HAMMERING HOME THE POINT

‘ XP FALCONS RAN NON- STOP AROUND THE EQUALLY NEW PROVING GROUND FOR FIVE STRAIGHT DAYS, RACKING UP 70,000 MILES’

PLENTY of Falcon models have the distinction of being the cars that almost killed the franchise here, but only one can really claim to have been the brand’s saviour. And that model is the XP of 1965. After the disastrous front-end failures of the original XK model, Ford was really caught on the hop.

The first job was to identify what was going wrong; the next was to do something about it. It was pretty obvious that lower ball-joints were a major fail-point in the XK and that the sheetmetal that formed the engine box and suspension mounts was similarly underdone. The solution was not to wait for an all-new model, but to make running changes including substituting the lower ball-joints from the bigger, heavier Fairlane and beefing up the engine box and body with similar gussets and braces as fitted to the US Falcon convertible.

It worked, too, but Ford needed to draw a line in the sand to convince buyers that all was now well. The XP was that line. Ford took the dramatic – some would say crazy – step of running a public relations stunt that would see five of its then-new XP Falcons run non-stop around its equally new proving ground for five straight days, racking up 70,000 miles (112,000km). It proved to be harder to do than to say and crashes were common with drivers suffering fatigue and all but one of the cars winding up on its roof temporarily. Anybody with a CAMS licence was drafted in as a driver, including former Wheels editor Bill Tuckey, who reckoned the venture was equal parts madness and suicide attempt. But all five cars finished and the goal was reached. And the Falcon’s bacon was saved.