Posts Tagged: Ford Galaxie
This pale yellow 1964 Ford Galaxie, with its red vinyl bucket seats and chrome-heavy face, looks like exactly the comfortable family hardtop Ford sold it as. But the same model line quietly carried the 427 and, briefly, the 600-plus-horsepower SOHC ‘Cammer’ that Ford never dared sell to the public. Read on for how the Galaxie evolved year by year into the 7 Liter, and why a small number of these ordinary-looking cars may be hiding something extraordinary.
Sherwin M. found his 1970 Ford XL through a classified ad with photos so bad the car was barely recognizable, which is probably why nobody else called first. What he found in person was a sixteen-year-dormant, numbers-matching survivor with its original 429 engine still intact. Read on to find out how a factory-correct rebuild turned this rare full-size Ford into both a daily driver and a genuine 14-second track car.
A high schooler in 1964 who never forgot the sound of an identical car lighting up his street. An Air Force veteran turned away by dealers who wouldn’t sell him one. A rumored history running moonshine through the Georgia mountains. V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week tracked down a Raven black 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 packing the rare R-code 427 rated at 425 horsepower and a 4-speed manual. What was actually bolted under that unassuming black hood?
After thirty years sitting untouched with its original one owner, this 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 XL — a genuine 428, four-speed big-block — fires back up on camera in Hotwoods Pontoon’s footage. Commenters flooded in with memories of nearly identical family cars from the same era, and one pointed out the fitting choice of Hotel California playing as the engine came back to life. Watch to see whether three decades of silence was enough to keep this 428 from running again.
In 1964, Ford squeezed a race-bred 427 V8 into the Galaxie 500, and NASCAR promptly banned the racing version as “too exotic” before it could dominate a single superspeedway. Only 3,140 R-code Galaxies were built that year, and just 76 are known to survive today. Here’s the story behind Ford’s short-lived big-block gamble and the handful of survivors still turning heads.
Pontiac’s planners expected to sell about 5,000 GTOs for 1964. They sold 32,450, and General Motors dropped its displacement cap on mid-size cars the following year. That is how the muscle car era actually started, and it started as an option package that skirted a corporate rule. A genuinely unrestored early example, still wearing its factory paint and drivetrain, is worth chasing precisely because so few survived intact.
Jay Leno owns more than 180 vehicles, but when The Drive asked him to pick his favorite American muscle cars, he skipped the obvious answers entirely. His list includes a 1971 Dodge Challenger, a Ford Galaxie 500 with a forgotten 7-liter engine, a 1,000-horsepower Oldsmobile Toronado, and a crate-engined Buick Roadmaster sleeper. Every pick rewards a level of car knowledge most muscle car fans do not have. See exactly why Leno chose these four over anything more obvious.
This 1965 Ford Galaxie 500R looks like any other full-size family car of its era, right up until you learn what is under the hood: a dual-quad 427 side-oiler paired with a 4-speed manual. Viewers are calling it their favorite Muscle Car Of The Week episode yet, and the comment section is already lobbying for more full-size sleepers like it. See the burnout that sealed the deal.
The 1966 Ford Galaxie is one of the most underrated classics of the era, and the engine list explains why: it ran from a 150-horsepower inline six all the way to a 425-horsepower 427, with the brand-new 428 and the one-year-only 7-Litre model sitting in between. Underneath was a coil-sprung rear suspension most competitors did not offer. Read on for what separated the mild versions from the genuinely fast ones.
In just eighteen months, Ford transformed the full-size Galaxie from a family-oriented sedan into a NASCAR-chasing fastback packing a conservatively rated 425 horsepower. A mid-year roofline change and a top-shelf 406-cubic-inch V8 rewrote what a full-size Ford could be. Read on to find out how the 63-and-a-half Galaxie earned its nickname and its reputation on the track.
Jay Leno ordered this 1966 Ford Galaxie as a sixteen-year-old, reportedly behind his father’s back, and decades later he’s calling its restoration ‘finally’ complete for the third time. Along the way, one exchange about a muffler and a rocketship has become, according to his own fans, one of the best stories Jay has ever told on the show. Watch to see what took the Ultimate Edition build so long to get right.
A modern Coyote 5.0 crate engine and a nearly sixty-year-old full-size Ford should not look this comfortable together, but this 1963 Galaxie makes the case. Tan PPG paint, a custom brown leather interior, and a Tremec manual behind Ford’s four-cam V8 turn a car built for NASCAR ovals and dealership showrooms into something genuinely usable. Read on for what the 1963 Galaxie originally was, and what it takes to modernize one properly.
The Ford Galaxie’s first three model years hid a genuine engineering experiment behind conventional full-size styling — a batch of roughly 200 lightweight race-only cars built to shed weight nobody expected Ford to bother losing. Add a one-year-only retractable hardtop and a short-lived Starliner body style, and the 1959-1961 Galaxie turns out to be far more interesting than its reputation as just a big sedan suggests. Read on for what made these years different.
A 1965 Ford Galaxie 500 XL convertible with the R-code 427 was one of the strangest performance cars Ford ever sold: a two-ton, four-seat drop-top carrying a dual-quad big block that the factory refused to pair with an automatic transmission. Checking that single order-sheet letter changed the suspension, the driveshaft, and the brakes before the car ever reached a dealer. Read on to find out why so few of these survived the decade they were built in.