This car, Lot 60, sold for $117,600, including buyer’s premium, at Bonhams’ Reno, NV, sale, on June 13, 2026.
Back in the early 1950s, long before the muscle-car era, there was no distinction between performance and luxury. Cadillac and Oldsmobile were GM’s performance leaders, as were Ford’s Lincoln and Chrysler’s New Yorker. In those days, if you wanted a fast American car, those were the options.
In 1949, Cadillac introduced its 331 V8, the first “modern” post-war automobile engine, utilizing overhead valves, design innovations and technical lessons learned during the war that allowed a much lighter, more-efficient and powerful engine. Chrysler countered with its “Fire Power” Hemi in 1951 and Ford followed with its “Y-Block” 317 in 1952.
Viva La Carrera
One of Mexico’s first post-war engineering projects was to build a single road that connected the entire country from Ciudad Juaréz on the U.S. border to Ciudad Cuauhtémoc on the Guatemalan border. It ran 2,178 miles from the deserts of the north to the mountains of the south, from 328 feet above sea level to 10,500. Most of the distance was at altitudes between 5,000 and 8,000 feet. To celebrate and promote the road’s completion, Mexico decided in 1950 to stage its own variation of the Mille Miglia, the Carrera Panamericana.
The first event was run from north to south, was limited to stock sedans with five seats, and attracted almost exclusively amateur entrants. After that, it ran from south to north, moved from early May to late November for drier conditions, and gained FIA certification as a points race for the International Championship, thus becoming far more professional and international. Five Carreras were run between 1950 and 1954, but plans for a sixth in 1955 were scrapped for safety concerns, following the Le Mans disaster that year. The Carrera, too, was a horribly dangerous race, with 27 fatalities in the five years it ran, one of the highest mortality rates in racing history.
With stock-car racing in its infancy and a national prohibition against speed events on public roads in the U.S., the Carrera was catnip to America’s “Big Three” automakers. They saw it as a chance to demonstrate the speed and durability of their flagship automobiles on North American soil. The 1950 race was won by amateur Hershel McGriff in an Oldsmobile, and the 1951 event was still mostly private entrants (with Ferrari’s semi-factory presence dominating). But in 1952, the Big Three were seriously in the game. By then, so were the Europeans, but classes had been established so that a 4,250-pound Lincoln didn’t have to compete directly with a 2,000-pound Mercedes, Lancia or Ferrari. That was just fine with everyone; the Europeans were there for international championship points, and the Americans were there for marketing moxie.
Team player
Having won their class in both 1952 and 1953, Ford’s Lincoln team went all out for 1954 with six team entries prepared by the best California speed merchants. Though technically stock, the engines had been “breathed on” with compression, camshaft modifications and general blueprinting to be sure they made or exceeded their official 205 horsepower. The chassis were upgraded with double shock absorbers in front, air-lift at the rear and hundreds of other little modifications, mostly within the rules. Ray Crawford, a wealthy and experienced amateur, was grudgingly allowed to have his car prepared with the factory team’s cars so long as he paid his own way, ran his own support team and generally stayed out of the factory’s way, becoming an unofficial seventh entry.
Lincoln had the first stock class starting positions for the race (#101, etc.) and used them. In accordance with the outsider vibe, Crawford chose to start last with race #149. He had a movie camera in his car and figured that he could get good footage if he passed some others. With the highest of expectations, the team roared out of the start and into the mountains, where things started to unravel like a Greek play, with Nemesis taunting the prideful. The highly tuned engines were foiled by lousy fuel, with three cars burning pistons on the first day, before another one drove off a cliff into the jungle. At Oaxaca, the first day’s finish, team Lincolns were 1st and 2nd across the line. In 5th position, having passed 24 competitors, was Crawford, who won the leg with an 82.5 mph average speed.
Crawford led the second leg with Indy 500 driver Bill Vukovich (aka “Vuky, the mad Russian”) chasing him, until Vuky overcooked a corner and somersaulted off a cliff. Nobody was seriously hurt, but by Mexico City, Lincoln was left with one factory car running (#103, Walt Faulkner) and Crawford comfortably ahead. When Crawford crossed the finish and headed for impound, a Lincoln bigwig hopped in his car and directed it to the Lincoln section, where factory mechanics pushed his support guys out of the way. Apparently, Crawford was now an official factory entry.
North of Mexico City, the road opened up into mostly open country, with fast running. Faulkner’s remaining team Lincoln got ahead and the two cars had some great dicing with Crawford’s movie camera still running, but his total time lead was enough that all he had to do was keep close to stay in 1st. At the end, Crawford won the stock class by just over a minute, with Faulkner’s team Lincoln taking 2nd right behind. He maintained a 92.5-mph average over the full distance, finishing three hours behind Maglioli’s winning Ferrari 375 Plus and 9th overall, but he had won the stock-car class for Lincoln, which is what mattered.
A bargain buy
Ford was thus put into a weird spot: It had won, but Crawford’s Lincoln wasn’t one of its team cars. The solution was to buy Crawford’s car for everything he had spent to run it, which he was happy to take. Ford then painted all the other cars to exactly match his and sent them off to star in showrooms around the country, after which records are lost. Nobody kept track of chassis numbers, so all anyone knows today is that our subject car is one of the original 1954 Carrera Lincolns, and it seems to be the only one to have survived. People have tried for years, but nobody can prove if this is Crawford’s or another.
That is probably no matter. It is very cool, beautifully restored and a singular remainder of a great part of America’s automotive history. You wouldn’t want to vintage-race it, but it’s not much money and most likely welcome anywhere, from car shows to prestige tours like the Colorado Grand. In terms of history and user bang for the buck, it was very well bought.
