This Rare A/C-equipped S-code 390-powered ’67 Ford Fairlane GT was Restored from a Rolling Shell in Just 18 Months

GT. Gran Turismo (or, in English, Grand Touring). Two little letters that, when slapped on the flanks of an automobile, carry a certain set of values: high-performance, pro-enthusiast, with a dollop of comfort and drivability thrown in for good measure. The working definition is that of a sporting 2+2 which can effortlessly devour vast distances at high speeds in supreme comfort, while having enough luggage space to accommodate a long weekend.  

It’s a nebulous area, living in the grey area between sports car, coupe, and 2+2. A GT is all of these, and none of them. The Federacion Internacional de l’Automobile (FIA, the world’s auto-racing sanctioning body) calls a GT car “an open or closed automobile which has no more than one door on each side, and a minimum of two seats situated one on each side of the longitudinal centre line of the car; these two seats must be crossed by the same transversal plane. This car must be able to be used perfectly legally on the open road and adapted for racing on circuits or closed courses.” Sounds like any old production coupe could do the trick. But sports cars can be rough-and-tumble, proper coupes tend to possess both back seats (if not always the headroom to accommodate passengers) and ample luggage space—2+2s just need a vestigial back seat to qualify. 

Yet Ford’s mid-sized Fairlane qualifies for a GT badge for reasons beyond the marketing department’s say-so. Ford’s mid-size line wasn’t much bigger than a lot of American cars passing as compacts in their day. It’s got the right number of seats, and it’s got enough room in the trunk for luggage covering a month of weekends. The cabin doesn’t crowd you. Its suspension is firmer than a standard Fairlane, but still comfortable enough that it won’t wear you out after an extended trip. You can jam along to the tunes on the 8-track stereo without having to compete with your drivetrain’s symphonic overtures and do so in air-conditioned comfort. Yet there’s enough useful power on hand to make short work of a hill, or the kid in the next lane blipping his throttle at you while the light is red. While a GT offers plenty of driving pleasure, it’s also not tugging at your sleeve constantly, demanding you pay attention to it every second you’re behind the wheel. It’s a sports car that knows when to shut up. All the while it’s looking like something special. 

The Ford Fairlane GT’s arrival in the fall of 1965 was two years behind Pontiac’s first GTO, but Ford’s Fairlane was the first in the ’60s to offer a mid-sized car at a mid-sized price. Nearly 300,000 Fairlanes were sold in 1962 and looked like a bargain next to Chrysler’s down-sized full-size models, which had similar dimensions but cost hundreds more. Even so, Fairlane dipped its toe in high-performance waters in its early years: 289-cube, 271-horse K-code Windsor V-8s arrived in late ’63 and could be dressed with a dealer-ordered, Shelby-fettled “Cobra kit” with Weber carburetors making an advertised 343 horsepower; the hottest Fairlane, the strip-ready 427-powered ’64 Thunderbolt, was a limited-production race-homologation piece. So, while Fairlane’s new GT model for ’66 felt a little behind the times, it’s not like the Blue Oval’s mid-sized line was completely absent from the high-performance game. Still, K-codes and Thunderbolts were the exception, not the rule.  

It wasn’t until 1966 that Ford offered a Fairlane GT (for manually equipped models; the automatic-transmission version was labeled GT/A.) The ’66 was an all-new car, sporting a 116-inch wheelbase, a widened track that allowed the engine compartment to happily swallow a big-block, and a stacked-headlight nose that resembled a junior-league Galaxie. Beneath the crisp lines of the faux-scooped hood lay Ford’s formidable S-code, FE-family, four-barrel V-8: 335hp, 11:1 compression, and a Holley four-barrel atop 390 snarling cubic inches. It was directly comparable to the ’66 Chevelle SS396, in power and price (roughly five cubes, five horses and fifty dollars in base price separated them)—though it must be said, with Ford building 33,015 hardtops and 4,327 convertibles, the SS396 neatly doubled the Fairlane GT’s sales.  

