Photography by the author.
When’s the last time you were in a Pinto—or its secret twin seen here, the Mercury Bobcat? It’s old enough to be out of America’s collective memory now, but between Ford and Mercury, Ford sold more than 220,000 Pintos a year for most of the ’70s and clear into 1980.
Model year 1979 was the Mercury Bobcat’s bestselling season, with sales jumping by more than a third year-to-year, for a couple of reasons. First, OPEC II: Electric Boogaloo choked America’s fuel spigot once again, driving us back to gas lines, odd/even rationing and the nearest small cars in the showroom when it came time to buy.
Second, the Pinto and Bobcat both received comprehensive facelifts for 1979. Unlike the Pinto, which previously had light redesigns in 1974 and ’76, this was Bobcat’s first trip to the plastic surgeon. Pinto and Bobcat shared a hood, new front fenders and rectangular headlamps, while the Mercury lost its traditional chromed upright grille in favor of a more aero-friendly version with prominent vertical bars. (Since the platform was only scheduled to last two more years, even less effort was made to differentiate between Ford and Mercury than previously.) Inside, a new instrument panel featured a speedometer that displayed your speed in both miles per hour and kilometers per hour. A little more chrome, a little less blackout trim and voila! Bobcat.
And third, a widely-touted year-to-year price reduction suggested that Bobcat was even better value in those double-digit-inflation-wracked days. Whether it was a prime motivator for Bobcat buyers, or icing on the cake, it all boils down to the same thing: historic high sales (more than 36,000) for the Bobcat in ’79.
Our sample Bobcat, an unrestored 55,000-mile example, has a curious array of options: floor-mounted automatic transmission with no console, manual steering and power brakes, air-conditioning with moonroof (which cuts into headroom), and the leisure-suit Alpine Plaid cloth interior that exactly matches the Tangerine exterior. It also features the Sports Instrumentation Group, which includes tach, temp gauge, fuel, amps and the Sport Steering Wheel.
The doors, relative to the length of the car, are enormous—they’re not Mk V doors, but they’re heavy for such a little car, and looking at it from the outside, they seem to take up half the profile. The feel says “clunk,” but the sound is “clang.” The rake of the windshield isn’t so steep as to be slitty (though the rearview mirror, mounted in the dead center of the windshield, is a little distracting), and your proximity to the rest of the glass makes for fine visibility in most directions. The moonroof eats into headroom considerably, even as the Alpine plaid seats let you sink in; we’ve been in other Pintos where headroom was little issue.
Inside, it’s every bit as orange (sorry, tangerine) as the outside. The interior and exterior are so closely matched, you’d never know that the interior door panel wasn’t a single piece. The horizontal divider line above the faux-wood trim is the giveaway; above is matte-finish paint, while below is vinyl. You have to physically touch the panel to differentiate materials. Even the seatbelts, those stranglers, are color-keyed; the black carpet and dash serve to make the seats look as if they float, and really make the colors pop. Tacky? Too ’70s? That’s your call; we’d rather be in here than inside something that’s yet another shade of dust-hiding dark grey.
Ford’s four alights with a surge before quickly settling in at an indicated 1,000 RPM on the tach. The 2.3-liter four has rarely been singled out as a paragon of smoothness, despite Car and Driver’s back-in-the-day insistence that it is “commendably free from vibration.”
That three-spoke Sport Steering Wheel is a fine bit of business to hold on to: meaty but responsive, and happy to transmit road feel through the column. And the power-assisted brakes stop you sure and straight every time. But the heft of the manual steering and the very light pedal for the power brakes mean that you can neither manhandle nor puss*foot; you have to be aware of your inputs at every moment.
Ride quality during our short jaunt is stiffer than we’d imagined. We know it’s a Bobcat, not a Cougar, but we were amazed at the jouncing going on. None of Mercury’s smooth-riding brand values are on display here. We suspect that the tires might have been overinflated, or else the newer tires (and maybe newer, firmer shock absorbers?) let through some of the suspension feedback that the original tires (and their attendant pressures) might have dialed out.
And then there’s the power. Probably we should put “power” in quotation marks, since the experience is different from what the word suggests. Bobcat is not fast. It is not quick. There are no euphemistic qualifiers to hide this fact. Scenery does not blur, you are not thrown back in your seat. Instead, you accumulate speed; the journey is an arduous one. With 88 horses, 118 pound-feet of torque, an automatic trans and near enough to 3,000 pounds with driver and passenger on board, all the gear multiplication on earth couldn’t haul you to speed at anything more than a leisurely stroll up through the revs.
But there’s a hitch. Usually the tradeoff with small-displacement engines is an ability to rev: Engines that don’t sprint off the line often find their footing higher in the revs. Yet, once the Bobcat’s four hits 3,000 RPM, it doesn’t want to keep going—the opposite of how a small four should operate. The tach suggests that there are another couple of thousand revs, but the pace is so glacial, and the noises coming from the engine bay are so labored, that you don’t really want to push it. This really was a car designed for a 55 MPH world. C&D ran a ’74 Pinto Runabout 2300/automatic through the quarter-mile in 21.5 seconds at less than 65 MPH, which feels about right. Well, not right, nothing from this era should be this slow, but correctly judged. It resists being driven hard, which is probably why so few decent stock examples remain today. In an effort to keep up with traffic, most of these were driven hard. As a collector car, it’s no big deal, but regular beatings on America’s highways meant that they got used up. That makes the ones that remain all the more special.
For more on the history of the Mercury Bobcat, and words from the owners of this example, buy the December2016 issue of Hemmings Classic Car magazine, on sale November 1, 2016.
