Racing
In 1967, renowned NASCAR race car builder Bud Moore campaigned Mercury Cougars in the Trans-Am Series with Ford Motor Company factory support. The team featured superstar-caliber drivers, such as Captain Dan Gurney, Parnelli Jones, Peter Revson, David Pearson, and Ed Leslie. Factory support dried up towards the end of the season and the Cougars began to show their wear. Ultimately, Mercury lost the championship to Ford by two points.
In 1968, Bud Moore took his Cougars NASCAR racing in the newly formed Grand American series. Star driver Tiny Lund dominated the series and took the championship.
After the Cougar changed to the Thunderbird platform in 1974, the bodystyle was raced in NASCAR. The Wood Brothers Racing team with David Pearson and later Neil Bonnett was very successful with the car and scored a number of victories until the bodystyle became ineligible following the 1980 season. The next year (1981) saw the previous Cougar teams switch to the Thunderbird when NASCAR mandated the smaller (110-inch-wheelbased) cars, though oddly the Thunderbirds had to have their wheel bases streched 6 inches, as the production cars wheelbase was only 104 inches. From 1989 to 1990, Lincoln-Mercury Motorsport fielded Cougars of the new body style in the GTO class of the IMSA GT Championship. The cars collected the championship both years, and continued the teams' streak to seven manufacturer's championships.
Read more about this topic: Mercury Cougar
Famous quotes containing the word racing:
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)