We have driven the Turbo, and it is good. We have all come back smiling, and we think of goggle-eyed good times and tequila by the shot because this Thunderbird Turbo Coupe celebrates life as good-hearted rowdyism for its own sake. Squeezable Shelley West has been climbing the country charts, serenading her favorite tequila thusly:
Jose Cuervo, you are a friend of mine!And on to the chorus:
Well, the music's playin',Yee-Hah! "Fly!" is the word - this woman could be singing about the Thunderbird Turbo, except the car threatens no unpleasant aftereffects. Its little 2.3-liter 4-cylinder engine and big-hearted turbocharger pick it up and fling it right down the road.
Frankly, it looks and feels as if it couldn't possibly be related to Thunderbirds of old, those underslung, overstated paragons of questionable taste, offerings to the great god Cube. The new Coupe's aerodynamic flare and .35 drag coefficient put it neck and neck with the Mercedes S-Class coupe and cleanly out front of BMW's handsome but somewhat inefficient 6-Series' commitment to shapes from the past. No one with car sense will have any trouble recognizing the turbo Ford as a wingdinger of an organic, dynamic, and aerodynamic exercise.
This particular wingdinger is not only striking but well-constructed - tight in its structure and showcasing drafting-board precision at body points and trim. Our test car came agleam with mirror-smooth paint work in the glaring red s appreciated by our friends in law enforcement. In an annoying slip of aero etiquette, however, our T-Bird bleats with an outrageous, one-note wind whistle ("Nate, it's the atomic teakettle!") in strong crosswinds or at speeds over 90MPH. Perhaps it's peculiar to our car.
Not peculiar to our car is a genuine willingness to run at 90MPH. Or considerably beyond, particularly in NASCAR configuration, where the Thunderbird makes the baddest Grand-National car in history. But don't think that NASCAR's V8 variety of horsepower is the only kind that will make a Thunderbird go fast, nosiree. Ford has thrown out the dismal, carbureted, "draw-through" turbo engine of yore, replacing it with a fierce little unit based on the same 140-cubic-inch block, but now fitted with full electronic port-type fuel injection. It also comes standard with a very efficient and smoothly adjusting detonation sensor and a "blow-through" turbo system that provides much improved throttle response, good fuel economy in low-load situations, and a whopping 145 horsepower. That's better than 1 horsepower per cubic inch!
The boost works beautifully. The response is only middling down low in the revs, but it's terrific at anything from mid-to-high revs, particularly in fifth-gear cruising situations where you've slowed for traffic and then pasted the pedal to the floor again, whereupon the Thunderbird fairly bolts forward. "Rush" is the operative term here, because the car rushes around with abandon, infusing every cell in your thrill-seeking body (let's face it, we're all animals) with a glorious, ecstatic, hot-diggity, oh-boy! flush of wonderfulism that hasn't come shooting out of a Thunderbird's innards since the mid-50's. The Thunderbird may never grip you with the same hair-raising, butt-puckering, pure wow power of a Porsche turbo or a 427 Cobra, but it will make you want to dance on the tables.
Five years ago we'd have listened with condescending smiles to anyone trying to convince us that Ford's thrashy little 2.3 cammer engine could do anything like this. It's still coarse up around the redline, but in return it gives plenty of performance. Output is equally giddy down in the midrange, where the typical 4-cylinder shakes and booms have yet to get up on the wrong side of the bed. And when you're ready to reaffirm your belief that the horizon is rightfully yours, the fun is just beginning. Top speed? You'll find plenty. We found 123MPH. And on a 1500-mile trip that we whittled down to size at 80MPH cruising interrupted only by left-lane bandits and 200-miles of sightseeing, and the turbo T-Bird turned in 21 MPG, part of our 19-MPG overall average.
The outright acceleration of the Turbo is barely behind that of the big-block V8 family sedans of the sixties and early seventies, the Impalas and Bonnevilles and Galaxies that came with detuned monster motors and grunted out zero-to-sixties in the mid eights. The new Thunderbird knocks off 9.1-second runs to 60MPH like nobody's business, while delivering a mix of economy and road manners that Detroit's better engineers could formerly only fantasize about.
