Inside the Ford Total Performance Show

We asked Williams to share the story of the Ford Total Performance Show and some of his experiences with the program, and his interview follows.

Old Cars: Could you explain the Ford Total Performance Show for people who may not familiar with it?

Gary Williams:It was a program put together by Ford in 1969 to show off their performance parts and what they were doing in racing. That’s when the Ford drag teams were introduced all across the country, and we were close with the four drag teams and the Trans Am teams at that time. We went to all the main races in the country; we went to the Indy 500, a lot of the NASCAR races, Daytona, as many Trans Am races as we could fit in, and we worked with the Shelby teams and Parnelli Jones teams, Bud Moore, and like I say, we traveled all over the United States to put on these displays for the public.

There were two of the Total Performance Shows, one East Coast and one West Coast, and we were the West Coast — west of the Mississippi [River]. The East Coast show overbooked so many times and we booked ourselves with time off in between to do maintenance and Ford would look at our schedule and say, “Oh, you guys got two weeks off here. Well, we need you back here to cover this and cover that race or this show.” So, we ended up being on the East Coast as much as we were on the west. 

OC: How did you get the job working for the Ford Total Performance Show and what was your role?

GW: Well, it was I was working for the U.S. Forest Service as a firefighter for nine years, and I’m a drag racer, so I had just gone to the Nationals in Pomona, Calif., and the day I got home from Pomona, I had a phone message to call Ford about a job with them. I didn’t realize I was on the radar like I was. I had done very well with my little ’65 Falcon that I was racing at the time. Like I say, this was 1969. 

And I called them back and they said, “We’d like to interview you for a job. We hear you are a Ford guy.” So they said that, “You’ll come down next week to the Riverside 500, we’ll interview you, and decide if you want us and we want you.”

So I drove down to Riverside, to the 500, and they liked my station wagon so much, my ’68 Torino station wagon, that they actually put it in the show. They interviewed me and I waited for another day and I had to get back to work, and I asked the guy that was going to be my boss what he’d heard — if they’d pick me or not — and he said he hadn’t heard anything, so I said, ‘I got to get home.’

So I came home Sunday night and Monday morning I was doing my laundry, getting ready to go back to work, and I got a call from the man that had interviewed me and he said, ‘I’m sorry we didn’t let you know, but you were hired on the spot.’ Actually, what he said is, “Why are you doing laundry on Ford’s time?”

He said, ‘Get back to Los Angeles as soon as you can, because Wednesday, we’re all flying back to Dearborn. That’s how I got the job.

OC: Did you have to relocate to Dearborn, or because you were on the road so much, did you just stay where you were? 

GW:Yes, I stayed here at home in Mariposa, and yeah, we were on the road all the time, so it was motel to motel, Holiday Inn to Holiday Inn. 

OC: So what exciting things happened to you while you were with the program? 

GW: Well, the first thing was going to the Indy 500 and being given credentials that I could go anywhere, anytime, even go into the garage areas. I’d go out on the paddock and take pictures of the cars, and the same thing with the NASCAR circuit. 

We were allowed to go any place we wanted, and I even worked with the Trans Am teams. Not only was I a firefighter, but I was a sign painter, too, so they found out that I was a sign painter and any time they wrecked the car and needed new lettering put on it, well, they always came to the Performance Show and grabbed me and had me do lettering on the cars. 

OC: If somebody doesn’t understand the Ford Total Performance show, what would you have done when you arrived at one of the locations where you set up? 

GW: We had a 40-foot van that was our display. Usually we carried three cars with us, depending on where we were going and what kind of a program we were going to put on. If we went to a NASCAR race, in those days, we’d put a couple of Torinos in our display that we’d carry with us. 

Sometimes we’d have concept cars. We had the keys to Dearborn Steel Tubing where they did 90% of the design cars, where they put the design cars together. Then afterwards they just put them in this big warehouse that was as big as a football field, and they just had cars stacked in there. We had the keys to that and we could go in and pick out any cars we wanted to take with us. 

