1964 Ford Ranch Wagon With Thunderbolt Hood Is the Perfect Sleeper

But there's something special about a station wagon with a beefed-up powerplant under the hood, right?

Take the 1964 Ford Fairlane. It's arguably the prettiest fourth-gen Fairlane in my book, but it doesn't look fast in sedan and station wagon layouts. The two-door hardtop is a different story, as is the Thunderbolt. You don't know what a Thunderbolt is? Well, it's the meanest Fairlane ever produced. It was also short-lived and built in small numbers, so it's rare and expensive nowadays.

The 1964 Ranch Wagon you see here is obviously not a Thunderbolt, but it shares at least one notable feature with Ford's factory dragster. I'm talking about the front hood, which packs a massive teardrop bulge. Unique to the Thunderbolt, this bulge was designed to accommodate a unique dual-snorkel air intake.

The latter fed air to an FE-series 427-cubic-inch (7.0-liter) V8 engine. The mill was initially created for full-size cars and Ford had a difficult time fitting it into the Thunderbolt. You see, the Thunderbolt was born at a time when Ford was still using full-size cars at the drag strip. But the Galaxie had become too heavy, so Ford designed the Fairlane-based Thunderbolt as a competitor for the lighter vehicles produced by GM and Chrysler.

Unable to simply transplant the 427 FE in the midsized Fairlane, Ford sent the cars to the Dearborn Steel Tubing company for extensive modifications under the hood. These included shaping the tubular headers around the front suspension components and replacing the inner headlamps with scoops that feed air into the engine. The teardrop bulge was also among them.

But does this also mean that the blue wagon packs a 427 V8 engine similar to the Thunderbolt? Well, that's a question I cannot answer because the hood remains closed. The lack of front grille scoops suggests this grocery-getter is not a Thunderbolt in disguise, but this doesn't mean it can't rely on a beefed-up V8.

The tiny badges on the front fenders point toward a 289-cubic-inch (4.7-liter) small-block V8 spinning the rear wheels. It was the range-topping Ranch Wagon mill at the time, generating 195 horsepower. That's not much to write home about, but the American racing wheels wrapped in wider tires and the hot-rod graphics on the hood, tailgate, and beltline tell the story of a massaged powerplant.

And here's a cool fact about this Ranch Wagon. It was produced during one of only two model years when the badge was applied to midsize vehicles. While Ford offered the Ranch Wagon for a whopping 22 years (1952-1974), it was a full-size rig for two decades. 1963-1964 was the only period when the name was assigned to an intermediate vehicle, in this case, the Fairlane. The latter was also born as a full-size car in 1955 but became a midsize in 1962. No matter how you look at it, this Ranch Wagon is not your average grocery-getter.