New 'Bird Soars ; Cruising is back and here's the car to do it in.(Evaluation)(Brief Article)

The first time we slid into the new Thunderbird the radio was set to AM, which was entirely appropriate for a car like this, since that's what Frank and The Boys would have listened to way back when. It wasn't just any old AM station, though. The radio started playing old tunes way outside our demographic from a station far over on the edge of the dial that we'd never heard before, kind of a Twilight Zone moment. It was almost a pre-oldies format. There were grand old classics from Nat King Cole, Perry Como and Frank Sinatra-crooners from when it really meant something to croon. We left the dial there, stuck on a Sinatra song we particularly liked, and cruised around town, the Chairman of the Board riding shotgun. The music, like the car, harkened back to an earlier, simpler time when T-Birds ruled the earth, classy dames wore mink stoles and dapper gents in blazers wore their hats at rakish angles and cruised

The Strip to these very same tunes.

``Do be do be dooooo...'' Frank crooned.

It was the perfect reminiscence because that era, or what is popularly remembered of that era, was something more of style than substance. Cars back then had big, fat V8s and ran well in long, straight lines but couldn't turn a corner or brake worth a plug nickel.

The new Thunderbird is better than those cars, of course, better in almost every mechanical way than the classic cruisers of the '50s and '60s. It has pretty much the same platform as the Lincoln LS and Jaguar S-Type, for instance, and it shares the Lincoln's 3.9-liter, 252-hp V8 and five-speed automatic transmission. So mechanically it's very competent. But it still drives more like an old luxo-style schmoozer on the way up the Baker grade to Vegas than like an M5 on the way to Laguna Seca. ``Relaxed sportiness'' is the corporate-approved term engineers and executives throw around in interviews, and it's accurate. The car is more of a boulevardier than a sports coupe. It is stylish before it is anything else.

Which, as Frank himself might've said, is not necessarily a bad thing.

The first time you see the Thunderbird in person, or in sheetmetal, the edges look sharper, the lines look more graceful, the whole car seems longer and more elegant than it did in all those Ford press photos from the Detroit auto show. You notice subtleties like the turquoise-inlaid bird on the hood and deck, the perfect proportion of the opera windows in the optional, removable hardtop, the absence of even a key cylinder in the trunklid to keep the lines uncluttered. The attention to purity of form is surprising. You almost wonder if the designers didn't try to sneak a shaved version with no door handles past the suits.