Check for smoke out the pipe at initial crank too.  Amount, color, etc. can tell you things.

Nice, but a member of the enemy camp.  If I bought a Ford, my Dad would probably die just so he could roll over in his grave.

390 with a three-on-the-tree would qualify as rare, that's for sure.  Ford probably built a lot of them, but by now most of them have been wrecked, rusted away or had a floor shifter cobbled into them.

A friend of mine in high school had a '69 Thunderbird with a 429 wedge in it.  That car was fast, but the way it handled made it feel like a closed casket funeral waiting to happen.

One thing that I do find very irritating about old fords is that when the "Total Performance" era got started, during the early '60s with all the American muscle car competition, they were constantly developing new engines in order to best the competition.  They went through a remarkable number of engines in each of their V8 families, i.e. late Y Blocks, Ford-Edsel (FE), and the small block Windsors.  They must have been paying their engineers some serious overtime, as some of the engines were outmoded in less than a year's time, e.g. Ford 221 ci Windsor.  They also used a multitude of transmissions and transmission bellhousings that were specific to the engines.  To make a long story short, hardly anything is easily interchangeable between engines and transmissions from year to year so trying to "just dump another engine" or transmission into your old ford can be a real headache.  With a Chevy on the other hand, you can pretty much do whatever you want with minimal headache.  Again, I'm just talking about older cars.

The British have a soft spot for fast Fords.

Ford have a great motorsport tradition.

...with a lot of help from British racing engineers of course, Namely Cosworth.

My own fav though is Jaguar, who made beautiful sports cars.