Junkyard Find: 1970 Lincoln Continental Mark III
We’re going to take a break from the Turbo Era Junkyard Finds and take a look at the kind of car that our resident lover of Ford personal luxury coupes really appreciates: a down-but-not-out (yet) 1970 Mark III in Denver self-service wrecking yard.
It’s bit rusty and the paint probably started looking bad while Gerald Ford was still president, but this car still has presence.
Thanks to optimistic gross power ratings and a who-gives-a-damn-about-oxides-of-nitrogen high compression ratio, the 460-cubic-inch V8 in this car was rated at 365 horsepower. Fuel economy? Gas will always be cheap!
This grille would look good hanging on my garage wall.
The transmission hump made it a bit less roomy than its front-wheel-drive Eldorado competitor, but who puts a passenger in the middle of this kind of bench seat?
“The automobile of celebrities, stars, and world leaders.”
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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The Mustang platform might not be a bad idea, but there would have to be a real demand for it, and the Mark version would need to be really diff erentiated from the Mustang design, in the same vein that the Dodge Cha llenger looks substantially different from the Charger, even though it's built on the same platform. One plus I see to doing a Mark based on the Mustang is that it would add a second product to the Flat Rock a ssembly plant, which I was told may lose the Mazda6 work if Mazda ya nks production. Currently, it shares space with Mustang assembly. Like the NUMMI situation with Corolla,Tacoma, and the Pontiac Vibe, Ford needs more production to make each plant work financially for them. As you wrote before, it's a tall order.
For those of you still following the comment thread for the junkyard Continental Mark III, Hemmings Classic Car magazine for their November 2012 issue has just published a Drive Report for the 1971 Continental Mark III, in color, and it's a super article. I subscribe, but you can usually find copies in news stands, or most Barnes & Nobles.