In 1969 and 1970, Lincoln-Mercury took one last swing at the vanishing full-size sporty car market with the plush, big-engine Marauder X-100. There was also a base Marauder, which offered the looks of the slow-selling X-100 without its performance or luxury, but at a significantly lower price.
The pity of it all is that “Marauder” is a great name for a sporty car, particularly a big sporty car. It suggests a kind of outsize lusty enthusiasm, whether Wallace Beery as Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1934) or Kurt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate (1952). If it drinks too much and gets a little sloppy in tight turns, as big cars are wont, well, savoir faire isn’t really part of the pirate code.
However, if Mercury had wanted to develop a real swashbuckling image for the Marauder nameplate, it would have helped if they’d have used it in some kind of consistent way. They got off to a good start: The first Marauder, introduced in mid-1963, was a special two-door hardtop, added to homologate the more aerodynamic fastback roofline for NASCAR. However, Lincoln-Mercury then proceeded to apply the Marauder name to various engines and various body styles, quickly diluting it to the point of meaninglessness.
For whatever reason, it took Lincoln-Mercury until the 1969 model year to do the obvious thing and create a sporty model series actually called “Marauder” rather than “S-55” or “Secret Agent X-9.” As Paul has previously noted, the 1969–1970 Marauder was essentially a Ford Galaxie SportsRoof fastback, with a tunneled roof and ventless side glass, married to the Lincoln-Continental-style front clip of the Mercury Marquis and further dressed up with simulated rear fender vents.
A telltale sign of the Marauder’s Ford Division origins was its exterior dimensions. It was 219.1 inches long on a Ford-like 121-inch wheelbase, making it 2.7 inches shorter than a Mercury Monterey on a 3-inch-shorter wheelbase.
The iteration of the 1969–1970 Marauder that people remember is the top-spec Marauder X-100, which came standard with the 429-4V engine, C6 SelectShift automatic, rear fender skirts, and a fancier interior, plus a somewhat incongruous swath of “sports tone” matte finish paint on the rear deck and pillars. This was not necessarily black — with certain exterior colors, it could also be dark red or dark green — and it was omitted entirely if the buyer didn’t want it or ordered a vinyl top.
By 1969, full-size sporty cars were well past their sell-by date, so Lincoln-Mercury tried, somewhat clumsily, to make the X-100 straddle what remained of the full-size performance market and also the Thunderbird/Riviera personal luxury segment (of which I suspect L-M still resented being cut out). Today, the X-100’s curious blend of muscle car cues and luxury pretensions intrigues some modern enthusiasts and collectors, but at the time, it went over like trying to sell Cypress Hill and Wu-Tang Clan merchandise outside a DARE convention.
Along with the headline-grabbing X-100, there was also a base Marauder, which had the tunneled “sport roof,” ventless side glass, fender louvers, concealed headlights, fender-top paint stripes, and special taillights, but not the fancy interior or the big engine. This had the obvious benefit of significantly reducing the base price: by a substantial $731 for 1969, by $633 for 1970.
(I want to mention here that the 1970 Marauder prices in Standard Catalog of American Cars 1946–1975 are wrong: They list the MSRP as $3,271 for the standard Marauder and $3,873 for the X-100, which seems to have been an editorial error inherited from a 1970 issue of Automotive Industries. Automotive News reported the base price of the 1970 Marauder as $3,503, which was also the price on the aqua car’s original invoice from Spitzer Motors of Elyria, Ohio. The base price of a 1970 X-100 was $4,136.)
Rear fender skirts, which were really part of the Marauder look, were technically optional on the base car. This car was ordered with the $57.10 Marauder Appearance Group, which included the skirts, bright wheel moldings, and wheel covers that were standard on the X-100.
(Incidentally, while the listing for the aqua Marauder calls it “highly original,” its luster makes me think it may have been repainted in some shinier modern approximation of the original Dark Bright Aqua. I’m really not sure.)
One of the downsides of fastback rooflines, which I think contributed to their decline in this era, was that they didn’t mesh gracefully with the increasingly popular vinyl roof, an option applied to more than 60 percent of full-size Mercury production in 1970. The sport roof sail panels, which were designed to blend seamlessly into the rear fender kick-up, didn’t really provide a natural breakpoint for the roof covering, giving the $115.30 vinyl top the air of a kid throwing a bath towel over their shoulders like a cape.
