Junkyard Find: 1997 Mercury Grand Marquis LS Safety Edition
By the time the last few years of the Mercury-ized version of the Ford Crown Victoria rolled around, every single Grand Marquis sold was an Ultimate Edition. Back in the late 1990s, however, Mercury shoppers had more choices. Including, apparently, a Safety Edition. Here is an example I found in a Denver self-service yard last week.
A close look at the badges on the fenders makes me think that we’re dealing with some sort of dealer-installed or coachbuilder option, not a factory trim level.
The vinyl landau roof is a good indicator that some (no doubt Florida-based) company created its own line of Safety Edition Grand Marquis de Sades, perhaps in a shop just down the street from the one that made the faux-vertible ’97 Cougar XR7.
The cylinder heads are in the trunk, which offers a solid clue about the reason for this car’s current parking place.
I couldn’t find any signs of safety features beyond what all Panthers got in 1997. Perhaps this car got the police-grade stab-proof seats to protect the driver from unruly back-seaters.
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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I'd love to get one of those late-model Mercury Maurader's with the floor-shift auto and souped-up engine/suspension. I think they only came in black or dark maroon.
+jayzwhiterabbit Those colors were the only colors for one of the two years of the Marauder, don't remember which. In the other year it was black and another color. I'm thinking silver, but really don't remember. And I think the dark maroon was called Dark Toreador Red, and it was the second color for 2004. I also saw a breakdown by color, and I believe black way outsold the other color both years. As Casey Stengel once said "it might be a record. You could look it up." And the 350hp was nice, though I think the 32 valve setup was a bit more temperamental than the 16 valve SOHC model in the Grand Marquis. What they really should have done was sell it with an optional Vortech supercharger, with enough boost to put it in the high 400 hp range, or even into the 500+ hp. Without it, even with the 350 hp, it only turned a zero to sixty in the sevens, IIRC, and a quarter time in the low fifteens. Not exactly enough to blow the doors in on a lot of other stuff, but a lot of fun at a light or at the strip, especially with a 4.10 rear, which may have been an option. It was at least a popular mod, if not an option. And it livened it up a decent amount.