Ford made several changes for the ’67 GT and GT/A models: 11-inch front disc brakes with four-piston calipers became standard, and the S-code 390 that was standard in ’66 was now the GT’s top engine option (a two-barrel 289 was standard). Despite the additional powertrain options, sales roughly halved, with 18,670 hardtops and just 2,117 convertibles rolling down the line; this meant that the Chevelle SS396 had tripled the Fairlane GT’s sales. Perhaps once the 390 was removed as the base engine, there wasn’t enough difference between the Fairlane GT and Fairlane 500 XL for most customers to make sense of? No matter how you slice it, nearly 60 years later, this generation of Fairlane is few and far between at shows and on the streets today.  

Chris Long of Gilbert, Arizona, is a serial muscle-era Ford builder and restorer—the three-days-on, four-days-off nature of his day job means that he can get elbow deep into a project in the 2,000-square-foot shop behind his house and not have to worry about buttoning things up or going to bed early so that he can function. It’s how he brought his rare Cobra Jet ’71 Cougar back to life as well as a ’71 Mach 1 Mustang plus many other muscle-era Fords. One of those projects, a ’71 Mustang Boss 351, ended up in the hands of Gary Uftring, an enthusiast and owner of the eponymous Ford dealership in Peoria, Illinois; he was sufficiently pleased with Chris’ work on the Boss 351 that he enlisted Chris to rescue a project that was languishing across town—this Fairlane.  

When Chris got his hands on this particular ’67 390 4-speed, it was a handful of steps away from being a basket case. Originally a California car, owing to its factory-equipped smog pump, it spent the bulk of its life in Oregon before Gary found it. “It came to me as a bare shell that someone had bead-blasted and primered,” said Chris. “And what work was done … man, there was a lot of hack work done to the floors. I had to fix all that.” Easier said than done in a unit-body car. “It needed the trunk pan replaced, the rear quarter drop-offs, the whole floor.” Luckily, the shop managed not to lose, break or re-home the bulk of the Fairlane’s bits—everything was, by and large, accounted for.  

Except for the bits that weren’t. The interior needed replacement—but because Chris couldn’t get a kit for this factory-red interior GT, he had to source the components separately. Bits of hardware had also gone missing and required replacement. “It’s always a challenge getting all the small stuff—clamps and hoses and such. I had to find a correct shifter; it had an aftermarket Hurst, which was cool but wasn’t correct,” Chris recalled. “A lot of the smog stuff had gone away also, so I needed to piece that all back together.” A combination of digging through his shop’s prodigious parts supply, plus select aftermarket bits, made it all appear and function correctly.  

Also not fun: sorting out the AM radio with optional 8-track stereo and four speakers. “That factory underdash 8-track was a “hang-on,” as Ford called it. It took me a year to find one that was correct with the specific camera-case finish that matched the gauge cluster. Then the one I found; the wiring was missing. A switch under the dash to go from AM to 8-track was there, but there was no wiring. Getting it all to work through the same power supply and four speakers … I looked everywhere for a wiring harness, but in the end, I just had to make my own.” This GT was also factory air conditioning equipped, the parts for which were also only partially there. Chris credits the Fairlane Club of America message boards and chat rooms for helping him to get everything as it should have been.  

Otherwise, the desire to modernize (that is to say, take shortcuts, whether visible or not) was avoided: while it would be easier—and arguably more drivable—to pop a late-model set of white-letter radials on to make waves at the local cruise night, this GT came from the factory with nylon four-ply bias-belt 7.75-14 whitewalls on chromed styled steel wheels—and so a period-correct set of Firestones appear here. Electronic gauge movements were eschewed in favor of getting the original stuff working as the factory intended. R12 refrigerant lives in the revived air conditioning system.  

Everything, including paint but barring machine work on the engine, was done in-house. Thanks to Chris’ part-time but work-intensive schedule, he was able to bring this Fairlane from a primered rolling shell to a potentially-show-winning machine inside of 18 months. At last report it was visible in the Uftring Ford showroom, a much-needed and highly-visible highlight among Ford’s current phalanx of trucks and SUVs—reminding customers of a time when the term grand touring meant something. 

What were they Thinking?

Ford made a number of changes for the ’67 GT models. Among the positive developments, front disc brakes became standard. But to help bolster sales, more engines than just the hot S-code 390 became available in a GT and GT/A: the base GT engine was now a two-barrel 289, with the 335-horse 390 as hot as it got for what is presumably the line’s hottest high-performance model.  