For 1970, the “sports tone” matte paint treatment was optional on both the Marauder and the X-100. It still couldn’t be combined with a vinyl roof, which I think was probably for the best, aesthetically speaking.
Inside, the base Marauder was essentially a Monterey. This car has the optional all-vinyl deluxe interior, a $28.50 option, but with the standard bench seat. You could order buckets on the base Marauder at extra cost, but not many people did.
Bucket seats and a center console were standard on the Marauder X-100, along with fancier upholstery and a rim-blow steering wheel. As a no-cost alternative to the buckets, X-100 buyers could specify the Twin Comfort Lounge Seat, a split bench with dual front armrests, borrowed from the Marquis Brougham. (The leather-and-vinyl upholstery that had been offered on the 1969 X-100 was no longer available; leather had only been available with the full-width bench seat, which was offered only on the base Marauder for 1970.)
One of the ways Lincoln-Mercury kept the MSRP of the base Marauder down was moving automatic transmission, which was standard on the X-100, to the options list, priced at a hefty $238.40. A 4-speed transmission wasn’t available on these cars, and Automotive News figures indicate that Mercury installed the column-shifted 3-speed on fewer than 200 cars across the entire 1970 full-size line.
This car also has power steering, a $115.30 option you wouldn’t want to be without (although Car and Driver had problems with it cutting out at parking speeds), and power brakes, a $71.30 option that helpfully included front discs. It also has air conditioning and the cheapest AM radio, but no other power equipment. Note the blanking plate in place of the clock, another feature standard on the X-100 and optional on the base car.
With its 429-4V engine and dual exhausts, the Marauder X-100 had some claim to muscle car status: It could run from 0 to 60 in around 8 seconds, with the quarter mile attainable in 16 seconds or less, which was fast by normal-people standards, if not those of Hot Rod and Car Craft readers. Adding front discs and the $31.10 competition handling package (which also included lower-profile H70-15 tires) allowed at least a certain amount of understeer-limited marauding.
A base Marauder like the aqua car, with the standard suspension, standard engine, and 2.75 axle, could make no such claims. Lincoln-Mercury hopefully dubbed the base car “a thriftier approach to sports driving,” but the 390-2V V-8 — an engine often found in full-size Ford station wagons of this era — was neither sporting nor especially thrifty, except in the limited sense that it didn’t demand premium gasoline. You could order the 429, in two- or four-barrel form, but if you wanted the big engine, it was simpler just to get an X-100.
So, the Marauder didn’t have much to offer buyers interested in sporting performance, and in base form, it wasn’t any plusher than the cheaper Monterey. It was the cheapest way to get the Marquis front end (a Marquis two-door hardtop listed for $610 more), but Marquis buyers of this period strongly preferred four-door models. Also, the base Marauder still wasn’t cheap: This car stickered for $4,723.70 plus destination, which was only about $275 less than a comparably equipped but better-trimmed and substantially more powerful X-100.
The Marauder line hadn’t sold well in 1969 — ’69 base car production had totaled a modest 9,031, the X-100 only 5,635 — and 1970 was considerably worse. The base Marauder sold only 3,397 cars for 1970, the X-100 a mere 2,646. Unsurprisingly, neither Marauder returned for 1971.
These Marauders were okay cars, as big Fords went. If Lincoln-Mercury had introduced this model a few years earlier, before the demand for big sporty cars had completely evaporated, building on the NASCAR associations of the 1963 car, they might have done something with it, commercially speaking. As it was, the Marauder line showed up much too late for the party, and by the time they arrived, Dress Like a Pirate Day was definitely over.
Related Reading
Curbside Classic: 1963 Mercury Marauder – Peppered with Plundering Promise (by Jason Shafer)
Cohort Outtake: 1964 Mercury Park Lane Marauder Four Door Hardtop Makes Its First Appearance At CC (by Paul N)
Curbside Classic: 1970 Mercury Marauder X-100 – Bootylicious (by Paul N)
1970 Mercury Marquis Brougham Four-Door Hardtop: The Budget Continental (by me)
Interesting to note then the Canadian Meteor got a variant of the Maurauder without the rooftop named Montcalm S-33.
https://www.oldcarbrochures.org/Canada/Ford-Canada/Mercury/1970%20Mercury%20Meteor%20-%20Canada/slides/1970%20Mercury%20Meteor%20Brochure%20Canada-10-11.html
It doesn’t seem comparable: The brochure says the Montcalm had the 124-inch wheelbase of the U.S. full-size Mercury, and it didn’t share any of the Marauder styling features. It seems like a variation of the U.S. Monterey with smaller standard engines.
