Resurrecting Bordinat’s Secret Coupe

In 1965, tucked deep inside Ford’s Design Center, a small skunkworks team quietly sketched a car no one had asked for but everyone secretly wanted. The Lincoln Continental was America’s design zenith — clean, formal, and presidential — but a few rogue designers wondered: What if Lincoln had a true performance grand tourer?

Under Eugene Bordinat’s watch, a pair of stylists and a young clay modeler mocked up a shortened, two-door Continental “Sport Coupe,” its beltline lowered, its roofline swept back, its cowl redesigned with crisp, machined geometry decades ahead of its time. They even sketched turbine-inspired wheels that couldn’t be built with 1960s tooling. The concept never made it past a single 1:4 clay. The project was shuttered, the files boxed, and by 1968 the team had scattered across Dearborn.

Fifty years later, an estate sale cracked open one of those long-forgotten boxes. Inside: grainy photos, a set of vellum drawings, and a note that simply read, “Someday, someone will build it.”

That someone decided “someday” meant now.

Using a tired ’60s four-door Continental as raw material, the car was reborn as the lost Sport Coupe: the roof shortened, the body re-proportioned, the lower cowl re-imagined in CNC-cut billet just as the original team had dreamed. Modern wheels replaced the impossible turbine sketches, and the stance was set the way the modeler once wished he could have sculpted it.

A forgotten design experiment from Ford’s golden era now lives — finally made real.

[note: This is a cleaned-up version of a design project that I did about 12 years ago but the real 1:1 scale project never got finished unfortunately.]