A Marauder May Raid Mercury’s 2001 Lineup, Helping It Recapture Its Youth
Mercury, a marque whose big cars haven’t topped the under-50 crowd’s gotta-have-one list in years, wants its youthful machismo back.
And what better way to regain it, the Irvine-based company’s newly transplanted executives figure, than to bring back a model whose very name evokes the hot-rod image that once defined the Ford Motor Co. unit’s offerings.
Think big. Think Marauder.
The roaring Merc V-8 of the 1960s, a car that could seat six people and scoot along at up to 140 mph.
Mercury officials won’t confirm it, but the company showed a Marauder concept at the Specialty Equipment Market Assn. trade show in Las Vegas last month and have done nothing to quiet reports that a production model is slated for release midyear in 2001.
“There’d be a good market for it,” said industry analyst George Peterson of AutoPacific Inc. in Santa Ana. “Look at the success of the Impala SS,” he said, referring to the full-size, high-performance coupe that Chevrolet produced and couldn’t keep in stock in the mid-’90s.
The black-on-black Marauder concept was built on a rear-wheel-drive 1999 Grand Marquis platform. But the stock 200-horsepower, 4.6-liter V-8 promises to hit the streets at close to 300 horses thanks to a Ford Special Vehicle Operations division supercharger and slew of other performance products manufactured by the aftermarket companies SEMA represents.
If the car does make it into production, one Mercury insider says, it would probably continue to employ the aftermarket components, strengthening the company’s ties to the huge automotive performance and appearance industry centered in Southern California. Ford has a history of using aftermarket tuners and modifiers to produce limited-production cars.
“It definitely would bring younger buyers into Mercury showrooms,” Peterson said, noting that the average age of a standard Grand Marquis buyer is 72.
The car displayed in Las Vegas is aimed squarely at the 40s to 50s set. It rides on oversize custom wheels from Enkei in Michigan--17-inch diameters in front, 18-inchers in the rear, all wrapped with high-performance Pirelli P-Zero radial tires.
Oversized 2.25-inch-diameter dual exhaust pipes help relieve engine pressure, while a high-volume, oil-saturated air filter by Riverside-based K&N; Engineering helps keep the fuel-injected, supercharged engine breathing freely. To improve the big car’s handling, Ford’s Special Vehicle Operations team installed its own oversize sway bars along with high-performance shocks from Edelbrock Corp. in Torrance.
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The original Marauders, built in 1963-64 and 1969-70, were souped-up, dressed-up versions of the Mercury Monterey fastback coupes of those years, says Gary Richards, a Riverside restorer of vintage Fords and Mercurys and West Coast director of the 1,500-member International Mercury Owners Assn. They came with V-8s that ranged from 265 to 360 horsepower, depending on displacement, carburetion and other tuning tweaks.
From 1965 through ‘68, Mercury offered cars with “Marauder” engines but had no specific Marauder body styles.
Bringing the line back, Richards said, “is a great idea.”
“There are a lot of guys out there in their late 40s, 50s and 60s who grew up with big cars with big engines,” he said. “Having a car like this with horsepower and good handling would bring them back to the Ford and Mercury days of the early 1960s.”
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Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached via e-mail at john.odell@latimes.com.
