s shift to low-lead, regular-grade gasoline forced Ford to drop compression ratios across the Torino engine lineup for 1972, and the Cobra Jet and Super Cobra Jet simply didn’t survive the transition. Rising insurance surcharges on high-horsepower cars were squeezing buyers from the other direction at the same time. By the 1972 model year, the 429 was gone from the order sheet entirely, the Cobra trim itself was discontinued, and the Torino line pivoted hard toward the luxury-leaning Gran Torino that would go on to headline a very different kind of TV fame later in the decade. That makes 1970 and 1971 a genuinely closed window — two model years, one Drag Pack option, and roughly 1,475 cars that ever combined all three.

It’s also why a channel like OldCarMemories.com finding a well-preserved example is worth pausing on. Cars built to be driven hard, in a niche option combination that lasted two seasons, don’t survive in factory-correct condition by accident. Somebody along the way decided this one was worth keeping stock instead of swapping in a crate engine or chopping the top for a resto-mod build — and more than fifty years later, that decision is the reason there’s still a factory-Drag-Pack Torino Cobra left to put in front of a camera.

For anyone shopping this generation of Torino Cobra today, that rarity cuts both ways. A 429 Super Cobra Jet with genuine Drag Pack documentation — the correct engine casting numbers, a matching build sheet, and factory paperwork confirming the axle ratio — commands real money and real scrutiny from buyers who’ve seen too many “SCJ” build tags added after the fact. It’s the same story that plays out across the muscle car market: the engine bay tells you what the car has now, but only the paper trail tells you whether it left the factory that way. For a car built in numbers this small, that distinction matters more than it does almost anywhere else in the Ford lineup.

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