“S-33” was a designation Mercury had used on U.S. models years earlier: The sporty version of the Comet was the S-22, the sporty version of the Meteor (which in the U.S. was a fancier version of the Fairlane intermediate) was S-33, and the full-size sporty version was S-55. (Notice that the red 1963 Marauder pictured is actually badged “Marauder S-55.”)
“As it was, the Marauder line showed up much too late for the party, and by the time they arrived, Dress Like a Pirate Day was definitely over.”
QOTD.
You have to pity the poor Marauder. As stated, there was solid name-recognition there but, beginning with the Cougar, Mercury seemed to be leaning into the wild feline scheme of things with their “Sign of the Cat” marketing campaign (although Buick had been using Wildcat for years). Ironically, the Wildcat could be seen as a direct competitor to the Marauder, along with the Plymouth Sport Fury GT and Chrysler 300. It was a heady time for Detroit muscle when all of these cars were conceived, but by the time they reached production, performance was all but dead, and their very slow sales and short time in the market reflected that.
It’s interesting to note the difference of the Marauder’s gauge layout with that of the Galaxie. The Ford division’s large cars had switched to the fashionable ‘cockpit’ style dash of the time, up to and including the horseshoe automatic console selector on bucket seat cars that mimicked commercial jet aircraft thruster controls, something that had already been used in various GM products (i.e., Chevelle, Riviera, et al), as well.
And that matte rear deck paint treatment was a bit of a rarity, the dark green being the most rare. I had no idea it could be had on any Marauder (I would have thought it would have been an X-100 exclusive). As it was, the green option was only available with a green primary color. Nearly as rare was red, which could be had on either a red or black car, the latter of which would be my choice for a Marauder. And, yeah, it’s a good thing you could not get the paint treatment with a vinyl top, too. That combo would have looked awkward, to say the least.
I love to latch on to the little tidbits that appear in Aaron’s posts. Today I’m going to latch on to the fact that fewer than 200 Mercury cars were built in 1970 with manual transmissions. It seems ridiculous and pointless for Mercury to have even *offered* the 3-speed manual as the base transmission.
I can only think of 2 reasons, one of which is fine but the other angers me. I think Mercury cars were built on F/S Ford production lines. I would imagine that 5% or so of full-size Ford buyers opted for the 3-speed, so it wasn’t a really big deal to install a manual transmission in a Mercury that was coming down the line. But I’m angered because making the 3-speed the base transmission allowed Mercury dealers to offer “bait-and-switch” pricing involving a low base price for a car that effectively no one wanted to buy.
There’s a third possiblity, and that’s sales to government and fleets. The buyers of those cars usually did not have to drive them, so they would traditionally scrimp to the last penny, and I can easily see them spec-ing out a 3-speed manual, column-shift Mercury Monterey, very likely with absolutely zero options.
To that end, did anyone else notice the light switch on the lower left of what appears to be an add-on panel beneath the steering column? It doesn’t even look like it has a park light detent. There’s another switch on the right panel so maybe that one is for the park lights.
It seems bizarre to have such an arrangement where the light switch(es) are not integrated into the dash.
By this time, it sort of depended on the fleet.
I ran across an interesting mid-60s item in Automotive News the other day that federal fleet buyers had new rules allowing them to factor in trade-in values when figuring the budget limit for new vehicles: for instance, if they had a budget of $2,500 per new vehicle and had a trade-in allowance of $1,000 on the vehicle they were replacing, they could get a $3,500 car. I haven’t made any study of federal purchasing policies over the years, and they didn’t automatically extend to other types of fleet buyers, but I think policies like that were beginning to erode the market for strippo fleet specials.
If residuals were a consideration at all, a really stripped-down big car with non-power steering and manual transmission was not a great value by this point. On a 1970 full-size Mercury, not having power steering or automatic meant an immediate $450 hit in wholesale value (and about $600 in retail value), which was more than you’d save by not ordering those options upfront.
I can certainly see that change in government fleet buying rules effectively wiping-out the already miniscule production of any remaining, full-size 3-on-the-tree cars, particularly in anything but the ‘low-priced-three’.
The advent of much easier to drive, affordable, automatic transmissions meant that the resale value of ultra-strippo big cars on the used market would be substantially less than their better equipped counterparts, even if the added options were only an automatic and power steering. No longer would fleet buyers be constrained to the lowest bidder when buying vehicles.
