Junkyard Find: 1993 Mercury Capri
After the Miata (introduced in the United States as a 1990 model) turned out to be an instant hit for Mazda, the marketing wizards at Ford decided to put Mercury badges on the Australian Ford Capri, a four-seat sporty convertible, and beat Mazda at its own game. Sure, the ’91-94 Capri was a Mazda under the skin (it was based on the 323), and it had front-wheel-drive, but so what?
The Capri was powered by a Mazda B engine, just like the Miata, and it had a convertible top, but the similarities ended there. While the Miata was a perfect expression of everything that the Alfa Romeo Spider and MBG had tried— but failed— to be in the past, the Capri was just a funny-looking 323 with a soft top.
I still see the occasional Capri of this generation on the street, for the same reason I see Geo Metro convertibles on the street: driving with the top down is fun!
The 24 Hours of LeMons has several teams campaigning these things (all turbocharged models), and they’re about as quick around a road course as, say, a Ford Ranger pickup or Kia Sephia. In other words, pretty slow.
This one only managed to get 120,000 miles, which makes me suspect that it spent a few years parked with something expensive broken.
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 test drove one of these in 1991. The salesman was a dick and so was his manager. That turned me off from the start. The car had the smallest trunk I ever saw and was cramped inside. It reminded me of a TR7 and not in a good way. The handling was unresponsive and the car was dead slow. I bought an SL-1 Saturn and was glad I did.
REALLY , THE TRUTH THAT YOU HAVE NO CLUE ABOUT THE CAPRI... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Capri Second Generation (1979–1986) During this period, a version of the Ford Mustang was sold through Lincoln/Mercury dealers as the Mercury Capri, giving Mercury a pony car for the first time since the Mercury Cougar was upsized in 1974 to complement the Ford Thunderbird. The Capri was built on the Ford Fox platform, which was used for the Mustang from 1979 to 1993 with a design change in 1994. It was the only Mercury Capri generation with a V8 engine.