Images from the author’s collection.
Not long ago I wrote up, for both this website and the print edition of Hemmings Classic Car, a Mercury Bobcat I had cause to photograph. It was a jaunty thing: orange and white, inside and out, with plaid seats and a generally sunny disposition. Sundial slow and as crude as a Married: With Children episode, it sent me off on a tangent about how the notion of a premium small car wasn’t really something America was prepared for, initially, until Ford started shoveling every option it could muster into a Pinto – and how upscale Mercury actually seemed a more apt marque for a highly-optioned version.
Not a week later, quite by happenstance, I was thumbing through a 1979-vintage issue of Car and Driver at lunchtime. It was written in that era when the cars were sufficiently awful (with some exception) that the writing had to be fantastic, in order to keep everyone’s interest. And over my plate of grilled chicken parmigiana, I ran headlong into a road test of the Lincoln Versailles.
Remember the Versailles? It’s the car that helped wipe the egg off of Ford’s face after Granada ads mocked the cost of the Cadillac Seville; they saw how it sold, figured out the profit margin, and applied GM’s formula to a Mercury Monarch. Small size, big luxury, lots of toys and trinkets and doodads inside. Jack up the price, and bam! It was the cushiest Falcon Ford ever built.
But what if Lincoln went a step further? What if Ford’s luxury division went a step further down the food chain? What if they took the Lincoln formula and applied it to … the Pinto? Of course it would never happen; Lincolns had status, and the Pinto was the very epitome of a buggy for the hoi polloi. A simple badge-slap wouldn’t have worked. But could the fuel crisis have gotten bad enough that the badge engineers could have gotten some overtime pay for developing such a creature?
What could it have looked like?
* It would have to share the Bobcat hood – at least, a ’75-78 Bobcat hood, for some version of the formidable Lincoln grille to live on it. Probably the headlights would have to be covered, as all other Lincolns save the Versailles then wore.
* It would have to have a V-8 – probably a 302. Since the Pinto and the Mustang II shared a chassis from ’74 on, and since the Mustang II had a V8 available from ’75-on, it would stand to reason that anything that small that called itself a Lincoln would need V-8 power. Not that it was particularly strong – 139 horsepower in the ’78 Mustang II King Cobra, but the key factor is the 250 foot-pounds of torque – more than twice on offer from the 2.3-liter four-cylinder. It had the necessary smoothness to be considered a Lincoln powerplant; the 2.3-liter four-cylinder was a rough customer and the V-6 was just so … common.
* A C4 automatic transmission would be the only available transmission – preferably column-shifted, although we can’t imagine the engineers making that happen. The Versailles had an optional floor shift and mandatory console, which should be good enough for our little fantasy buggy.
* Shocks and springs would have to be the softest available in the lineup – and maybe softer.
* Layers of sound deadening would need to live everywhere. In the doors, in the headliner, under the carpet, in the trunk/hatch area. It would be heavy. It would not matter.
* Power everything: steering, brakes (maybe even four-wheel disc, adapting the Versailles’ system?), windows, seat, all of it standard. Mandatory air conditioning (and kill the swing-out rear quarter windows – opening them would make too much noise). Intermittent wipers, tinted glass, the triple-note horn, all of it. And that clock had better be digital, mister,.
* A front bench seat would be ideal for the Lincoln concept, but with the tall trans tunnel (and carpet so thick you could lose your toes in it) softly-padded buckets would work… festooned in velour or optional leather, of course. An armrest should be available for each front-seat passenger. Whether it’s mounted on the trans tunnel or is attached to the seat itself, Captain’s Chair style, is a question best left to others.
* Color palatte. Subdued. Blues, blacks, maroons. White of course, and probably a silver and a baby blue, but mostly dark and serious colors. Vinyl top? Mandatory; the only choice is half-top or full-top. And festooned with chrome – around the windows, wheel openings and grille particularly, with polished rockers.
* New door panels that completely hid the painted-metal portions of the doors that lived in Pintos and Bobcats till the end. A sun visor that hid the garage-door opener and lighted vanity mirror.
* The Pinto’s sporty round gauges? Out. Remove that gauge cluster and install a bar speedometer (sans numbers above 85 MPH, of course) and a brace of warning lights will suffice in the same space.
* A million courtesy lights, inside and outside the car, along with a symphony of buzzers and chimes, plus every stereo option including CB.
* Wheels an inch taller and an inch wider, with tires as tall as soft as you’d expect from a Lincoln. For comfort and roadability, not performance.
* Any wagon versions would need the mandatory hearse option.
* It needs a name (other than Koch’s Terrible Idea). Following in the theme of Continental and Versailles, it would have to be European. Monaco, LeMans and Barcelona were already taken, and Luxembourg would have required a badge the width of the tailgate. Keeping the name to French cities with populations of more than 100,000 … Nice (a double-entendre) would be clever but doesn’t have multisyllabic elegance. Bordeaux would bring up some uncomfortable questions about advocating for drinking-and-driving. Marseille? Montpelier? Grenoble? Limoges? (Who said Merde? That’s not a town.)
* Price it to split the difference between a $5,000 Pinto and a $12,500 Versailles. Say, $8500 all in?
Could my idea have worked? Maybe, maybe not; buyers seemed to have a hard enough time swallowing the idea of a Bobcat, judging by the sales numbers (fewer than a quarter-million sold from ’75-’80). A Pinto-based Lincoln would have been a step too far, doing more damage to the Lincoln name and reputation than the money raked in short-term in the face of the gas crisis. It could have been a Cadillac Cimarron before the Cadillac Cimarron was. Or it might have caught fire (sorry) with Lincoln buyers who were touched by OPEC II. Then again, if OPEC II affected you, you probably shouldn’t have been buying a Lincoln in the first place.
from Hemmings Daily – News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/2c54FNL
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