Anyone who has read Stuart Gibbard’s Ford Tractor Story Part One 1917-1964 will realise that it is an exceptional volume with a wealth of accurate detail which must be unmatched in any other book about a marque of tractors.
Part Two, covering 1964-1999 is 32 pages longer than the earlier book and has 380 illustrations, most of them colour photographs from Ford’s archives.
By the time this volume starts, Ford was a mature company. The story now was one of immense growth, starting with the ‘worldwide’ 6X range launched in 1964 followed by a host of new models and features as the line expanded and became technically more sophisticated. Takeovers of New Holland and Versatile, followed by the merger with Fiat, created one of the most powerful agricultural organisations in the world, with 6,000 dealers in 160 countries.