DRIVING: That's what it's all
about!
A blog and website for automotive driving
enthusiasts, featuring news and opinion
about manufacturers of interest, significant
enthusiast cars, and driving them safely and well.
About this blog category: The main blog of DrivingEnthusiast.net
My procession of 11 brand new Fox and SN95 Mustangs ('79 thru '03 comparison chart) almost started with a Mercury Capri. It was late in the 1979 model year, the all-new (although Fairmont-based) Mustang had been on the market for several months, and better yet I could now actually afford my first brand new car.
At the time, I lived outside of Buffalo New York in the suburb of Williamsville. I was still in college, but I'd already started in my chosen industry. I had been driving in TSD rallies, and had talked to some SCCA folks at the car show a few months earlier and wanted to get involved in autocross. I spotted a red/red '79 Mercury Capri hatchback, with V-8 engine, manual transmission, and no other options (standard high-back vinyl buckets!) in the lot of a Lincoln-Mercury dealer located across from the Boulevard Mall near Maple and Niagara Falls Blvd. The price was workable, the dealer arranged financing ($145/month for 4 years), and a final deal was agreed upon. Until, that is, the dealer also insisted on adding rust-proofing and some other treatments.
Now this is Buffalo - the snow and rust belt. And it was a Ford, which meant it was doomed to rust as all Fords did then. But I was already a car enthusiast, and the thought of having rust-proofing on the cart was unacceptable. Rust-proofing back in those days was a black oily asphalt-type "goop" - you literally couldn't work under the hood without getting it on your arms. I didn't want it, but they wouldn't take no for an answer. So the deal was off, and they decided to keep my $100 down payment (can you believe the prices in those days?). What a bunch of jerks, and soon thereafter the dealership went out of business anyway. Good riddance.
Fortunately, a Ford dealer in the area (Al Maroone on Transit) had a '79 Cobra Mustang left on the lot - although it was a turbo 4-cylinder. This interested me technically and I appreciated the mid-range grunt the engine offered (although it had the HP of the 302 V-8, it didn't have the torque), and the handling was much better - the nose of the car was probably 100 pounds lighter. Downside: the car was yellow and had a large hood decal. I made the deal anyway, started autocrossing, and a year later zipped the decal off the hood. It was the first of two turbocharged 2.3 liter 4-cylinder Mustangs I owned (the second was an SVO several years later), and the first of three cars I've owned powered by turbocharged 2.3 liter engines (the third was a MazdaSpeed6 - whose engine trumps the first two 2.3s by far in sophistication, smoothness, mileage, power, torque, reliability, and every other possible measure).
The Cobra Mustang did well on the autocross track... although it didn't make for much of a high-speed trackday car. The Cobra had even smaller brakes all around than the V-8.
I really liked the good looks of the Capri versus the Mustang. I always thought I'd built a Mustang with the flared fenders of the Capri (even though they didn't have any more room inside than the Mustang). . Here's a commercial for an '80 Capri so you can see what they looked like (ignore the ugly hood scoop - that came along in 1980).
I never did get my Capri... although a few years later I did pick up an old German-made Capri as a winter car. That was an entirely different and unrelated Capri, with a 2-liter Pinto engine, a long-tube header, and an out-sized Weber carb. It also solved my winter rust problem, since I could leave my Mustang in a garage all winter.
Coincidentally, my late-model Mustang career was book-ended with "Cobra" Mustangs. The first one ('79) was good enough to start the entire string... the last one ('03) was an absolute quality disaster from the engineering nincompoops of SVT. You can read about the '03 here:
RSS Feed for the DrivingEnthusiast network
About the DrivingEnthusiast network
Index of all posts by title