I once read a story about “the last, big, stick-shift Chevy” which was a 3-on-the-tree 1977 Chevelle colonnade. Of course, the downsized 1978 Malibu still offered a manual, but it was now a four-on-the-floor and really didn’t qualify as a ‘big’ car.
By this time, full-size Fords with the 3-speed were down to just slightly over 1 percent; Mercury was less than 0.2 percent.
I think it was almost entirely a matter of paranoia about maintaining base price parity, which was the same thing that delayed the standardization of heaters in the early ’60s. The automakers perceived a kind of nuclear standoff where no one dared to be the first one to blink by standardizing features that were almost always installed anyway. I don’t know if the general public was even that aware of it — after WW2, the domestic carmakers were often wary of advertising list prices, so that information wasn’t necessarily super-available, and even if you looked at sources like Consumer Reports, they would often talk in terms of typically equipped prices — but it was an article of faith for Detroit.
Someone here mentioned a number of years ago that certain jurisdictions taxed cars based on their base MSRP rather than the actual transaction price, so a $3,200 car with $800 worth of options was taxed at a lower rate than a $4,000 car with the same features as standard equipment. I don’t know how common that was in this period, or how significant Detroit considered it; from what I can tell, it seemed to be less significant than their fear that higher base prices would scare people away.
“Someone here mentioned a number of years ago that certain jurisdictions taxed cars based on their base MSRP rather than the actual transaction price, so a $3,200 car with $800 worth of options was taxed at a lower rate than a $4,000 car with the same features as standard equipment. I don’t know how common that was in this period, or how significant Detroit considered it;”
That would have been me, and the state in question was Michigan, so I’m sure the folks in the executive suites in Detroit were very aware of it.
Ah, undoubtedly then!
Was in late “40’s”, before i even knew the “Marauder” existed prior to “1969”. Some neighbors, “3 blocks”, west got a shiny, black one that year. Inside was a tan, color; car got a to stay in a garage. Was still quite a “looker” in the late “70’s”.
It was sad that the market for sporty full-sized cars shrank to where it was no longer really viable. The kind of people who might have bought one in the past were now moving into personal luxury coupes and luxurious full-sized sedans (the Broughamification of America), while younger people moved to lower-priced sporty mid-sized and pony cars that offered better performance.
The ’94 to ’96 Impala SS was something of a successful last hurrah for the large sporty car, but Mercury’s own 2003 and ’04 Marauder was a failure. A beautiful failure, but a failure nonetheless.
The final nail in the full-size coffin, at least at Ford, was the wholesale switch to overhead cam engines. Simply put, they were a bad fit in large, weight-challenged cars where the low-end torque of pushrod engines had previously gotten those land yachts moving out smartly at low speeds in years long gone by.
So it was with the final 2003-04 Marauder with its torque-challenged DOHC 302. Unlike the earlier 1994-96 Impala SS (and Buick Roadmaster) which got the Corvette’s pushrod V8, the Marauder’s performance left much to be desired.
“So it was with the final 2003-04 Marauder with its torque-challenged DOHC 302. Unlike the earlier 1994-96 Impala SS (and Buick Roadmaster) which got the Corvette’s pushrod V8, the Marauder’s performance left much to be desired.”
Exactly correct. I had a 1995 Firebird Formula LT1 V8 (5-speed manual) hopped up and was in a local/regional Camaro/Firebird club. We also had SS Impala owners in it as well sharing that same LT1 V8, although it was detuned to 260hp from 280hp back then for the Cam/Bird (the LT1 in the C4 Corvette was 300hp from 1992-1996).
Stock those big sedans would click off high-14s and 90mph traps, up there with 230-240hp early-mid 90s Mustang GTs. A few guys would do basic bold on mods like we did (intake, headers and exhaust, computer programmer, MSD ignition) and get another 30hp or so out of them. They were sleepers and surprised many an early to mid 90s BMW M-series driver back then! Just as those DOHC Ford V8 owners found out who had to wind that engine up to get power out of it. There is no replacement for immediate low end torque off the line.
Ahh–Kurt Lancaster. A legend of the silver screen.
“…it went over like trying to sell Cypress Hill and Wu-Tang Clan merchandise outside a DARE convention.”
Damn.
Of course, it was the charismatic BURT Lancaster of Hollywood fame.