This story starts off innocently enough: with the Cadillac limo on death row in a junkyard in Kentucky, there was a need for a replacement car to run at the King of the Heap winter racing series. And the three guys who ran with me on the first event were rookies to road racing and wanted to do more. I don’t need my arm twisted to go racing and to get something that provides content for you, readers, but we had a problem: the Cadillac’s 5,080 pound bulk only equaled a $333 payday at the scrappers. I was willing to add in to make it an even four hundred dollars (the money from scrapping the SN-95 Mustang shell would fit the bill easily), and while the others said they’d help, we all knew that this was cheap-ass racing at it’s finest…lowest possible entry price wins. With that in mind, Scott Renshaw, Chris Conn and I started ripping though every car-for-sale site that catered to the local area around Bowling Green to see what we could come up with. Early on, the selection was narrowed down to either the cheapest Fox body known to man, a crappy V6 SN-95 Mustang that actually ran, or some kind of Ford Thunderbird/Mercury Cougar/Lincoln Mark of some kind because I already had some parts, parts we didn’t have were cheap enough, and in the worst possible scenario, I get more Fox-body parts to use when it’s time to build up the Great Pumpkin Mustang.

Scott had found this 1987 Mercury Cougar LS first. We had narrowed the choices down to three cars: this one, a 1985 Cougar that narrowly missed becoming a dirt-track car, and an $800 1997 Thunderbird that looked quite streetable. We sent the owner a message weeks ago, and when we didn’t hear back we figured that the car was sent to the scrapper before we had a chance. Except, it hadn’t. The night before the January KOTH race, a few days ago, I got a phone call asking if I was still interested. The seller had a few vehicles in their backyard and the city of Evansville, Indiana crawling up their backside to get rid of them. I couldn’t borrow a truck and trailer fast enough, and on a sunny Sunday morning, Conn and I left my house to go retrieve our prize.

Did I say “retrieve”? Sorry, my bad…I meant “excavate”. After the brakes failed enough to cause the Mercury to make contact with something headlight-high and unmovable, the car was parked where you see it and had remained there for, if I heard right, nine years. Nine years of sinking into the soft earth up to the hubcaps. You could tell under the years of grime and algae that this was a really nice car outside of the crash damage, so we started making a list of things we’d need. A can of Fix-a-Flat for the rear tire was on the list, as were a few gallons of fresh gasoline. We were convincing ourselves that we could just wrench out the Cougar from the yard and drive it onto the trailer. Yeah…blame that on Roadkill, or the YouTubers who make this kind of shit look like a breeze, but it didn’t seem out of reach. Once we got the ancient battery out of the car and a fresh one hooked up and heard the 5.0L spin over beautifully, we were over the moon. All we had to do was figure out why the engine wouldn’t fire and we’d be home free!

As I’m sure a couple of you guessed, we had a slight incident with the original starter solenoid when it stuck on, leaving the 5.0L stuck in cranking mode. That’s cheap enough to replace, so we added that to our shopping list. The coil was also on the list because we suspected it might have aged out as well, it was cheap enough too, and it wouldn’t hurt anything. We made sure that we were getting fuel into the rails by pushing open the Schrader valve on the line and decided to break for lunch right after we got a nicely pressurized shot of gasoline. We’d get the fuel and the parts and get back to the car right at the warm point of the day.

That was the last part of the day where our optimism wasn’t broken. After our parts run, Conn started to show signs of getting sick, and a cold that I’ve been fighting for a little bit flared back up. We tried and tried, but the Mercury just wasn’t having any of our bullshit…no starting, whatsoever. Ok, round two: let’s drag it out of the backyard and get it onto the trailer. I emphasize “drag”, because two feet after we got the Cougar out of it’s four ruts that it had been living in for years, the passenger rear wheel locked up tight. I was “MF-ing” like I was Samuel L. Jackson after he stubbed his pinky toe on furniture. Using the Mercury’s teeny-tiny little jack and tire iron, we got the wheel off and realized that the drum wasn’t going to break loose, no matter how violently I smacked it with the lug wrench. Instead, I disconnected the brake line to that corner, bolted up the wheel and tire, threw Conn behind the wheel of the Cougar and proceeded to drag the car around the block, the borrowed Silverado in 4-Lo, until the wheel freed up some. 

