We were looking thru our site statistics this morning and noticed 10 unique visits from the Probe Club of the Netherlands ( http://phpbb3.probeclub.nl/ - suggest <right click> and <open in new tab>) over the past few weeks. Apparently they just discovered our site and blogs and had been going thru some parts of it looking at our material. There are also about a dozen Ford Probe club sites on the web from around the world - although only the folks from the Netherlands have found us so far.
We hadn't received any attention that we know of from Ford Probe enthusiasts before, but we do routinely get thousands of hits per month from groups dedicated to other oldie-but-goodie Fords such as the SVO and SHO. We've got a lot of unique material for those great cars on the site, as well as what is probably the web's largest collection of materials on the 2000 SVT Mustang Cobra R (which few people have dug out of our site - so far). Yes, we also covered the now-defunct SVT, even though their increasingly poorly engineered and tested products ended so disastrously for us (the more they changed the base production Mustang, the worse the quality got).
Unfortunately, we only have a very little material covering the Probe for this site. However, we do have personal experience with the 1993-1997 Ford Probe. We had two in the family that were leased and provided exemplary service and fun. The last one was a gorgeous dark green with a gray leather interior. I also had several Probe GTs as rental cars on business trips. One trip in 1993 included a fabulous early morning 100-MPH run across the Everglades turnpike in Florida in which the GT was perfectly quiet, stable, and comfortable. And during my time with Microsoft in Redmond, I noticed a very nicely done 1997 Ford Probe GT with a plethora of HKS parts. Unfortunately, I never did find out who owned it - undoubtedly the owner worked even crazier hours than I did because the car was always there, day and night.
We did - just once - cover what some people controversially refer to as the predecessor to the Probe, the Ford EXP:
And we do have a considerable amount of material covering the FWD Mercury Cougar (and it's European version, the Ford Cougar), including the version of it designed by SVT and then canceled at the last possible moment before production (just after it was shown at SEMA). Even worse, the Europeans got the SVT-engined version shipped to them anyway as the "ST200".
Ford has nothing like this in it's lineup these days, at least in North America, and that hurts. Whether the upcoming Ford of Europe Capri (based on the next-gen Focus platform) will get over here or not is debatable, especially given the life-threatening financial "situation" of the parent company. We'd like to see a sporty and lightweight FWD car offered in North America, even though it will take sales away from the Mustang (which is clearly dated and overweight these days).
We're going to plan to do some research on the Ford Probe, at least the 1993-1997 "2nd gen" version. Look for it in the coming months. To support the Probe better, we've added a new blog category specific to the Probe, as well as a dedicated RSS feed:
