Greetings from Asbury Park - 1957 Ford Custom F-code | The Online Automotive Marketplace

If you get down next to the beach and boardwalk, you can still find it. A blocks-long loop of streets in rundown Asbury Park, New Jersey, an adjective that certainly applied during the late 1960s. North some 13 blocks on Ocean Avenue, over to Kingsley, back down south. Past Convention Hall, the Empire Bar, the Stone Pony, Mrs. Jay’s Beer Garden and the giant Exxon sign that gave this fair city light. Places and faces immortalized in the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen. Every block set off by traffic lights. Where the Hemi-powered drones did stoplight combat. If you lived “downa Shore,” this was where you went to cruise and smoke off the guy in the other lane. This classic Ford was purchased and revived specifically to attack these streets, known throughout the world simply as The Circuit.

So it took a Jersey guy a long time to get this ride just the way he wanted it, for noisy stoplight launches, block after block. The owner is Rich Stuck, most recently seen in these pages as the creator of the replica 1957 Ford Battlebird, and a guy who’s stuck, if you’ll pardon the phrase, on late-1950s Ford performance.

If you could turn the clock back, it would be easy to imagine this 1957 Ford Custom two-door sedan doing block-by-block combat around The Circuit. It’s built for the task: An ultra-stripped low-line car, with a single, crucial option–Ford’s ultimate engine for that year, the Paxton-supercharged version of the Y-block V-8, with some upgrades to make the whole package even nastier.

In Ford parlance, it’s called an F-code. It was Ford’s response to getting consistently whipped in NASCAR, mainly by Chrysler, a process that began in earnest in 1956 when the 292-cu.in. Y-block V-8 was enlarged to 312 cubic inches and then creating the E-code engine package by bolting a pair of Holleys atop a new intake manifold. That one year touched off a horsepower race in NASCAR, when Oldsmobile and Pontiac opted for triple carburetion, Chevrolet mounted new Rochester mechanical fuel injection, and Ford bolted on the Paxton blower, feeding a single four-barrel Holley. Much of the development work was performed by Holman Moody in Charlotte, North Carolina, at least until the auto manufacturers acquiesced to an industry-wide ban on active participation in motorsports.

Rich is a total, die-hard Ford guy, especially when it comes to the 20th century’s middle decade. It all started when he was growing up in North Jersey, where his father had a 1957 Ford Country Squire station wagon as the family hauler. Every summer, the family would head down to rural Tennessee, where one of Rich’s dad’s buddies from the Army Air Forces during World War II lived. One summer, around 1965, while cruising through the countryside, “I saw a pretty nice ’57 Ford forlornly sitting in a shed. The owner came out of nowhere and gruffly stated, ‘What are you doing here?’ I told him that I was looking at the cool old Ford,” Rich recalled. “He turned out to be a nice guy and proceeded to tell me that at one time, that Ford was the fastest car in the hills and was used to haul illegal liquor. He told me that he had sold the engine in it some time ago and was saving the body to build a stock car. I asked if it was for sale, and he said he would let it go for $200.”

His dad soon returned, and Rich told him about the Ford in the shed, and begged him to go take a look at it. Being a good dad, he agreed. He also managed to get the Tennessee seller down to $150, using the remainder to buy a tow bar so he could haul the Ford back to New Jersey behind the family’s 1962 Mercury Colony Park station wagon. Since Rich was only 13 at that time, he had some years to get the Ford back together. It ended up with a remanufactured 312-cu.in. Y-block that cost $400. In the mid-1970s, the Ford received Custom 300 fenders, doors and trim sourced from a local junkyard because Rich thought they looked better, though he also presciently stashed the originals. He painted it black with pearl flames (“After all, this was the Seventies”) that shortly faded to hot pink.

In the early 1980s, Rich discovered that the car’s VIN began with an F, designating it as one of the very rare factory-supercharged Fords. At that point, Rich decided to take the car off the street and store it. That, really, is where this restoration story begins. That opening chapter took three decades to run its course through marriage, two children, a house and two college degrees. It was only then that Rich was able to begin searching for the correct F-code parts needed to restore the car to its original specifications. We can only figure that the Tennessee “likker” man used the F-code engine heavily before he sold it. None of the requisite parts were present on the car that Rich bought when he was still a teenager.

Hood lettering reflects old-time NASCAR practice of advertising horsepower ratings, but the supercharged Y-block makes more than that now. Part of the reason is higher-compression Mummert aluminum heads. Another part is an overbore to 328 cubic inches.

“The major parts, such as the Paxton VR-57 supercharger, the air cleaner, and the brackets and pulleys, were really not too difficult to locate. It turned out that was the easiest thing to find,” he explained. “The biggest hurdle is the price. The VR-57s have no parts available to rebuild them. I was fortunate enough to locate Jerry Ponder, who re-machines the original cases to accept all-new Paxton SN supercharger internals. The supercharger now makes 11 pounds of boost and doesn’t leak. EDB-D heads are made of pure unobtainium, as are the original intake manifolds. I was lucky to find them amongst a former drag racer’s stash of stuff.

