If you are that person whose father built the factory racing program, please reach out! We need your input!
Did this person work for Holman-Moody? Our car's chassis was separated from its engine & transmission at the Ford Tech Center and we have the second owner telling us that the drivetrain went to Holman-Moody to be warmed up. It also had the hood removed and the car sat waiting for the engine to come back so it could go to Dearborn Steel & Tubing for prep (the hood was never to be seen again). The Ford racing program was scrapped a few weeks after the engine was sent away, so the car had no purpose and was sold out the back door to an employee of the Ford Tech Center in 1971. Ford surrendered the engine & transmission to Holman-Moody as a result of the work that was done to it - the program was over, so they didn't pay the bill. The car's owner drag raced the car with a stockish small-block, and then later a 351W built by one of the bigger names, Roush maybe? It was sold to another person in the Detroit area a few years later and chopped up to become a pro-stock car. The work was done by a "reputable" shop but was absolutely horrid and never finished, despite thousands of dollars being paid. We bought the car in Michigan in 2003 from a really big name in modern hot-rodding, he didn't have the heart to cut it up any further and sold it instead. The odometer shows around 20,000 miles, which sounds about right. We bought it knowing nothing of its history, just thinking it was a run-of-the-mill 429 car that had no powertrain and looked like hell. I wasn't a fan of it, but my father had a good feeling about it. We ordered a Marti report and saw that Ford Marketing was the car's original buyer. We thought maybe it was a test mule, but had no further info at the time.
Then around 2011, I found our car's original powertrain in Texas. It had been sitting in a crate since 1971 - the man who owned it said he obtained it from a widow whose husband bought it from Holman-Moody in 1971. He bought the engine & trans for his '32 Ford and reportedly paid $10,000 for them at the time (she remembers signing the check), but they never took it out of the crate. We opened it up and it is indeed blueprinted, it looks like it had dyno time at the very most. Everything is original and date coded, including plug wires, a strange combination of drive belts, you name it. It has sodium-filled 427 valves, some odd pistons and looks absolutely ready for stock-class racing. It was complete from fan blade to tail shaft, carb to oil pan, and had chunks of the wiring harness that were not present on our car. So we dug deeper and started tracing the ownership back. We talked to the second owner who had the story of the car and was willing to chat for a while. We haven't located the Tech Center employee, and we don't know if he's still alive. We called Holman-Moody and one of them (Lee Holman, maybe?) vaguely remembered receiving a 429 SCJ for prep, but they didn't have any documentation.
The car itself is Grabber Blue with white interior, about as bare-bones as it gets. Sportsroof with 429 SCJ/drag pack and 3.91:1 gears, 4-speed with F60-15s, front disc brakes, color-keyed mirrors, hubcaps & trim rings and the instrumentation group. Nothing else. We had special research done by Kevin Marti showing the destination as Dearborn Steel & Tubing, but we have nobody who can document the story of what happened after - it's all hearsay that matches up, but nothing in writing. I'm absolutely convinced it was going to be a factory drag car, what else could it be?
Back to the plates, they are not 1970 Torino plates. I started thinking 1969/1970 Falcon, or Ford LTD, or Lincoln, but there are no images of this stuff that I can find. We don't have classic junkyards like you lucky folks in California & Arizona, so we can't just go fishing. My father is searching for them now, I have a feeling that we're going to have to restore the originals.