1969 Ford Fairlane Reviews, Pricing & Specs

My car is a 428CJ Ram Air Cobra. It is a shame that young kids these days don't know about these cars. The torque is absolutely mind boggling. It is very quick, but easy to drive. It stops well, but it could be better. The handling is good, not great, but it isn't a sports car. The interior room is so much better than new cars. The gas mileage is,,,well, it's a fun car. It is easy to maintain. I wish more cars were like this today. My Fairlane is a fun car that can't imagine living without.Jul 16, 2010

Yep, I had one of them-there Fords - it was a 1969 Fairlane 2-door hardtop. It came equipped with a 302-cubic inch (that's 5.0 liters for you Communiss' out there) V8. Had a three-on-the-tree. I'll translate as I go along for you New-Age baby seal lovers. A three on the tree was a gear shifter on the steering column. Don't see none of them anymore. V-8s made lots of torque, so you didn't need so many gears in the transmission, and three was plenty. The shift lever wouldn't go on the floor anyhow, since it had a bench front seat (that's like a sofa, not two separate chairs, for the people in front.) It also had a bench seat in back, lots of leg room. The car was big, bigger than one of your seven-series BMWs, so the rear wheels were BEHIND the rear seat, not sharing body space with it, and the back seat was wide enough for three people, easy. OK, now what else do car reviews talk about? It had manual steering, a green innovation way ahead of its time. No power steering pump, no parasitic losses from spinning a fan belt and pumping red oil through a relief valve mile after highway mile, and no extra weight from all that gimcrackery. What it did have was a high-ratio recirculating ball steering gear from a 1965 Fairlane GTA (I kid you not) that I put in. That and some new ball joints and tie rods from Kearley Auto Parts, and you had one fine-handling machine, yes sir! Manual brakes, too. No vacuum booster to add weight and take up space. This baby had single-leading-shoe drum brakes. The harder you tromped down on the brake pedal, the harder they grabbed. Polyester-cord bias ply tires were the norm, so disk brakes would have been overkill. Front suspension was equal-length A-arms and coil-over-tube shocks, and rear suspension was leaf springs and shocks. What's a leaf spring? Tell you what, if Ferrari invented leaf springs today, it would be the greatest thing since the slide rule. A car's biggest size is in its length, then the width comes next, and then the shortest major dimension is the height. Hey, I'm talking about CARS, not Deux Chevaux and Pacers. Leaf springs are long, narrow, and very short. It is darn near perfect from the packaging point of view, and it does the job of coil springs and control arms to boot! Lets you have a nice wide, deep, flat-floored trunk without stuff sticking up all over the place. I carried a Norton motorcycle frame in that trunk, with the fork tubes and swingarm attached and with the trunk lid closed. Try that in your Acura sedan! Try finding a Norton motorcycle frame to try it with! Anyway, back to the no-model no-year Ford. It had 260 air conditioning. Everyone should know what that is, so I'm not going to explain it for the automotively challenged crowd. The engine, as I said, was a 302 overhead valve V-8. The term "overhead valve" meant the valves were in the cylinder head instead of in the engine block like they were when they started making V-8s. Overhead camshafts did exist way back then and were used on Offenhauser race engines, but the 302 had one camshaft and pushrods and rocker arms for all the valves. Gave you a lower hood height. Fuel injection? Nope. Electronic ignition? Nope. You could overhaul both of those systems back to brand-new condition in one afternoon, and Kearley always had the parts in stock. Try THAT with your BMW! OK, on to the review. Performance - once I got a ticket for exceeding the speed limit in a residential area. I went to court and told the judge the cop stopped me and my Fairlane five house-lengths from the red light. The judge knew a Fairlane couldn't get up to 25 and back down to nothing in that distance, so he let me off. Build quality - if it ever had any, it had all been used up on the previous owner's fishing trips. Appearance - it looked good. Red paint doesn't last long, though. Joe-Bob who bought it from me painted it black, like it should have been all along, and then it looked really good. Cost of ownership - I had it all through college - enough said. Fun Factor - the Norton was more fun. Would I recommend that car to a friend? Yessirree Bob! If I had one today, I'd be cool beans!Dec 16, 2008