Mercury Built Just 503 of These to Race NASCAR — Four Years Later, Only 30 People Wanted the Last Cyclone Ever Made

Mercury’s Cyclone chased Detroit’s aero wars onto the NASCAR high banks with a 503-unit homologation special built to out-nose the Ford Torino Talladega. By the time the nameplate died in 1972, Mercury could only find about 30 buyers for it. Here’s the rise and quiet collapse of Ford’s forgotten muscle car twin.

In 1969, Mercury built a muscle car with one job: survive just long enough to sell 500 copies so NASCAR would let it race. The Cyclone Spoiler II wasn’t really meant for showrooms at all — it was homologation paperwork with a V8 bolted in, a six-inch-longer nose borrowed straight from Detroit’s aero-war playbook, and two limited-edition liveries named after the drivers who would actually race it. Mercury built exactly 503 of them, just enough to clear the rulebook. Three years later, the Cyclone name had been reduced to a checkbox on a Montego order form, and only about 30 people checked it. In between sits one of the strangest, most overlooked stories of Detroit’s muscle car era — and it’s the subject of a deep-dive history video that finally gives the Cyclone the full treatment it’s never really gotten.

The Video: A Full History Most Fans Skip Past

The video comes from Tony’s Fords and Mustangs, a channel built around Ford-family cars, and it does something most muscle car content doesn’t bother with: it walks the entire arc of a single nameplate, start to finish, rather than fixating on one famous model year. It traces the Cyclone from its earliest days as an option package all the way through its quiet discontinuation, covering the drivetrains, special editions, and features that changed along the way — the kind of ground-level detail that usually only shows up in old dealer literature, not YouTube.

That approach matters because the Cyclone is one of the easiest muscle cars to get wrong. Most casual fans know it, if at all, as “the Mercury version of the Torino” — a footnote to Ford’s more famous intermediate muscle cars. The full history tells a different story: a nameplate that started as a trim option, briefly became one of the most purpose-built race homologation specials of the era, and then got quietly discontinued when Mercury couldn’t find enough buyers who wanted the same car as a Torino with different badges.

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From Comet Option to NASCAR Homologation Special

The Cyclone name first appeared in 1964, not as its own car but as a high-performance option package on the redesigned Mercury Comet, replacing the earlier S-22 trim. For its first couple of years it stayed in that lane — a performance-flavored Comet rather than a distinct model. By 1966 and 1967, the Cyclone GT package had grown into something genuinely serious: a blacked-out dashboard, bucket seats, a console-mounted shifter, twin hood scoops, heavy-duty suspension, and a 390-cubic-inch V8 rated at 335 horsepower, all wrapped around body stripes and unique emblems that made it obvious from the curb which Comet you’d paid extra for.

Mercury spun the Cyclone off as its own standalone nameplate in 1968, moving it onto the same fastback “SportsRoof” intermediate body it shared under the skin with the Ford Torino. 1969 is where the story stopped being a badge-engineering footnote and became something genuinely strange. Mercury added the Cyclone CJ that year, powered by the 428-cubic-inch Cobra Jet V8 rated at 335 horsepower, available with or without Ram Air. But the real story was the Cyclone Spoiler II, a car that existed almost entirely because of NASCAR’s rulebook. To homologate an aerodynamic nose for stock car racing — a six-inch-longer, flush-mounted grille treatment similar to what Ford was doing on the Torino Talladega — Mercury had to build and sell a minimum number of street versions to the public. The result was two limited-edition trims built around the drivers who’d actually race the car: a Cale Yarborough Special and a Dan Gurney Special. By the end of the run, Mercury had built roughly 285 Yarborough editions and 218 Gurney editions — 503 cars total, just enough to clear the homologation minimum with a handful to spare.

The Big-Block Years and the Quiet Death of a Nameplate

1970 brought the Cyclone’s biggest engines and its most track-focused street trim, the Cyclone Spoiler. Mercury dropped the 390 and 428 V8s from the lineup that year in favor of two 351s and two 429s, and the Spoiler came standard with the 429 Cobra Jet backed by Ram Air and a 780-cfm Holley carburetor. Order the Drag Pack option and buyers got the more aggressive 429 Super Cobra Jet along with a competition suspension package, an 8,000-rpm tachometer, a 140-mph speedometer, and the black or white racing stripes and front-and-rear spoilers that gave the trim its name. On paper, it was every bit the equal of the muscle cars wearing Ford badges on the same showroom floor.

It didn’t matter. 1971 was the last year Mercury sold the Cyclone as its own distinct model, and by 1972 the name had been demoted back to an option package — this time on the Montego GT rather than the Comet it started on. Mercury built only about 30 Montego Cyclone performance package cars that final year, roughly 20 of them with the 429 engine. Buyers simply weren’t choosing the Mercury version of a car they could get with a Ford badge for less, and Mercury dropped the package after 1972 rather than keep propping up a nameplate nobody wanted.

What Makes It Special

The Cyclone’s significance isn’t really about any one engine or spec sheet — it’s about timing. It landed squarely in the middle of Detroit’s aero wars, the same arms race that produced the Ford Torino Talladega, the Dodge Charger Daytona, and the Plymouth Superbird — cars built first to win on NASCAR’s high banks and only secondarily to be sold to the public. The Spoiler II was Mercury’s entry into that fight, one of a small handful of true aero-war homologation specials from the entire era. The fight didn’t last long: after the winged and long-nosed cars started pushing speeds toward 200 mph, NASCAR effectively ended the aero wars for 1971 by capping engine displacement on aero-bodied cars at 305 cubic inches, gutting the straight-line advantage that had justified building them in the first place. The Cyclone Spoiler II’s entire reason for existing evaporated within two seasons of its debut.

That obscurity is exactly what makes surviving Cyclones interesting to collectors today. A car built in numbers that low, sharing a platform with a far more famous sibling, tends to get overlooked at every stage — overlooked by original buyers who bought the Torino instead, overlooked by restorers who chased the more recognizable name, and overlooked by the market for decades afterward. That’s slowly changing as buyers who already own the obvious muscle cars go looking for something their friends haven’t seen before, and a 503-unit NASCAR homologation special with a Cobra Jet under the hood — or a 30-unit final-year Montego Cyclone that almost nobody remembers exists — is about as deep a cut as the era offers.

It also makes the Cyclone one of the trickier cars in the muscle car world to buy with confidence. Because it shared so much sheet metal and so many drivetrain options with the far more numerous Torino, a genuine Cyclone can be harder to authenticate than a car built in bigger numbers — the Marti Report or Mercury-specific documentation matters more here than it does on a mainstream Mustang or Torino, especially on a Spoiler II where the difference between a real Gurney or Yarborough edition and a well-dressed clone is entirely in the paperwork. That extra homework is part of why the video’s model-by-model, year-by-year approach is useful beyond simple nostalgia: knowing exactly which engines, packages, and trims existed in which years is the difference between spotting a legitimate survivor and getting talked into a Torino wearing the wrong grille.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.