Man. Browsing '28-9 Ford Town Sedan builds I happened upon this cherry Leatherback. Just chassis work with the only apparent modification to the shell being a recessed firewall to fit a small block Chevy.
It's just a shame these Briggs (Leatherback) and Murray (Town Sedan) bodies didn't have the cowl detail that defines early A roadsters, coupes and tudors.
Pretty LeMans is pretty. Shame about the potato resolution.
That appears to be a '71 Sport, assuming everything which identifies it as such is original. Fender louvers went away for '72.
I love the idea of a GTO, don't get me wrong, and the '68-9 and '70 cars are great. But the drop-nose '71-2 loses me. The Sport got a lot of the GTO performance but with the LeMans grille and chrome bumper.
I just think the full diameter of the front tire should be visible in the fender. It's what I tend to find most aesthetically pleasing. On basically anything.* This usually applies to the rear as well save for where fender skirts are used or the openings are just much lower and a rake is inappropriate.
*Okay probably not a lot of Nash cars. And I make exceptions for sleds of the '50s and '60s because they also feature chopped roofs and that gets awkward if the tops of the door panels aren't also closer to the ground.
Speaking of sleds, a Harry Bradley treatment on a lackluster custom what left the Barris shop shortly after the famed Hirohata Mercury.
I think it's funny that he got on the clear taillight bandwagon.
Bradley also explored what said Mercury could have looked like as a wagon.
On a Cross Boss bent at the moment and I found this picture, which reminded me that Roush offered a Cross Boss 351R motor package in the mid-aughts using their own intake.
It's actually kind of genius running it on a 351 because the larger displacement allows it to pull decent vacuum and make power that isn't as peaky as the race motor that the intake was designed for. Add in the port injection (it looks like a "standard" Cross Boss upper but the taller deck and thus greater width of a 351 means the lower gets a convenient place for injectors) and four-barrel inline throttle body up top allows you to dial in fueling for streetability rather than compromise jetting on the original Autolite inline carb.
That said, it's purely nostalgia for a Trans Am relic because the original intake was devised to take advantage of a loophole in racing regulations that called for a single four-barrel carb. When you don't need to meet those regs (which were also changed to require a square-four carb before Ford could even run it), you can just do a true cross ram with individual throttle bodies.
The Roush motor was...not cheap. Upwards of $20,000, 20 years ago. I've never seen it used in anything. Cool, though.
I think it's funny that the motor image that was cropped for this original online catalog insert also includes a distant bottle of water above the fuel line like it's a part of the motor.
Pretty Cutty is pretty. I love the RPO Y73 stripe package.
I should say it's technically a 442 as it's a '71 and the 442 didn't revert to a Cutlass package until the following year...but I liked the ring of that above.