With Conn quickly getting sicker than a dog, we ultimately just winched the car onto the trailer with a come-along, strapped the car down tight, and drove back home, explaining to our spouses how a five-hour trip turned into a twelve-hour ordeal. I didn’t even park the truck and trailer so much as I just left it in a field next to my in-laws’ house. It was dark and I was cursing up a storm, still. You want to know how bad I was seething? My mother-in-law offered me bourbon balls. That’s the closest she will ever come to offering me a shot of something to calm my nerves.

The next morning, refreshed and ready to work on the car once more, I headed back to the field. Using my father-in-law’s tractor, I drug the Cougar off of the trailer and returned the borrowed equipment, then did the one thing I really needed to do: wash the damn car. Consider it a psychological need…looking at this wretched mess of a personal luxury coupe was one thing, but seeing it covered in algae, dust, tree sap  and whatever else was messing with me. This wasn’t even a thorough wash, just enough to knock the crap off of the outside. And it worked…each progressive wash-rinse cycle proved that the car was actually really decent. Feeling better, I made a plan for work that went down yesterday.

By all accounts, the issue seemed to be a lack of spark to the engine when I broke out my tools. And a quick review of TOCCA and CoolCats (Fox Thunderbird/Cougar forums) quickly pointed a finger to the TFI (Thick Film Ignition) module that is attached to the distributor. It’s filled with solid-state parts suspended in an electrolytic film that gets roasted from engine heat, prompting it to fail. Think of it as Ford’s answer to Chrysler’s Lean Burn computer. It either works or doesn’t, and chances were very good that the TFI was dead as a doornail. After cleaning away some of the squirrel habitation from the distributor location, the dizzy was yanked out and the TFI was swapped. Surely to God, this would do it, right? Sit in, key on, and…spin, no fire. Frustrated and seeing red mist again, I keyed it slowly, holding the key to START and kind-of-sort-of letting the spring return it to RUN…and that’s when the Cougar gave me a clue: halfway between RUN and START, the starter disengaged and the 5.0L chugged into life for a second, then died when I released the key.

The ignition cylinder. You have got to be kidding me. No joke, a combination of the ignition tumbler and a loose connector right behind the tumbler in the column, hidden by the plastic cover, kept the Mercury from firing off. As of writing, I’m happy to report that the 5.0L is alive and runs shockingly smooth for an engine that hasn’t done anything for a decade, the transmission has at least two gears at the moment, and that the car was able to limp itself from the field to the driveway of BangShift Mid-West on three questionable tires and one that is only being held together with an entire can of Fix-a-Flat.

So what are the plans? We still need to do more cleaning (especially underhood) and we need to get useable wheels and tires on the car for some shakedown testing. We are hunting down a set of 15″ four-lug wheels…anybody got a set of late 1980s Mustang GT turbines for sale dirt cheap? The brake system needs a thorough going-through to make sure we don’t stuff the other side of the nose into something solid, and our first event, if all goes well, is the February King of the Heap date. And we’re keeping our eyes open for some replacement sheetmetal so we can fix this busted cat up a little bit. We will see what happens, but for now, we will be treating the Dirty Cougar as our in-house $5,000 Challenge car. Every bit of coin spent on the Mercury will be tallied up. Any parts, the registration, whatever is needed to get this Cougar back on the road will be accounted for here. If we are able to horse-trade or we get free parts, we will account for them as necessary.

Dirty Cougar running total:

• 1987 Mercury Cougar LS – $400
• Starter solenoid, Fix-A-Flat, funnel: $32.50
• Coil: $25.67
• Ford TFI module: $42.39
• Ford ignition tumbler with keys: $19.60

Total Investment: $520.16