Finally, the time of balanced cars has arrived. The thunderbird Turbo didn't turn out brilliant performance statistics on any of our measured tests, but it was all-around competent. Its skidpad cornering produced 0.77g, and its straight-line braking from 70MPH required 201 feet - both good, solid results - but the car's strength lies in the real world, where it works well enough to feel good and provide plenty of entertainment. Infinitely more sophisticated than its ancestors, it nevertheless flunks a few subjective evaluations. But not by much. Its steering is usefully quicker than the current base T-Birds (15.0:1 vs. 20:1), but it hasn't yet received the coming torsion bar for its power assist, which will give increased effort and better feel. The car darts over big bumps with today's light steering, because the bumps go through the driver's arms and into the easily influenced wheel. Call it involuntary steering.
Overall, though, the news is good. The basic skidpad understeer is easily overcome with the rush of turbo power in the real world, and even in outrageous angles of power oversteer, the car is a snap to control. Braking effort is a little light under panic-stop duress (which also sends an unoccupied passenger seatback bounding forward in an unrestrained distraction), and the car's nose sometimes floats a tad over big bumps, lacking that final tied-down feeling common in most great road cars. But overall, the Turbo is so easy to drive that many owners of so-called superior machinery will undoubtedly go home grumbling and wishing that discretion had been the better part of their valor, because their valor has been ground into dust.
In addition to numerous handling-oriented component changes in the new suspension (anti-sway bars, springs, bushings), Ford's approach from the start called for the application of gas-pressure shocks for the sake of both ride and handling. The front MacPherson struts are built at Ford's Ypsilanti, Michigan plant, and the four (count 'em, four) rear shocks are produced by Gabriel. The extra pair of rear dampers is used to control the erratic live axle behavior (see Technical Highlights) that's plagued Fords for years, and they work. Gone is the axle hop that used to crash in with every heavy application of power. Gone are the disconcerting side-steps T-Birds used to take over bumps in corners. Amen to that.
Our car is fitted with Goodyear Eagle HR's. Despite their modest size and, by today's standards, almost teensy 5.5-inch-wide wheels, they do an exceptional job of hanging on and sending word to your senses. The optional Michelin TRX's are larger but don't stick as well. Bigger Goodyears on substantially wider wheels are in the pipeline even now.
The shift linkage to the Borg-Warner five-speed transmission, which whirs with a nicely chosen set of ratios, is light in action and operated with a decently placed and pleasantly upholstered lever. The shift boot, however, allows too much of the whirring synchro sound up into the cabin with every shift. The clutch engages about knee-high off the floor, it seems, but adaptation is easy and smooth.
The seats are terrifically comfortable on long trips, offering plenty of tush-and-torso tunability. Decent lateral and thigh supports are mixed with good legroom and with headroom that ranks up there with the Guggenheim Museum's. The back seat is livable for adult humans, and out back are an eighteen-gallon tank and a reasonable trunk with low lift-over height.
Overall, the interior trim is somewhat tacky in texture, feel, and fitting. The dashboard is decent enough, but it could benefit from another gauge or two to go with the speedo, tach, and fuel gauge. A pleasing four-spoke, leather-wrapped sport wheel has an optional tilt feature. Its only failing is that it hides two control stalks: one for the excellent intermittent wiper system, another for the not-so-excellent horn. The hooter's placement borders on criminal, because you can never find the thing when you need it most.
Ventilation, heating, and cooling are comprehensively handled, as expected (American car, and all that). A well-integrated row of windowlets unobtrusively punctuates the area just above the climate controls, ready to light up individually at the first sign of specialized troubles. To handle more general problems of idiocy on the part of the driver and the passengers, an obnoxious male voice is forever on call, a perpetual do-gooder who can't wait even a respectable few seconds to call potential mental lapses to your attention. What's worse, while this chirpy little numbskull is telling you your door is ajar, all you get to tell you what's going on with the turbo is a wee-dinky pair of lights, green for boost and red for overboost. There's room on the dash for a better information system, by which we don't mean talking or digital; what we do mean is analogue gauges. Full points, however, to the optional, finely adjustable power system for the setting of both outside mirrors (the right one is cleverly convex - nobody hides on that flank).
Power to Ford and the people within who developed this car. There is joy within it that comes out with the driving of it. The Thunderbird Turbo Coupe is something of a rapscallion, and having gotten it this far, Ford is glad to say it isn't finished yet. Right now, a stout run home in a Thunderbird Turbo and a stout shot of Jose Cuervo would finish off today just fine, because it's time to dance on the tables and shoot out the lights.
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