Cobra Jet Wins!
That was the big news starting in 1968 and this Cougar is one of only 14 XR7-G’s to get Cobra Jet motivation.
Congrats!! Well deserved!
Congrats Bill !!!
Excellent bill, glad to see you made the ride of the month. I know I voted for the other guy, but I couldn’t make up my mind. 
Anyone know if the Blue CJ in the ad still exists ?
Now Bill, we all know there’s more to this story than what you posted! Each ROTM has a history, and you gotta tell! 
Congratulations on both counts Bill. Let us know how everything went as soon as the hangover subsides. 
I would like to echo my congrats (on both accounts) as well. The real beauty of Bill’s G is that it is a driver! Valuable? Yes. One of the “holy grail” Cougars? Yes. Beautiful colors combination? Yes. Does it have “character” (flaws)? Yes. But most of all, it is a driver! (Bill tell us the story again of the exhaust system “tinging” in the gas station after a evening ride!).
Regards,
Bob
Outstanding! For those who haven’t had the opportunity to see this beauty, she’s better than any picture could portray. On a trip up to a rodeo in Payson, I was priviledged to spend an hour or two in Bill’s “Cat House” and see/hear about his entire pride of Cougars including his gorgeous Cardinal Red 427 E-Cat; but this baby was the one that had me asking for a rag/towel/mop to clean up my drool. 
My son (then 12) was under strict and repeated orders to “Touch NOTHING!!!” especially around this car.
Now, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease Mr. B, type up the story you told my wife and son and myself about the shape that beauty was in when you first saw her; as compared to how she looks now.
That’s the REAL “labor of love” story behind this beautiful car. 
Congratulations Bill! This is the car I spent the most time looking over when I was down for BJ earlier this year. What a great car with a wonderful story!
Thanks guys, I will be back with more details. The guests are still here following the wedding, so computer time is limited. Betweent the wedding and the OSU football victory I had a lot of reasons to sleep in today… Tylenol…
WARNING: MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS!
My stories run so long that I have been known to suck all of the oxygen out the room…
Even for me this is along one.
The Internet is a dangerous thing. Make that one entry into Google and it can change your life. That’s what happened when I entered Mercury Cougar into the search engine. I hadn’t driven a Cougar for probably 10 years, hadn’t even really given any serious thought to one for longer than that. (My lapse can be attributed to a serious bout with the British car bug, a Triumph TR6 in the mini storage remains as the last visible scar). And then there were the years of learning about the finest varieties of German rust, but I digress. This is about Cougars.
In September of 1967 my favorite aunt Vertie Belle (her real name) took delivery of a brand new ’67 standard décor interior lime green rocket. Since the car arrived on my birthday, it seemed only right that it should also, in some way, be mine too. The least I deserved was to get to accompany my dad on the test drive. Now Dad was a very frugal guy. He was a firm believer in the advantages and benefits of the Ford straight six. Gas mileage was his quest, and the Falcon his steed. But when it came to somebody else’s car, well that’s a different story. Let them buy the gas and we’ll haul some hay! So a test-drive in the new Cougar wouldn’t be dull. Back then he called it pick up. As in, man this car has some real pick up when you step on the gas. The Cougar had great pick up. Dad punched it on some hot asphalt and before we knew it, that little Cougar was going sideways down the street in a cloud of bias-belted tire smoke. Cool! When we returned to the assembled group of aunts and uncles to report our findings, dad allowed as to how the car had plenty of pick up, and I couldn’t stop smiling. According to my older wiser sister, the Cougar appeared at just the right point for a very impressionable boy to be marked for life. She likens it to something akin to hatchling geese that mistake a passing lawn mower for their mother, following it mindlessly around the yard. So it was that I became Cougar challenged.
Like many other forms of maladjustment, the illness remains just below the surface, ready to manifest itself at any moment in the purchase of a Cougar. My first real car, the first car picked out based upon what I wanted and not just what I could afford, was a 67 Cougar (standard, lime green, décor interior, and power nothing). Later in life, an engagement ring was not enough. Real commitment required the gift of a Cougar (67 XR7, lime green, power everything).
Life happens. From Mustangs to mini vans, many cars came between Cougar ownership and me. I seemed to be in total remission. Until I discovered the ring. The Classic Cougar Web Ring (no hobbits), one great site was way too many, and a thousand weren’t nearly enough. I learned about G’s, GT’s and GTE’s. I had Cougar fever, and the hunt for the cure had begun. It was in a well-thumbed copy of Hemmings that I found the first hint of a cure. The ad said it was a 1968 Dan Gurney special, with a 428, and an XR7 to boot. Well, I knew that there weren’t any 1968 DGS built with the 428. Pictures seemed to cloud the story even more. If it was an XR7-G, then it would have had hood pins, and the GTE style hood scoop. Not this one. It had what looked like a ’69 Eliminator ram air scoop sitting on top of a big black stripe running down the hood. But it did have XR7-G badges on the dash, the headlight door and the roof pillars.