See anything missing from this list? Ford’s side-oiler 427 (both the white-hot 425-horse dual-four-barrel R-code 427 side-oiler and its sibling, the merely-red-hot 410-horse W-code single-four-barrel 427) were unavailable in the Fairlane GT. Factory literature, from dealer brochures to internal memoranda, specifically denied the 427 in the Fairlane GT (and its corporate sibling, the Comet Cyclone GT). Sounds weird, right?  

If you could get the expensive 427 in a strippo base two-door-post formal-roof Fairlane, and a Fairlane 500, and a high-zoot Fairlane 500XL … then why ever not in a GT, the model that is not only the sportiest in the Fairlane line, but also the one with the spendiest base price? At $2,839 to start, the GT was $220 more than a Fairlane 500XL coupe; that price included a standard floor shifter, dual exhaust, bucket seats, tach, styled steel wheels, hood scoops and stripes, and a handling package. Was it that big a stretch for Ford to offer either 427 too? 

The side-oiler had slipped into a limited number of Fairlanes in late 1966 and saw limited street car use—doubtless because the “427-8V CID Engine Race Car Pkg.”, as it was known, cost $1,725.20, in a Fairlane that started at around $2,500. The side-oiler’s name came from a revised lubrication arrangement that incorporated a cast-in oil galley running down one side of the engine block, drilled to supply oil to the crank’s main bearings before the solid-lifter cam and valvetrain. That lubricated forged crank was reportedly good for a constant 6,200 rpm, and was capable of short bursts at the 7,000 rpm redline.  

We know that at least one side-oiler ’67 Fairlane GT squeaked through somehow, and the combination (as a GT/A!) was advertised in a number of buff books in December of ’66 issues (one of which printed a “not intended for highway or general passenger car use” disclaimer; the other did not). Why advertise a car that wasn’t destined to be built? Why advertise it with automatic transmission? Other ads plugged 427 availability in the Fairlane—but that ad, comparing the street car to its barely-recognizable NASCAR-spec cousin, used a Fairlane 500 hardtop.  

The unanswered, and sadly unanswerable, question is simply: why couldn’t you get Ford’s hottest engine in Ford’s hottest Fairlane model? 

Specifications – 1967 Ford Fairlane GT

Horsepower: 335 @ 4,800 

Torque @ rpm: 427 @ 2,800 

Valvetrain: Hydraulic valve lifters 

Main bearings: 5 

Fuel system: Single Holley four-barrel carburetor 

Lubrication system: Full pressure, gear-type pump 

Electrical system: 12-volt 

Exhaust system: Cast-iron exhaust manifolds, dual mufflers and pipes 

TRANSMISSION 

Type: Ford “Toploader” four-speed manual, all synchromesh 

Ratios: 1st/2.32:1… 2nd/1.69:1 … 3rd/1.29:1… 4th/1.00:1 … Reverse/2.32:1  

DIFFERENTIAL 

Type: Ford 9-inch housing; hypoid, semi-floating, limited-slip differential 

Ratio: 3.25:1 

STEERING 

Type: Power-assisted recirculating ball 

BRAKES 

Type: Four-wheel hydraulic activation, power assist 

Front: 11.37-inch disc 

Rear: 10-inch x 2-inch cast-iron drum 

SUSPENSION 

Front: Independent; upper and lower control arms; tubular shock absorbers with anti-roll bar 

Rear: Solid axle with semi-elliptic leaf springs and tubular shock absorbers  

WHEELS & TIRES 

Wheels: Styled Ford stamped steel 

Front: 14 x 5.5 in. 

Rear: 14 x 5.5 in. 

Tires: Firestone nylon bias-belt, white stripe 

Front: 7.75 x 14 

Rear: 7.75 x 14 

PRODUCTION 

For the 1967 model year, Ford built 18,670 Fairlane GT and GT/A hardtop models. No further breakouts of GT vs GT/A production are available. 

PERFORMANCE 

0-60 mph: 6.8 seconds 

¼ mile ET: 15.2 seconds @ 92 mph* 

_{*Source: Motor Trend, October ’65, testing a Fairlane GT/A with 3.25 rear} 

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