There's No Industry as Family-Oriented as the Automobile Business
- Nov 27, 2025
- 1 min read
And no sport is more family-oriented than car racing. Here’s why.
From Road & Track
Bill Ford—great-grandson of Henry and executive chair of Ford Motor Company—recalls a time in 1968 when his dad, William Clay Ford Sr., drove the Indy 500 pace car, a Ford Torino convertible packing a 428 Cobra Jet. “I was there all week with my father as he was doing the practice laps,” Ford says. “I’ll never forget, the chute at Indy was very narrow to exit the track and go into the pits, and it was built for narrower race cars. So this land yacht enters at 140 mph. . . . It was an incredible adrenaline rush.”
Ford was 11, “a very impressionable age,” he says. The memory became so special to him that he set out to locate that Torino when his father died in 2014. “It looked like we were never going to find it,” he says. Then his buddy Kevin Marti, who writes the famous Marti Reports, solved the mystery. “It was in Iowa and not in good shape,” Ford recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t care what shape it’s in. I have to have that car.’” He purchased the Torino and had another friend, Colin Comer, begin a restoration to bring it back to the condition it was in when Ford was a kid and lapping the Brickyard with his dad.
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