At the time when I found the car, there was a lot less information floating around on the really rare cars. It seemed that every one I talked to had a different story; mostly that this was most likely a modified XR7-G, crossed with a 428 Eliminator. This combination would make an interesting car no doubt, but hardly as unique as the truth would make it. Enter the good Dr’s Jim Pinkerton and Royce Peterson. They not only knew what it was, they were very helpful in giving me some idea of what it could become, and what it might cost (a lot). The truth didn’t set me free, but it didn’t get me killed either. The car was one of the 14 XR7-G 428’s built, and one of the 11 with a C6 automatic transmission. Now that I knew what the car was, I was faced with the even greater task of making it mine.
Ordinarily, a story like this requires some mention of the negotiations with the spouse. Fortunately, Debbie, my very sweet wife, understands the illness well. After more than 25 years it’s even getting to be hard to surprise her with the automotive residue I drag home. I can make the cat look like an underachiever leaving half a mouse on the doorstep. Imagine seeing the partial remains of a dead MG in your driveway some morning. My children, raised around this sort of thing have been largely desensitized to the carnage. These are all good things because the car was, shall we say, a fixer upper. In car-ad speak the words are so simple: needs work.
To say that the car had issues when I got it is to make light of how it got to be that way. Every car has its story. Here is what I know. The original purchaser is a mystery. The story of the car begins for all practical purposes with the car, nearly new in 1970, sitting on the lot of a Datsun dealer in Seattle Washington. The car had been traded in due to its incredible appetite for premium fuel. At the time the second owner purchased it, the hood pins were already missing. The dealer said that the first owner thought they made the car look too much like a “kid car”. They had been removed and the holes in the hood had been filed with braised in patches, and repainted. The car was the pride and joy of it’s second owner, but life gets in the way sometimes.
Some things aren’t meant to last, like the second owners marriage. During the course of the divorce, many things were decided as easily as they might be: custody of the kids, division of the common assets and liabilities. Only one real issue remained to divide the parties: the car. As is often the case, justice doesn’t always mean what you think it does. She got the car. She made it her goal in life to see how many door dings and scratches she could put in it. Not a single panel would go untouched. Panels inaccessible to ordinary parking lot hostility were keyed, others were simply beat upon. Now there is a fine line between making a car look beat to death, and actually beating one to death. This car walked the line. Her work complete, she called her ex and informed him that he could buy the car back: sight unseen. Her assurance was the car hadn’t been wrecked, and it was running just fine. He jumped at the chance to get the car back. Money changed hands. And then he got to see the car. We have all heard about the side effects of women scorned. This is what happens when applied to things automotive. He put the car away. He just couldn’t stand to drive it, looking like that. Time passed. A lot of time passed.
The car was parked in a warehouse in Los Angeles. Out of the sun, out of the weather, the storage conditions were good for preservation of what was left. Cars aren’t the only things that grow old; the owner had added a few years as well. It was becoming clear that he would never be able to restore the car. The warehouse, with the exception of the corner where the Cougar sat, was leased to an auto broker who specialized in British cars, mostly Jaguars and the odd Aston Martin or two. The owner decided that it was time to sell the Cougar, and the broker seemed an ideal choice to help move the car. A deal was struck between the broker and the owner.
Getting the car running would not only increase its value, it would make it a lot easier to move from place to place. Call in the Jaguar mechanic. Rebuilding the carburetor seemed like a good place to start, of course this Holley isn’t quite the same as an SU or a Zenith. It is amazing how many parts you can leave out of a Holley and have it still run.
Once you have going worked out, stopping is high on the list. One out of four brakes actually working would make a fine start. Doing this work allows you to advertise the car as “runs and drives”. Based on the promise of these improvements, the car was moved by transport to Seattle for sale.
This is where I came into the picture. First there were the pictures, and then there was the inspection. The results of the inspection were clear enough: needs everything, headliner good except for small hole, ran for a few minutes before fouling plugs. Illness clouds judgment in a peculiar way that allowed me to determine that such a report added up to a car I had to have. A deal was struck.
Since the paint was beyond hope, I elected to use an open transporter to move the car from Seattle to Oklahoma, after all, what did I have to lose? It took several days for the car to get loaded in Seattle, but once it started rolling towards Oklahoma it seemed to move at about the same speed as a spring tornado. When it arrived, it looked like it had been hit by a spring tornado.
Gravity is your friend when you are trying to get a dead car off a transporter. I was out of town when the car arrived and my business partner was gracious enough to direct the unloading and to park the car under an awning behind one of the buildings, after all, somebody had to do the pushing.
