Via Mecum High Performance Auctions comes the strange tale of the "Tobacco King" Ford Galaxie 500.
Most of us who watched racing in the sixties think of those years as a golden age in motorsport, but they also marked the end of another great era. In the years after WWII, before the advent of the Nader safety nannies and all the government agencies born of their insistent meddling, a daredevil brand of adventurous entrepreneurs brought an endless parade of fun and dangerous products to the market, from lawn darts to firecrackers to early ultralight aircraft. Without doubt, the most outrageous of these creative maverick enterprises was the Turbonique Company of Orlando, Florida. Aimed at the drag racing market, their product line consisted of three basic devices: AP superchargers, microturbo thrust engines and rocket drag axles. All were designed for short usage periods of mere seconds due to their use of a solid fuel known then as Thermolene, its proper chemical designation being N-Propyl Nitrate.
The most outlandish of these devices was the Rocket Drag Axle, which connected mechanically to a car’s differential and, when ignited, surpassed the engine’s motive power and launched the vehicle forward at an astonishing rate of acceleration. The infamous Black Widow Volkswagen Beetle, a basically stock Bug fitted with a Turbonique Rocket Drag Axle, became an instant drag racing legend by leaving Tommy Ivo’s four-engine Showboat dragster in its dust with a 9.36 elapsed time at 168 mph on Sept.19, 1966 at Tampa Dragway.
Built by tobacco magnate Zachary Reynolds of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the “Tobacco King” 1964 Ford Galaxie was as wild an example of a Rocket Drag Axle-equipped car as one could ask for, and certainly reflected Reynolds’ daredevil personality. Playboy, pilot, Ham Radio enthusiast and all-around enfant terrible, Reynolds wanted a car that would terrorize everyone with its appearance alone, just before slamming their senses with a prodigious detonation of Rocket Axle power. The “Tobacco King” certainly fulfilled that mission.
Documented in the 1967 Turbonique product catalog, the Raven Black Galaxie’s original 390 V8 engine was replaced with a 425 horsepower 427 Ford big block fitted with a rare Latham axial flow supercharger fed by four Carter one-barrel sidedraft carburetors. Such automotive exotica alone would have been enough for most street racers, but not for the young Reynolds, who took the whole project the extra distance by having the differential replaced with an 850 horsepower Turbonique turbine Rocket Drag Axle. The rest of the car had to be modified to handle the colossal acceleration and speeds of which it was then capable; the frame was reinforced and suspension beefed up to handle the enormous torque delivered through the rear axle housing, and ground clearance increased to accommodate the huge turbine housing that shot its rocket exhaust out from underneath the rear bumper.
The car’s visual impact is arresting from every angle. From the front it looks every bit the mid-sixties A/FX racer of the Thunderbolt variety, with dropped suspension, dump tubes and unpolished American Torque Thrust wheels. The picture is only completed by approaching the thing, if you dare, from behind, where the black Simpson chutepack and twin large-diameter tailpipes draw the eyes down to that alien-looking rocket exhaust pod.
Inside, the Galaxie’s stock instrument panel is augmented by a set of gauges to monitor engine RPM, supercharger boost and the space-age bomb lurking out back. The Ham Radio installed beneath the dash speaks to Reynolds’ passion as a Ham operator (QSL card #W4TXL, now held by his surviving brother-in-law Bill).
This was as crazy as crazy got in 1967, and is no less so for the years that have passed. Zachary Reynolds put a total of only 3,611 miles on the car before his untimely death in a 1979 plane crash in North Carolina, after which the car was placed in careful storage until recently. It is accompanied by early registrations, the original owner’s manual made out to Zachary Taylor Reynolds, an original Turbonique product catalog with photos, the original Latham Supercharger literature and Zach’s personal notebook. Unrestored and original, it is in superb condition inside and out, a delightfully shocking artifact that speaks to a period during which daredevils and adventurers were given full sway to express the forces that drove them.
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