Ok, I'm a 1965 Valiant guy (Barracuda body style) but having grown up around then, I loved the story of the Ford Sprint Rally cars that ran in the 1964 & 1965 Monte Carlo Rally and I find myself studying their dashboards and roll bar placement for "era correct" ideas for modifications to my Cuda.
So last night I found some old black & white footage of the '65 rally on YouTube. And somewhere in the middle of it a Valiant came blowing around a slight curve in the snow.
A Valiant????? It was only there for a moment and I wasn't sure so I kept going back, looking at the headlight rings and round emblem on the grill. It sure looked like a Valiant.
So I went to the race results. And I'll be darned, there were 3 Valiants entered, 2 seemingly out of Michigan (well known driver Gene Henderson who finished best, finishing 88th). So I looked some more and someone said that they had pulled the slant 6s and put in V-8s which they passed off as "factory". Somewhere else was a reference to one of the Valiants out running one of the Sprints during one of the "speed trial" legs of the race.
And then I did an "images" search on Valiant and Rally de Monte-Carlo and came up with a few car photos, although not nearly as many as I would have liked.
So does anybody know more? I'm interested. This is an important piece of our early race history.
dd ddd d
So last night I found some old black & white footage of the '65 rally on YouTube. And somewhere in the middle of it a Valiant came blowing around a slight curve in the snow.
A Valiant????? It was only there for a moment and I wasn't sure so I kept going back, looking at the headlight rings and round emblem on the grill. It sure looked like a Valiant.
So I went to the race results. And I'll be darned, there were 3 Valiants entered, 2 seemingly out of Michigan (well known driver Gene Henderson who finished best, finishing 88th). So I looked some more and someone said that they had pulled the slant 6s and put in V-8s which they passed off as "factory". Somewhere else was a reference to one of the Valiants out running one of the Sprints during one of the "speed trial" legs of the race.
And then I did an "images" search on Valiant and Rally de Monte-Carlo and came up with a few car photos, although not nearly as many as I would have liked.
So does anybody know more? I'm interested. This is an important piece of our early race history.
dd ddd d
