Building a Classic Mercury Cougar As A Modern Restomod

Ford went and Thunderbird-ed a Mustang, and Mercury (plus that pool of fortunate first owners) reaped the rewards. Built to give Mercury a contender as the market reached peak pony car potential (with a redesigned Barracuda, plus the all-new Chevy Camaro and Pontiac Firebird all launching more or less simultaneously), the new-for-’67 Cougar’s mission was… The post Building a Classic Mercury Cougar As A Modern Restomod appeared first on The Online Automotive Marketplace.

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Dec 25, 2024 - 11:27

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Building a Classic Mercury Cougar As A Modern Restomod

Ford went and Thunderbird-ed a Mustang, and Mercury (plus that pool of fortunate first owners) reaped the rewards. Built to give Mercury a contender as the market reached peak pony car potential (with a redesigned Barracuda, plus the all-new Chevy Camaro and Pontiac Firebird all launching more or less simultaneously), the new-for-’67 Cougar’s mission was all over the place. It was meant to split the difference between the popular, populist Mustang and the personal-luxury Thunderbird in terms of image and comfort—a sports car the whole family could enjoy while transmitting a vibe of European opulence in a reliable all-American package.

It worked: Mercury built more than 150,000 Cougars for 1967, easily recouping its meager budget and representing a whopping 42 percent of the division’s sales for the season. They even ran in the fledgling SCCA Trans-Am series, winning four of 12 races (Dan Gurney won in Texas, David Pearson took the checkered flag at Riverside, and Peter Revson claimed the top step of the podium at both Lime Rock and Loudon, New Hampshire), putting Mercury second in the points tally for the year, just two points behind Ford in the over-2-liter class.

How, or whether, Cougar’s race pace and upscale image influenced buyers’ decisions is tough to quantify without interviewing original owners—but we know that some early Cougars left a longer-lasting impression than others.

“In 1967, my great uncle, Ottavio Mecca, bought a brand-new Inverness Green Mercury Cougar XR-7,” says John A. Schiavone of Lockport, New York. “My dad’s family moved to Western New York from Italy in 1962, and Ottavio followed a few years later—he even lived with my dad’s family for a few years. My dad, John P. Schiavone, was 7 years old at the time, and considered his 25-year-old uncle more like an older brother; Dad tagged along every chance he got. As a result, he rode shotgun in that Cougar over thousands of miles, including trips across the entire length of New York State on Route 20 to Massachusetts to see family that lived there.” Its swiftness occasionally brought the wrong kind of attention, however: “Uncle Ottavio got two speeding tickets in one day on one of those trips—obviously my dad wasn’t a great lookout!”

Uncle’s Ottavio’s upscale XR-7 model cost another $250 (about 8% more than a standard Cougar) and attempted to bring the upscale European GT vibe to a Dearborn product—even the alphanumeric nomenclature sounded like something you might see from Mercedes or Jaguar. The XR-7 was mostly about an upgraded interior, and the package featured: leather-and-vinyl seats; an overhead console with map lights; warnings lights for open doors, undone seatbelts, parking brake, and low fuel; three-spoke steering wheel; walnut-toned applique dash with tachometer and 120-mph speedo; an array of gauges (fuel, water temp, and amps) instead of base Cougar’s warning lights; door panels with map pockets; a suite of toggle switches on the dash to control various lighting functions; an oil pressure gauge on the passenger’s side of the dash, and more. A nice place to do business, for sure.

It would have been poetic, were Ottavio to hand his Cougar down to a car-crazy (and by this time Cougar-infatuated) nephew, but the timing was all wrong. “Uncle Ottavio got married in 1970, and in 1971 he traded his Cougar in on a new Pontiac Le Mans; he was just starting a family, and he wanted something a little bigger,” John says. Not helping matters: after four rough Buffalo, New York-area winters, the Cougar “just turned to rust.” Plus, John P. was eleven years old in 1971—a good half-decade before he’d be driving. While the car went away, the memories remained and gained strength.

It was an enthusiasm that John would infuse in his own son, John A.; together, they would build and own a series of collector cars, including a ’64 Comet Caliente, a ’68 Pontiac Firebird, a ’70 Mustang Mach 1 and then a ’71 Mach 1, and a pair of restomodded Datsun Z cars whose mention and relevance here will be clarified anon. Starting with a rough but drivable non-XR-7 Cougar discovered online in Arizona after a decade-long discussion over whether they should pull the trigger or not, father and son got the desert dweller home to Western New York and stripped it down, only to discover pinholes in the floor and rear wheel wells—proof that even in the desert Southwest, old cars can have rust issues.

Early on, they chose the restomod route, rather than a strict as-factory recreation driven by a fealty to John’s childhood memories. His son explains: “Uncle Ottavio’s car was an XR- 7, and while this was an A-code 289 car with Deluxe interior, we didn’t want to start with anything too special. We knew that this was going to be a restomod, and we didn’t want to commit muscle car sacrilege” by chopping up a factory four-speed car, or a 390-powered example, or even a genuine XR-7, which was barely 20 percent of Cougar production for ’67.

Going the restoration route, a real XR-7 might have made sense. But the younger John sees the practical side: “To restore something perfectly, with all of the correct finishes and hardware, takes a level of anal retentiveness that I don’t have. My dad may have it, but he doesn’t have the time. Doing a restomod allows you to do your own thing—you can make it how you want.” John’s experience with his Z cars played into the decision also. “My 280Z is a restomod, and that’s the car where we first dipped our toes in those waters. The Z proved that we could build a modified car that looks good, drives well, and appeals to a crowd. That experience gave us the confidence to do the Cougar.”

