MERCURY MONTEREY
HEAVY METAL
The car magazines and the websites dealing with the same today are full of ‘barn-find’ stories. Garry’s place is one big barn find. Each barn has its own amazing and eclectic selection of cars, enough to keep a magazine like this going for years.
Garry walks around them exclaiming, “I just loved the colour”, “I just love that square shape”, “look how plush that interior is”, or “it’s so beautifully ugly”. He’s just full of enthusiasm and appreciation for bits of car design that the normal car aficionado misses completely. Sure, Garry knows about the mechanical bits underneath, but the look, feel, and emotion of the cars seem to be the main attraction. There’s a Triumph 2000 parked in his driveway, “Don’t you just love
that colour?” We say that it is just fine, and it is.
A mix of Mercurys
For this feature, Garry has extracted not one, not two, but three Mercury fastbacks from 1968. One is on the back of a truck — “bought for spares”. Understandably, sourcing any new bits here, glass, for example, would be very difficult, so it pays to have your own supply of bits and pieces sitting right where they may be needed. The other two cars, though, are ‘runners’. The first is a two-tone green monster, sitting there all primeval and dangerous looking; the next looks very neat and tidy, still huge, though, and in very shiny red.
In 1968, many American cars looked a bit like road-going version of US Navy aircraft carriers. These Ford-sourced Mercurys must have looked very futuristic among that competition. The exterior view is startling, to say the least. There’s still an impression of size — the car looks immense — but it is also low, aggressive, and, among its contemporaries, very, very stylish.
Sliding into the seat is like taking your place in a chair on the deck of that aircraft carrier. The bonnet (err, I think that should be ‘hood’) stretches way out in front and is bigger than Texas. The seat is large, think lounge chair large, and the dashboard is about as far away as the TV. The long lap belt spanning the chair would do nothing to hold you in place, but it’s one of the few concessions to safety that existed in a late-’60s American car.
Farmyard capers
The motor starts instantly, and reminds one immediately of Steve Earle’s song about Copperhead Road: “I still remember that rumblin’ sound”. As that sonic rumble bounces around, Garry says, “You wanna play up; you feel 16 again”. Incredible but true; it’s like having a shot of youth rejuvenator.
The car is huge by today’s standards, and those Detroit designers never did their work with New Zealand farmyard driveways in mind, so, at the speed we whistle down that drive, each gate feels very narrow as we shoot through — pretty obviously the bit about ‘playing up’ has cut in. In 1968, the designers expected this car to be doing these speeds on blacktop roads, not on New Zealand farm driveways.
No amount of 1968 pop music could possibly drown out the noise of those twin pipes — or, for that matter, the graunching coming from the car bottoming out across the undulations in the driveway. The ongoing fishtailing on the gravel surface reminds us that this car is no World Rally Championship (WRC) wannabe. No Worksafe person would be brave enough to be close enough to see what is happening, so that isn’t a worry.
The brakes don’t really do an adequate job of pulling the car up, but then that’s what you got in ’68. By now, the full playing-up mode has definitely cut in. There’s no more gentle fishtails but deliberate huge spins across the paddocks. Some 50 years after this car was made, people pay good money to see young people with fancy names drifting their cars as a sport, but out on the farm it is manic fun in a car simply never designed for this: huge old V8 roaring, the sound and feel of a couple of tonnes of US car sliding as it was never intended to do, and a huge grin from Garry as he enjoys the car for his own special reasons.
Garry is convinced that the car would cruise all day above our speed limit — it might well do that, but it’s probably safer to push the boat out a bit and race and spin across paddocks in a car never designed with that sort of thing in mind.
Hard to hold on to
Ford placed Mercury in its range just above the cars that were simply Fords to split the gap between Ford and its Lincoln division. It then split the Mercury market even further by producing different-spec versions of these particular cars. The Monterey was a lower-end-spec car — no power assistance on the brakes or steering and the ‘smaller’ 390-cubic-inch (5.7-litre) motor. The next one up was the Parklane: 427 cubic inches (seven litres) of V8. There was power everything on that one, and there was a performance option called the ‘Cyclone’.
The last Mercury rolled off the production line in Detroit in 2011 — 73 years of “entry-level premium brand”, according to Ford, with the company pulling the plug on this brand to consolidate production and marketing, as they say,
So, back in ’68, these fastbacks from Mercury were fast like their names: 200-plus kilometres-per-hour top speed; thirsty (but nobody was counting then) — 22 litres per 100km at times; large and comfortable; and only just stoppable, so long as you had the room. People with names like Cale and Leeroy were racing them in Nascar. That was back when the Nascar guys measured front-tyre wear by looking through a little window in the footwell to see how it was doing. In ’68, the one called Cale won at Daytona at an average speed of 167.2mph (269.1kph) — even faster than we’re going in Garry’s driveway.
Ford placed Mercury in its range just above the cars that were simply Fords to split the gap between Ford and its Lincoln division