Thunderbird fights off Winston Cup extinction

Thursday, Feb. 19, 1998 | 8:14 a.m.

Already dead on the streets and targeted for extermination on the race track, the Ford Thunderbird isn't going to its grave quietly.

The 21 Fords that qualified for the Daytona 500 included 18 1998 Tauruses and three 1997 Thunderbirds. One of the Thunderbirds - driven by Chad Little - even managed a seventh-place finish. That's better than the performances of 16 Tauruses in Sunday's season-opening race.

Even though Ford discontinued production of the poor-selling performance coupe at the end of the 1997 model year, NASCAR rules allow teams to keep using Thunderbirds through the end of the 1999 Winston Cup season.

Because the Ford teams have had only about nine months since the manufacturer told them of the switch to the family sedan, some of the top teams are still struggling to get enough Tauruses prepared. Such was the case with Little, one of five drivers in the Roush Racing stable.

Not all of Roush's teams were completely comfortable with the Taurus by the time Daytona rolled around, so Little's crew decided to stick with the Thunderbirds for the short term.

"Fundamentally, no team is going to bring their second-best car to a race. They just can't afford to do it," said Preston Miller, Ford's NASCAR technical manager. "And Ford is not going to think any less of them or anything."

There's also the money issue. Some of the lesser-financed Ford teams can't afford to completely dump their stock of Thunderbirds for a new fleet of Tauruses, so they're making a gradual transition to the new model. That was the case with the cars driven by Robert Pressley, who finished 32nd at Daytona, and Billy Standridge, who came in 35th among the 43 competitors.

Ford officials expected more Thunderbirds to show up at this week's Winston Cup event in Rockingham, N.C., and next week at Las Vegas.

"It's all understandable. I think by Atlanta, the Thunderbirds will start to disappear," Miller said of the race scheduled for March 8, the week after Las Vegas.

There is no longer a shortage of available materials, which was a concern for many teams leading up to Daytona.

"We stamped 1,000 pieces of sheet metal, and that took some of the labor out of building the cars if they elected to use it," Miller said. "They've got plenty of noses and tails, plenty of roof flaps, plenty of windows. We're stocked up in terms of parts availability."

Judging from a sampling of driver comments, the jury remains out on the Taurus, which captured five of the top 15 spots at Daytona, led by Jeremy Mayfield's third-place finish.

"I've been doing this for a long time, and that's the best car I ever drove," said Michael Waltrip, a 13-year veteran who finished ninth. "That's a good feeling to have for the rest of the year."

Dale Jarrett, who got caught up in a pit-road accident and wound up 34th, offered a different perspective.

"It seems the car is pretty good in the draft as far as handling," he said, "But we don't seem to have the answer as to why it runs up to a certain point behind a car and then you seem to lose that steam that you had."

Whether the drivers like it or not, the Taurus is here to stay, at least for a few years. The primary mission of a car company is to sell cars, not win races, and the Taurus is a perennial occupant on Ford's best-sellers list.

The trick will be to see if Ford can boost Taurus sales by using the four-door family sedan in the rapid-growth arena of Winston Cup racing.

"From a marketing sense, it was a logical decision," Miller said. "Competitive racing aside, the marketing guys thought this was the best opportunity they'd ever seen. It's really a test case to see if the regular family market can benefit from a motorsports image. We'll learn from that."

There's talk that the Thunderbird, winner of 185 Winston Cup races since its introduction on the circuit in 1978, will be resurrected by Ford in the near future.

If that happens and if the Taurus proves to be a model that wins on the track and in the showroom, would Ford then want to risk switching back to the Thunderbird?

"Whatever they want to race from a marketing standpoint, between Ford engineering, the teams and NASCAR, it will fit right back in," Miller said.