No visual enhancements were made to the car's exterior and interior, so we get the original lines on the outside and the standard appointments inside: leather seats, power windows, tinted glass, power seats, and air conditioning, among others.

The engine runs a 3-speed automatic transmission. The original engine is there, complete with the three Holley carbs which helped it develop a total of 340 hp and 430 pounds of torque. The Thunderbird seems to pack most of the gear it originally had on. According to Barrett-Jackson, the auction house that's responsible for selling this Thunderbird, just 37 of them were produced in this configuration back then, making it even more special. That meant not many of these things were made. Just to give you an idea, the one you're looking at now had an MSRP of $6,286, which would be $63,209 in today's money. The combination of an M-code engine and the Sports Roadster package was rather expensive, even for a luxury car the likes of the Thunderbird. The engine was of course the only version available at the time, the then-new 390ci unit.

The M-code Thunderbird on the other hand meant first and foremost the car used three two-barrel carburetors over the engine instead of a single four-barrel one. It came with several unique features, including wire wheels of Kelsey-Hayes provenance, a removable tonneau cover made in fiberglass, a passenger grab bar and, obviously, all the required badging. The Sports Roadster is one of the packages offered back then by the Blue Oval for the Thunderbird. That's what the 1963 model you see here has to offer: the looks of a third-gen Thunderbird, the bling of it being a Sports Roadster, and the rarity of the letter M in its VIN. Especially when the example is a rare one. My poison is of course the first gen, but the other two aren't shabby either, and my blood gets pumping when I come across representatives of gen two and three as well. But the first three generations, which cover the period from 1955 to 1963, surely were. It burned through a total of 11 generations and true, not all of them are the pinnacle of Ford's work. The Thunderbird was around for a long time, as it wasn't pulled from production for good until 2005. Introduced in 1955, it completely transformed what people thought of car design before the war, and would probably have no problem winning any beauty contest even today, in the age of hypercars. Of all the cars mentioned above and the many others I left out, the Ford Thunderbird is my personal favorite. And it's all because of the spell they still cast on us thanks to their design, their engineering, and what they meant for the world. Many of these cars are no longer around, but we still come across them almost on a daily basis. It is then that names like the Chevrolet Bel Air, Chevrolet Impala, Plymouth Barracuda, Chevrolet Chevelle, Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, and many, many others were first used. Fueled like everything else by the euphoria of the war's end, and later on by a complete switch in ways of thinking, carmaking enjoyed its best times during these two decades. It's the 1950s and 1960s I'm talking about, two decades that will forever be listed in the industry's history books.

Ford thunderbird 1963