Debbie and the kids were anxious to see daddy’s new car. So was daddy. Knowing that the car wasn’t a driver, I hooked the trailer up to my truck, and with Debbie following in the mini van with the kids, we were off. The most direct way to get from Washington to Oklahoma will take you through Colorado. So will several of the less direct routes. Colorado has a special way of dealing with snow. They try to bury it in some kind of red clay. This would be a problem in that the clay would build up after a while except that it sticks to cars so well. Especially cars on the back of a transporter that haven’t been waxed since the Fonz was a big TV star. Throw in a couple of quarts of ATF that had leaked out of the car above on the transporter and you can make a pretty fine mess. The upside was that the imperfections in the paint were completely hidden by the layer of accumulated filth.
Once we got past the “you paid actual money for that” comments, Debbie seemed to accept the situation, until I started the car. As it turns out, if you leave the gasket off of the power valve in a Holley, raw gas pours into the engine. In order to match this mighty flow of fuel, the idle speed must be adjusted to about 3000 rpm. This must make sense if you work on Jaguars. If one is lucky enough to get the car started under such conditions the result is one heck of a roar. It takes a lot of voice to shout over such a sound, but Debbie succeeded. She wanted to bring my attention to the rapidly growing puddle of what looked like gasoline that was pouring out from under the car. As if acting on its own self-preservation, the car chose that moment to have a catastrophic failure of the water pump, dumping several gallons of possibly fire-retardant anti-freeze and water on the floor. I deemed this a good time to kill the engine.
Debbie was not impressed. She must have thought that the roar deafened me. That must have been why she didn’t even try to speak to me. She just said, “ C’mon kids, we are leaving”. And they did. As I watched them drive away, it occurred to me that I had better get this thing on the trailer and through the car wash and looking as good as it could pretty darn quick. Both divorce lawyers and Psychoanalysts’ open up pretty early in the morning in Oklahoma, and I didn’t want to meet either one. Well, as you can tell from the pictures, things did get better.
About the Car:
The car is Black Cherry with the Black Oxford (vinyl) roof. The interior is Dark Red. According to the Marti Report, this is the only car built with this combination of color and options. It appears to be the second of fourteen XR7G’s built with the 428 CJ. It is equipped with the locking 3.50 rear axle. Other options are tilt/ tilt away steering column, door edge guards, and AM radio.
My goal is to keep the car as original as possible for as long as possible, meaning I want to keep as many of the original parts as possible on the car. I also believe in driving my cars, so things like belts and hoses need to be reliable which some what conflicts with goal number one. The risk of having to leave the car on the side of the road tips the balance towards using good quality replacement parts for reliability and safety. Other things like the leather seat covers and the carpet are original. I work hard to try to preserve these original surfaces for as long as possible. It’s only original once.
This is by no means a concours restored vehicle it is a very nice driver, that does get driven, although not as much as I would like. As I see it, we are all only temporary custodians of these cars, I am saving a few things for the next guy to take care of.
Driving the car:
Preface: I live in Arizona which means it is pretty damn hot in the summer. So the best time to drive is after the sun goes down and things are starting to cool down a bit. The Phoenix area sits in a valley. The land to the east rises abruptly several thousand feet in elevation, to what is called the Colorado plateau, and the White Mountains. The edge of the Colorado plateau is called the Mogolon Rim.
I think this is the story that best describes it:
I gotta say, popping the garage door open, at about 11PM and taking a test drive is pretty fine.
Windows down, warm breeze, and no traffic. I turn up highway 87 and and begin the climb up to the first line of mountains. The edge of the Mogolon Rim stands like a wall, towering up in the darkness. Its silhouette like the edge of a torn sheet of paper. Every time I drop between the ridge lines the air turns suddenly cold. I can feel the heat rising from the floor, massive iron chunk of engine and transmission, like a hot coal at my feet. In 45 minutes I have wound around and up and down, and at 5500 feet, the air has turned cold. Windows up and heater on. The sweet smell of anti freeze blends with the pinion wood fires that warm the few houses set back in the ponderosa pines.
I stop for gas at the edge of Payson, listening to the click, click, click, of the exhaust cooling in the dark. And then back down the hill listening to soft burble of the exhaust, the engine battling gravity to slow our coast down the mountains. The pine trees turn to juniper, and then cedar, and then sage brush. The silhouettes of the towering saguaro cactus mark the point where the windows go down, and the smell of creosote fills the car. Lights twinkle in the distance and the glow of city lights off the broken clouds looks like some strange sunset that never ends. I sneak back in to the neighborhood, trying to keep my arrival as quiet as possible, and then sneak into the house and eventually to bed.
Great story Bill. I have enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing.
Steven