Thanks for the welcome ya'll. I was driving the real one from the time I turned 14 until I traded it in on my '66 Mercury Cyclone when I went to work just before my high school graduation. The closest that it came to really being a transporter was carrying me to see "Thunder Road" for the first time. LOL It mostly belonged to the family and out of respect I never really explored the outer limits of performace or tire adhesion with it. But the Cyclone was another story altogether! We wound up doing some high speed research on the very same roads that "Thunder Road" was filmed on and it had impecible road manners due to some suspension "tweaks" I had learned to do from some dirt track racing friends of mine.
I had wanted a "fastback" when I was in school but by the time I went to work the "big" cars had fallen out of favor due to the new GTO inspired muscle cars like the Cyclone so it took me a little longer to get my big Ford. I found mine in '89 when a friend told me of a 460 powered '64 Galaxie that the drag racing owner had pulled the engine from to put in something a little lighter. I took a trailer with me on the two hour drive to look at it. Good thing too, because when I saw it from the road I just backed the trailer in to load it before I even talked with the owner.
It was burgandy and I drove it a few years like that until I decided the paint needed some help. A lady friend of mine, whose grandmother was full blooded Cherokee and had already named the car Roxanna after one of the female leads in "Thunder Road", laid her hand on it and said that Roxanna was talking to her and said that she wanted to be white. I knew it would be cooler in the summer (no air conditioning) and I had seen one that I liked years ago with some red trim. I started taking the side trim off to check for rust and the first piece I removed showed white paint behind it. I checked the paint code and the original color was Wimbledon White! Needless to say, Roxanna got her new white paint job.
Here's my model of her built from one of the Millineum kits in a "crowd shot" in front of my newest "shop".