Ordinarily, this would be a three-on-the-tree car, but circa-1969 Toploader adds fourth gear, completed by the 4.11 rear.

“It’s the smaller parts that are the most difficult to locate,” Rich said. “The distributor, fuel pump, carburetor, hoses, metal oil lines and various fittings are tough to find. The blower-to-bonnet hoses were so hard to find that I wound up having some made in England. The guys involved with F-codes are generous with information and helpful with locating parts.”

Rich had gone through an anxious and filthy couple of weeks scraping years of accumulated gunk and grime off the frame. Since he had the original body parts, the restoration would come together surprisingly easily. But he wanted a proper street performer and decided to rebuild the 312 in something of an F-code-plus. First off, the engine block was bored .100-inch over to bring the bore to 3.90 inches. The stock heads, cast at Ford’s foundry in Cleveland, were cast-iron bearing the correct EDB-B casting number, with 69-cc combustion chambers. But Rich substituted cast-aluminum and machined heads made by John Mummert of El Cajon, California, who specializes in high-end performance components for Y-block Ford engines. The combustion chamber size for these heads is 60 cc, which, combined with a .625-inch deck thickness, edged the compression upwards to 8.7:1. Intake airflow is 235 cfm with 175 cfm on the exhaust side, both at .550-inch lift. The Mummert heads utilize 1.94-inch intake valves and 1.54-inch exhaust, both with 11⁄32-inch stems and 18 degrees of valve angle.

The crankshaft is stock Ford, but Rich opted to use forged-aluminum dished pistons by Race-Tec that were custom-made for the F-code application. That’s because it was necessary to further dish the pistons so they would meet Mummert’s compression requirements for his heads. The custom-ground Iskenderian camshaft was installed four degrees advanced.

Powerful but plain: Discreet ”Red Lightning” moniker implies what’s at foot here.

Rich wasn’t trying to create a perfectly stock, numbers-matching Ford, so he went with a lot of modern aluminum components, including the intake manifold, valley pan, timing chain cover, thermostat, water pump, high-ratio rocker arms, tubular supercharger-spec pushrods, dual-belt-drive generator, dual-belt supercharger drive, ARP fasteners throughout, a high-flow Milodon oil pump and a double-roller timing chain. He saved all the stock parts, which are now “stored,” as he likes to put it, “in a secure undisclosed location.” All of the engine machining and balancing was handled by Gil Jordan at Jordan’s Automotive Machine in Hainesport, New Jersey, the same shop that did the machine work for Rich’s Battlebird’s Y-block. Rich and Charlie Morris handled the assembly, which was documented in the book Y-block Engines, How to Rebuild and Modify (www.coastal181.com).

Sun tachometer is period-correct; additional gauges monitor engine functions.

The Ford Toploader transmission ought to be familiar to fans of NASCAR and more modern Ford muscle cars. This car, from the factory, would have had a three-speed manual transmission with column shifter, but once he swapped in the Toploader, Rich went with a Hurst shifter that he modified with a 1957 Ford truck gear lever and knob. The stock final-drive ratio for an F-code Ford was 3.56:1, but Rich was serious about running the Ford hard on the strip at Englishtown, so he installed a set of 4.11 cogs. Other than the addition of front discs from a Ford Granada and an anti-roll bar, the chassis is stock, but he dropped the ride height by two inches with modified front spindles and de-arched rear springs.

It’s old school, but it’s a rocket. “I was just pursuing my own little bit of craziness, and wanted to make it a little bit of my own, with my own ideas. It’s just a little different. I wanted to live out my own little bit of American Graffiti down on the Jersey Shore, because I grew up a town over in Neptune. What I really like about the car is that it’s an extremely rare 1957 Ford. They were really a seminal part of Ford performance, even though they got upended by the AMA ban on racing. It’s stripped: No armrests, just a single sun visor, no clock, no radio, no coat hooks, no interior light, not even a cigarette lighter. It’s the cheapest model they built that year, the lightest model, with the biggest engine. So even back then, somebody at Ford really knew what they were doing.”

OWNER’S VIEW

This car has absolutely no factory options except for the supercharged engine. It’s really a blast to drive. You head down the road, accelerating, and the whine from the supercharger just builds. It’s something that gives me goose bumps, still. It’s on street tires, bias-plies, so it acquits itself quite well for what it is. At the strip, if you don’t get out of it after you leave the line, it’ll smoke the tires all the way down the track. So it’s not a Camaro killer or anything, just a really nice piece of Ford history from a year I’ve always liked.–Rich Stuck

Greetings from Asbury Park - 1957 Ford Custom F-code | The Online Automotive Marketplace | Hemmings (2024)

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