The Z also lists good handling among its attributes, which may have had an influence on the choice of TCI suspension for the Cougar. Or maybe it was cable television. “Once we were working on the shell, we started asking how we wanted it to come together,” John recalls. “Dad called me at college and told me to turn on Speed Channel; Stacey David was building a Cougar on his GearZ show, and they showed him cutting out the entire suspension and replacing it with TCI’s IFS and torque-arm rear suspension. And we asked each other, could we do that? We had a plasma cutter, so we thought we’d give it a go.”

The “427” call-outs imply big-block power, but this one is a small-block based on a 351W. An updated suspension eliminated the intrusive shock towers.

The TCI front suspension meant that the factory shock towers went away—which in turn meant more room in the engine bay. That could have meant anything from a side-oiler 427 to a late-model five-liter Coyote to a Godzilla crate engine, but … “We saw what was out there—347 strokers, 392 strokers, FEs…” John explains just before getting to the prize: “Then we came across the 427.”

This would be the Ford Performance Boss crate engine—427 cubes from a 351 Windsor block, with a SCAT stroker crank, aluminum heads, and the promise of 535 horsepower right out of the box. “It’s got all the power we’d want, it fits perfectly, and it’s got the legendary Ford displacement of 427 cubic inches. It’s not a big-block, but this car came with a small-block, and it seemed right that it still has a small-block in it. It all just came together.” The decision to go with fuel injection was also influenced by John’s experience with his Z: “We have a couple of classic muscle cars that are more-or-less original, and carburetors are finicky. So, I thought, let’s go FiTech throttle-body injection. It took a bit of learning and dialing in, but I’m a fan now.”

The bodywork and paint were all done at the Schiavones’ home. “We did the paint in a makeshift booth made of plastic sheets, 2x4s, and exhaust fans. Ten coats of clear to help sand out anything in the paint helped, too! But those other cars gave us the confidence to make a couple of cosmetic changes,” John says, adding that some were subtle, others less so. “It’s the correct ’67 Inverness Green on the top, but we were inspired by the ’68 Cougar GT-E [and by extension the ’67 Trans-Am racers—ed.] and painted the rockers and around the wheel openings. Instead of silver, we went with a darker metallic gray,” John details. The plan worked out: “Parked on asphalt, it just looks like the pavement is reflecting in the green paint; the effect is better than we’d hoped.”

A ’68 GT-E hood scoop was selected, as was a ’69 Cougar Eliminator wing for the trunk. A subtler touch is evident in the rear where ’67 Mustang exhaust reliefs were worked into the Cougar valence. The vertical chrome pieces that protected the Cougar’s rear pan have been eliminated, but the outboard backup lights remain. The effect is factory-level subtle.

And then there’s the interior—the European-influenced showpiece of the original XR-7, and pretty stunning here, too. For years, the Schiavones just knew that it needed to be tan—then another piece of European-sourced inspiration struck.

“At an event we attended during auction week in Scottsdale, we found a beautiful pair of 2007 Ferrari 599 GTB seats. The owner of the car hated that there was a built-in pass-through to accommodate a child seat, so he sourced a set of European-spec seats that didn’t have them,” John says. “He was letting these go for … well, let’s just say that if there had been another zero at the end of the price, no one would have been surprised. They ended up being less expensive than the aftermarket solutions we looked at.”

According to John, all of the power controls work, including the inflatable side supports, but as we explain, “Then it just snowballed from there.” As the seats were already decked out in tan leather, father and son had the rest of the interior trimmed to suit. Casullo’s Automotive Services in Kenmore, New York, sourced the leather and pulled the rest of the interior together. “The rear seat, the door cards, the console, all of it is in leather that matched those seats as close as we could get.” The laser-cut rosewood dash insert was made by John himself, in the brief time he worked at a laser-cutting manufacturing shop.

Recall that the original Mercury Cougar found success by squeezing itself into the gap between Mustang and Thunderbird. Transmitting a feel of European opulence in a reliable all-American package? Well, activating a 500-plus-horsepower fuel-injected Windsor via Ferrari seats, a hand-trimmed leather interior, and five forward speeds, sounds like a consummate blend of Stateside and Continental vibes. A sports car the whole family could enjoy? Just try wiping the smiles off the Schiavones’ faces. Uncle Ottavio would surely approve.

SPECIFICATIONS – 1967 MERCURY COUGAR

ENGINE

Block type: Ford Windsor “small-block” OHV V-8, cast-iron

Cylinder heads: Ford Performance “Z2” aluminum, 2.02/1.60-inch stainless valves

Displacement: 427 cubic inches

Bore x stroke: 4.125 x 4.00 inches

Compression ratio: 10.5:1

Pistons: Mahle forged, floating wrist pins

Connecting rods: SCAT forged-steel H-beam

Horsepower @ rpm: 535 @ 5,600

Torque @ rpm: 545 lb-ft @ 4,500

Camshaft type: Ford Performance hydraulic roller

Duration: 242/248 degrees, intake/exhaust (at 0.050)

Lift: .594/.618-in, intake/exhaust

Valvetrain: Ford Performance 1.65:1 ratio roller rocker arms, hydraulic roller lifters

Induction system: Edelbrock Super Victor single-plane aluminum high-rise intake manifold, FiTech fuel injection system with single 850-cfm four-barrel throttle body and 80-lb/hr injectors, Holley Sniper 400-lph in-tank electric pump

Lubrication system: Ford Performance high-volume gear-type pump, windage tray

Ignition system: MSD billet distributor locked out and controlled by FiTech system

Exhaust system: BBK long-tube Fox-body headers, electric cutouts, dual 2.5-inch exhaust, dual Borla stainless mufflers

Original engine: 289-cu.in. V-8