Photo: eBay User: fastturbodaddy (edited by autoevolution)
Undercover, unmarked police cars are the bane of a petrolhead's existence. By the time you realize the ops are trailing you in a red or blue Ford Explorer with steel wheels and dual exhaust pipes, it's usually already too late. But wouldn't you know, Ford Police interceptors have been doing this kind of thing for decades. Back in the early 1970s, highway patrol would snoop around not in an SUV but a big, floaty four-door Galaxie 500 sedan.
Such is the case with this 1972 Galaxie Police Interceptor coming to us for sale out of the little town Pocono Pines in Monroe County, Eastern Pennsylvania. If you can believe it or not, this hulking dinosaur of a machine was expected to keep up with the latest and fastest hot rods coming out of Detroit and elsewhere in the early-to-mid 1970s. Back when the scene from the Blues Brothers movie about cop cars having goodies like "cop shocks, a cop motor, cop shocks, and cop tires," actually meant something, the P-Code Ford Galaxie really was a force to be reckoned with.
Of course, Jake and Elwood Blues were driving a Dodge Monaco Police Interceptor, but the metaphor works just as well with this Ford. With a cop-specialized P-code 429 cubic inch engine hailing from Ford's 385 series of V8s, it's believed P-code 429s jetted as much as 100 horsepower more than civilian variants of the same engine. This was in large part owing to a larger combustion chamber and a compression rating of 9.8:1, all things that allowed all seven liters of all-American goodness to accelerate that little bit faster than the vast majority of motor vehicles a cop was liable to run across in the average American town in the 1970s.
Save for the rarest, most powerful American muscle cars of the era and a handful of European super coupes like the Lamborghini Miura and the classic Porsche 911, police-spec Galaxies really did drive quicker than its massive wheelbase and curb weight might lead on. Civilian Galaxie 500s equipped with a 351 cubic inch Windsor V8 could sprint from zero to 60 mph in around 12.5 seconds based on anecdotes from the period. With the P-Code 429 V8 under the hood, there's every reason to suspect this old cop car could make that sprint in well under ten seconds.
Granted, that's not impressive at all by modern standards. We might even call that slow. But in the context of the early 1970s, that wasn't too bad whatsoever. It also helps that the rest of the vehicle, four-speed automatic gearbox, vinyl seats, and all, is in pretty phenomenal shape for its age. For our money, this is the kind of classic muscle car auction worth checking out.
Of course, Jake and Elwood Blues were driving a Dodge Monaco Police Interceptor, but the metaphor works just as well with this Ford. With a cop-specialized P-code 429 cubic inch engine hailing from Ford's 385 series of V8s, it's believed P-code 429s jetted as much as 100 horsepower more than civilian variants of the same engine. This was in large part owing to a larger combustion chamber and a compression rating of 9.8:1, all things that allowed all seven liters of all-American goodness to accelerate that little bit faster than the vast majority of motor vehicles a cop was liable to run across in the average American town in the 1970s.
Save for the rarest, most powerful American muscle cars of the era and a handful of European super coupes like the Lamborghini Miura and the classic Porsche 911, police-spec Galaxies really did drive quicker than its massive wheelbase and curb weight might lead on. Civilian Galaxie 500s equipped with a 351 cubic inch Windsor V8 could sprint from zero to 60 mph in around 12.5 seconds based on anecdotes from the period. With the P-Code 429 V8 under the hood, there's every reason to suspect this old cop car could make that sprint in well under ten seconds.
Granted, that's not impressive at all by modern standards. We might even call that slow. But in the context of the early 1970s, that wasn't too bad whatsoever. It also helps that the rest of the vehicle, four-speed automatic gearbox, vinyl seats, and all, is in pretty phenomenal shape for its age. For our money, this is the kind of classic muscle car auction worth checking out.
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