1966-1967 Mercury Comet
Okay, you’re going to need to sit down, take a few deep breaths, and steel yourselves. I have something shocking to say, and you’re going to need every bit of fortitude you can muster just to cope with it. Are you ready?
Okay, here goes: Mercury used to make interesting cars.
Pardon me for blowing your mind. I know we’ve all become used to seeing a Mercury lineup stocked exclusively with somnolent, chrome-laden, and drearily redundant Ford clones. Mercury is most remarkable for its application of pretty cool names to vehicles that have no particular reason to exist. In an era in which way too many cars are named alphanumerically, Mercury actually bothers to give its cars evocative names. Milan, Mariner, Sable, Mountaineer–these are all great car names, but it’s a shame that they are wasted on cars that bring nothing unique to the vehicular world.
This sad state of affairs has not always been thus. While Mercurys have almost always been derivatives of similar Ford models, Mercury used to have a performance reputation, established by powerful, good-looking cars that high-schoolers found desirable. The 1966-1967 Comet was one such car.
For 1966, the formerly compact Falcon-clone Comet was re-purposed as an intermediate–the Mercury equivalent to the Ford Fairlane. With the upgrade came some stylish new duds and a whole lot of muscle. I think the 1966 Comet is one of the prettiest domestic cars of the mid-1960s, with its vertically stacked headlights, trim dimensions, and elegant freshly-pressed angular lines. Under that pretty origami sheetmetal came the most powerful engines Ford had available in 1966–all the way up to the monster 335-horsepower 390 V-8.
Car and Driver had a comparison test between the hot muscle cars of the time, and the Comet and Fairlane were among the fastest. Of course, they were both extremely hairy to drive and, as it turned out, heavily and illegally modified to win the competition. When I first read that road test as a pimply-faced teenager (as opposed to the pimply-faced middle-aged man I am today), I immediately disregarded the impropriety and thought, “Cool!” When was the last time you found yourself thinking that about a Mercury?
When the conversation turns to 1960s muscle cars, I typically lean towards GM or Chrysler–but the Comet is one of my favorites and an all-time object of my lust. Add in the fact that the Comet line included a station wagon, and it’s an obvious winner.
Like today’s Mercurys, the Comet had a cool name working for it as well. Comet is a great name by itself, of course–it implies something flashy, fast, and completely inexorable. And, combined with the Meteor name, Mercury showed clear leadership of excellent space-related names (Plymouth Satellite notwithstanding). But consider for a moment that the Comet could be had with a Caliente trim package. Fantastic. I can’t imagine any of today’s automakers having the intestinal fortitude to give one of their cars a Caliente package.
Mercury would later blaspheme the Comet name by placing it on a rebadged Ford Maverick–a guilty pleasure of mine–but these Comets require no guilt and no irony. They’re as brilliant as their stellar namesake.
The video below is a walkaround of a particularly nice 1966 Comet Cylclone. There’s also a nice video available of the Comet Voyager four-door station wagon; while embedding is disabled, I can still link you to it here. That’s a gorgeous wagon.
The top image comes courtesy of Flickr user osubuckialum; the second two come from Flickr user kenmojr, and the Caliente badge detail image was taken by Flickr user born1945.
–Chris H.
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