Anyway, we’d set up the display. We had these display boards that we’d put up on the side of the van, and it had lighting, we had our own generator system setup, so we had lights on our displays, and then we had these big, what we call parabolics — big awnings that we’d set up on all four sides of our van and we’d have coverage over the displays. And we’d hand out the materials, depending on the race or the car show or whatever we were at. That’s pretty much what we did.

OC: What cars did you display that stand out in your memory? 

GW: Well, one of the cars that just stands out of my mind was one of the original Mustang design cars. It’s been featured in quite a few magazines. I hated that car because it had Indy tires on it that leaked air all the time, so we’d have to stop about every four hours and air up the tires so that it wouldn’t move around inside our van — it was tight. You couldn’t tie it down tight enough that it wouldn’t move. 

And a couple of times it would move over on the ramps, and we’d have to change a flat tire inside the 40-foot van. 

We carried around Jimmy Clark’s original Indy runner-up car and then we also had his winning Indy car that we carried with us for quite a while. We had a lot of Bill Stroppe’s Baja cars that we carried. 

We had a lot of the original concept cars. I couldn’t even name them all. 

But like I said, we had the keys to Dearborn Steel Tubing’s warehouses, and we’d just go in and grab a couple, and if we were close to the Michigan area, well, we’d just take those back and get a couple more for the next display.

OC: What celebrities did you encounter with that job? 

GW: Well, Ed Terry and Dick Woods from Drag Racing and Hubert Platt, Randy Payne, Dick Loehr. All the Indy car drivers — Dan Gurney, you know, all those guys. I almost felt like I had a personal friendship with Parnelli Jones. Bill Stroppe in Long Beach — we called that our Western hangout, our base in California — we did a lot there, and I met Parnelli Jones there, and then when we’d go to the off-road races and stuff, we’d meet there and then, of course, Indianapolis. So all the Indy drivers. I’ve got pictures and pictures of all those guys. 

OC: That’s pretty incredible. It sounds like there were a lot of benefits to that job. 

GW: Oh, yes. Like I said, when we went to these races, they gave us credentials that we could go anywhere. So at Indianapolis, we could go anywhere we wanted, except on race day we couldn’t be on the paddock. It was a dream job. 

I was going with a girl at the time, and her father owned a business that built farm equipment, and he pulled me aside a couple days before I left to go back to Dearborn for the second time, and he said, “If you’ll marry my daughter, I’ll give you half my business.” And I said, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I’m sorry, I can I can’t do that.”

OC: How did the Ford Total Performance Show influence the cars you drove afterward? You probably had a need for speed on top of already having some pretty cool Fords already.

GW: Well, yes. I built a 1964-1/2 Mustang that we ran in junior stock at the time. I built that car in 1971 and we held many records with that car. It was called “The California Colt,” and we were written up in a few magazines because of that car. And then at the time they wouldn’t let us put roll cages and subframe connectors in those cars, because they were unibody cars, and after the Mustangs started bending in the middle, I built a ’64 Comet. And that car we held the record 16 times for the class in super stock. 

OC: What engines did you run in the Mustang and Comet? 

GW: The 210-horse 289. We were the quickest and fastest 289 cars in the nation there for quite a few years. 

OC: So in having that job, were you able to get special parts or anything unique from being with the Total Performance Show that you used in your cars?

GW: Well, not really, because of the NHRA — National Hot Rod Association — rules that we had in those days. You had to run the stock parts of the car. All you could do was blueprint the motor, bring it right into factory specifications. And so actually we had to adapt some of the Chevy parts to fit our Ford. When we went to the roller rockers in our heads, I had to make valve covers to fit. I had to take two valve covers and weld them together to make them fit over the rocker arms. Moroso didn’t make a valve cover at that time to do that. They only made Chevrolet stuff. And I did get one of the first sets of the Moroso [Ford] valve covers after they started making them. So it didn’t even come from Ford! 

OC: You didn’t even get any help from Ford and you were an employee?

