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The Dirty Cougar: Unexpected Rhinoplasty And A Warning For Winter Weather


The Dirty Cougar: Unexpected Rhinoplasty And A Warning For Winter Weather

The moment the clock struck 5 p.m. yesterday, was the moment that I fully intended to shut my phone off so that my wife and I could enjoy a night out for our anniversary together without any sort of interruption. Our original plans, which would’ve involved a steakhouse in Las Vegas, were certainly shot this year but I’m good with wherever so long as she’s across the table and happy from me. But as we were settling into the booth, right about the time the bread came out for the appetizer, my phone went off. My buddy Chris was calling in…which seemed odd. And, unfortunately, my gut instinct that something was not right was well founded.

Chris has been taking care of the Dirty Cougar, the 1987 Mercury Cougar LS that we dug out of a backyard, revived, raced, and brought back to life. Ever since he took custody, he’s been making marked improvements on the rather unloved Mercury, and the last time I saw the car it was as good as ever. It sounded healthy, it was running strong, and his kid had taken a liking to cruising the car around. And that all ended on a rainy afternoon when some yokel pulled in front of him and stopped dead without realizing that there was a car behind them. The Cougar didn’t have a prayer.

Not that the Cougar was pretty to begin with…the front end had already been re-arranged once a decade ago and we were still running the busted nose cone, Grand Marquis headlight and Dodge Ram corner light on the bad side, but the impact folded the hood and shoved the good fender underneath the driver’s door. Dejected, Chris had the car towed home. The kid is all right, shaken up but uninjured. We will be looking over the damage more closely this weekend…I’m expecting a dead radiator, potentially an injured fan. And, obviously, the nose cone is completely wasted, which is freaking fantastic…1987-88 Mercury Cougar parts are right up there with whatever the hell Indiana Jones is stealing out of a tunnel this week. We’ll pull the battery out and curb-stomp the hood back into place, probably put in hood pins to keep it down. I’ll pull the headlights out of the Rough Start Fox and donate them to the cause, they’ve been replaced already. And I guess we’ve got our King of the Heap car for the year, something that hadn’t been settled yet.

We didn’t want to take the car out for a third year. We were hoping to get the rest of the Cougar polished up to be presentable and continue to enjoy what had been a cheap, fun knockaround coupe. Now the question is, do we find a body shell to transplant the running gear into? Do we just salvage the 302/AOD combo out of here and ditch the body and sit on the powertrain for a bit? Those are questions that will come later. But for now, take our story with a bit of warning: the weather is going south in a hurry. We’ve got saturated roads covered in fallen leaves right now, and by next week, we will see temps getting below freezing at night. Give yourself room between the car in front of you so you have time to react. Don’t be the brake-checking ass that way too many people have succumbed to being. Sure, this is a cheap coupe nobody cared about until we put forth the effort, but all the same, it’s somebody’s project car, a machine they cared about. Be careful out there.


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