Cars In Depth

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I’ve always like the early ’60s “bullet Birds”. The styling perfectly captured the styling idioms of the era. The late 1950s were the pinnacle of Detroit’s styling excess. The Ford’s and Lincolns from that period often are found on “ugliest cars ever” lists. So the clean lines of the ’61 were a sharp departure, and they found an eager audience, selling over 70,000 units that year including 10,000 convertibles. For a car with a limited market – personal luxury cars would not get to be a significant market segment for another decade – the bullet Bird was a smash hit. Bill Boyer’s design for the ’61 Bird won out over Ford styling chief’s Elwood Engel’s proposal based on John Orfe and Howard Payne’s clay model that ended up being the 1961 Lincoln Continental. “We wanted to keep it very youthful, and that meant aircraft and missile-like shapes,” Boyer recalled. The dramatic interior design, which included a novel swingaway steering wheel to ease entry and egress was the work of Art Querfeld.  “I wanted to emphasize and delineate the positions of the driver and front seat passenger,” Querfeld said, “and I conceived of two individual compartments separated by a prominent console.” This ’61 Thunderbird is a mild custom – wheels, paint and some odds & ends, but it’s still mostly stock with a very original looking engine compartment that includes a vintage red plastic FoMoCo radiator overflow bag.

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