GW:The only information that I really got from Ford was tech stuff. We were the only ones running the 289 competitively. We had a lot of problems with National Hot Rod Association’s tech department, and so I had to go to the Ford tech people many times to verify what we were running was real Ford stuff and with the right part number and so on and so forth. 

Well, one of the things I did get was a Posi traction rear end from Ford. They had three handmade sets of gears  — it was like a Detroit Locker, and they gave me one or two of the handmade sets that I could use in my race car. So that is one good thing that I picked up from Ford. 

We’d change our display every year. And one of the things that I kind of kicked myself about is we had intake manifolds and crank shafts and heads for 427, 428 motors on our display boards and after we changed those over for the next year of displays, I gave away all that stuff to my friends that had boats with big-blocks. So I could have had a lot more stuff if I’d just asked for it, but I didn’t need it at the time. 

OC: How did and when did the Ford Total Performance Show end? 

GW: Well, the government ended it... In 1971, the end of ’71, the government was into the 5-mile-an-hour bumpers and the gas mileage thing, so the government stepped in and tried to stop all racing, because they said all these big car companies were spending too much money on racing, which was dangerous, and they needed to spend more on smog control and safety in the vehicles. And my first thought was, “Where does safety come from? It comes from racing.”

So anyway, we were in Santa Cruz, Calif., doing a show at a dealership, and I got a telegram, and that was on a weekend and I got a telegram that said, ‘Get everything back to Dearborn by Friday. The funding’s been cut for the show.’ That’s how it ended. 

OC: And that was at the end of ’71? 

GW: Excuse me, ’72.

OC: What career did you pick up after? 

GW: Well, I was out of a job in Dearborn, and I just told him, I said, “I can’t live back here in this cold weather.” We got everything back to Michigan, and they offered me the job in Dearborn, and I said I couldn’t, I’m sorry. And they said, “Well, we have an opening in Lincoln-Mercury in Los Angeles,” and I said, “I don’t want to live in Los Angeles, either,” so if I can get my job back with Smokey Bear, I’m going to go back to firefighting again. 

We went to Brainerd, Minn., for the Trans Am races and drag races, and the people in Brainerd were so nice. For our setup and tear-down crews, we used to go to Manpower and just hire people that they’d pick up off the street. And when we got to Brainerd, Minn., we ended up with off-duty highway patrol and sheriff deputies as our setup and tear-down crews. We actually had to stop going through Minnesota when we were going from state to state, because we’d get stopped every time we went through — the officers wanted to talk to us and see where we’d been and how we were. 

Anyway, I thought I wanted to live in Minnesota and I went and visited, because I had a couple girlfriends there, and I went and visited in November, before we came home for Christmas vacation. And I said, “How do you get to the grocery store in the snow?” And they said, ‘Oh, we just get on the snowmobile and go.’ And I said, “I don’t think I want to live here after all.” 

OC: I grew up in Minnesota, so I can relate. 

GW:Yeah, I mean, the drag strip was only 20 minutes from [Brainerd]. I said, “You know, this is this is great. This is perfect. And the people that owned the motel that we stayed at there, the first night, they invited us for dinner, and we ate dinner with them every night after that. Good, old Minnesota hospitality. 

OC: You sent Old Cars photos of your Torino station wagon and your Falcon. Do you happen to have either of those cars or any other old Fords these days? 

GW: Yes, I still have my station wagon. It’s a unique car in that it was one of 158 built, and mine’s the only one that the Fairlane Club knows still exists. 

OC: How many miles are on it now? 

GW: It’s fast approaching 300,000. I take it to car shows and it’s won lots of trophies.

If you like stories like these and other classic car features, check out Old Cars magazine. CLICK HERE to subscribe.

Want a taste of Old Cars magazine first? Sign up for our weekly e-newsletter and get a FREE complimentary digital issue download of our print magazine.

We know you love old cars, but do you collect anything else? Ever wonder about the baseball cards in a box in the basement or Grandma’s old coins in a jar?  Do you love history or spin vinyl? Head on over to Collect.com and see what you are missing. Collect.com is the who, what, when and where of the collecting world! https://www.collect.com/