By the end of the 1969 model year, the Ford Motor Company had churned out over 129,050 chassis bearing the “Torino” nameplate.

Though Ford’s motorsports efforts continued to bring success at Le Mans, however, the brand was losing its grip on the domestic NASCAR series.

In a rapid move to correct this “issue of competition,” Ford quickly resolved to produce a new platform available to NASCAR teams, and—as homologation rules would require—the general public as well.

So, while the assembly lines of the main Ford plants churned out chassis after chassis, month after month, a team of designers and engineers holed up in an otherwise nondescript building at Ford’s Dearborn campus had already begun working on the specific and purposeful development of a new, limited edition Torino model; the Talladega.

This chassis offered here is one of two known Ford Torino Talladega prototype mules modified by Ford’s Experimental Vehicles Building.

Sequestered from the Lorain, Ohio assembly line on Sep...