Mercury Built Only 42 of These Dual-Quad 427s in 1964 — Nick Zakarian Has Kept His for 20 Years

A 1964 Mercury Marauder with the factory-rare dual-quad 427 — one of just 42 built that year — turned up at a Detroit car show still owned by the same man for two decades. Nick Zakarian’s fastback-roofed big Mercury hides one of the rarest engine options Ford Motor Company ever sold. Here’s the NASCAR-bred history behind the nameplate most muscle car fans have forgotten.

Mercury built exactly 42 cars like this one in 1964 — and finding an untouched example, dual carburetors, four-speed and all, sitting outside a car show tent decades later is not supposed to happen anymore. At the Mustang Memories show in Detroit, YouTube channel REVan Evan tracked down Nick Zakarian and the 1964 Mercury Marauder he’s owned for twenty years: a big, fastback-roofed full-size coupe hiding a factory-rare 427 under its hood. The engine option was called the Super Marauder 427 — Mercury’s own inside joke, since it powered the very car it was named after — and it paired two Holley four-barrel carburetors with a four-speed manual instead of the automatic nearly every other big Mercury left the factory with. Viewers who watched the video weren’t shy about their reaction either, several calling 1964 “the most beautiful year for the big Mercs” and admitting that the sound of a 427 FE big-block still gives them goosebumps sixty years later. Zakarian’s car is proof that Mercury’s forgotten full-size muscle era deserves a second look.

Nick Zakarian’s Twenty-Year Marauder

REVan Evan’s video is a straightforward car-show walkaround, and that simplicity is exactly what makes it work — the camera lingers on the long hood, the fastback roofline, and the numbers-matching 427 sitting under it while Zakarian talks through what makes the car special. According to the video’s description, this Marauder runs the factory “427 2×4 combination” — two four-barrel carburetors instead of one — backed by a four-speed manual gearbox, a combination Mercury sold in vanishingly small numbers. Zakarian has owned the car for two decades, and viewers familiar with him weren’t surprised; one commenter noted growing up in the same neighborhood as “the Zakarian brothers,” who “always had good luck finding the best cars and full of knowledge of these babies.”

The comment section turned into its own oral history of big Ford and Mercury FE engines. Viewers swapped stories of 390, 406, and 427-cubic-inch FE big-blocks in period Galaxies and Meteors — tri-power carburetion, top-loader four-speeds, and rear gears “to make things happen,” as one commenter put it. One remembered his first car, a one-owner 1964 Galaxie 500 XL with a 390 four-barrel, a floor console shifter, and factory chrome reverse wheels; another recalled a friend who ran a factory 427, four-speed Galaxie 500 back in the day. Others pointed out the Marauder’s chrome front-end treatment echoes the 1961 Ford Thunderbird, a detail that ties this car into a broader family resemblance across Ford Motor Company’s early-1960s lineup. It’s the kind of detail that only surfaces when genuine enthusiasts, not just casual viewers, show up in the replies.

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The Roofline Mercury Built to Beat Ford at NASCAR

The Marauder name first appeared partway through the 1963 model year, and it wasn’t just a trim package — it was an aerodynamics project. Mercury’s other full-size cars that year wore the reverse-slanted “Breezeway” roof, but the Marauder got a forward-slanted fastback instead. Legendary racing tuner Bill Stroppe tested both shapes and found the fastback was worth an extra 4.5 mph at speed over Mercury’s other rooflines — a meaningful gap in NASCAR’s high-speed superspeedway racing. The bet paid off almost immediately: Parnelli Jones drove a new Marauder fastback to victory in 1963, launching a string of Mercury wins that continued well into the 1970s.

By 1964, the Marauder treatment had spread further across Mercury’s lineup, including a four-door sedan that kept the same fastback roof. The two-door hardtop coupe carried a base price around $3,650, with several thousand built that year across Mercury’s Monterey, Montclair, and Park Lane series. But the Super Marauder 427 under Zakarian’s hood was a different story entirely — Mercury’s records show only 42 cars left the factory in 1964 with the dual-quad 427, code “R” on the door tag, making it one of the rarest options Mercury ever offered on a full-size car. That rarity is easy to miss today because the Marauder never got the marketing push Mercury’s intermediate and pony-car rivals eventually received, even though it was winning races on national television years earlier. If you want to see how another overlooked chapter of American performance history gets the deep-dive treatment, our look at how a “1967 Shelby GT500” reshaped the market decades later covers similar ground on why rarity and provenance matter so much to collectors today.

The Rarest 427 Mercury Ever Built

The numbers explain why this particular Marauder stopped people mid-scroll. The Super Marauder 427’s dual four-barrel setup was rated at 425 horsepower and 480 lb-ft of torque — genuinely fierce output for a full-size 1964 car weighing well over two tons. Mercury also offered a tamer single four-barrel version of the same 427, rated at 410 horsepower and 476 lb-ft, and even that milder engine only found its way into 22 cars that year. Between the two versions, fewer than 65 full-size 1964 Mercurys ever left the factory with a 427 under the hood, and Zakarian’s dual-quad, four-speed combination sits at the rarest end of that already-tiny list.

The four-speed manual is its own kind of rare. Most big Mercurys of the era were ordered with Merc-O-Matic automatics, since full-size buyers in 1964 tended to want comfort over row-your-own shifting. Pairing a factory 425-horsepower engine with a stick in a car this size was a genuinely odd combination for a mainstream dealer to sell — closer to a homologation special built for weekend racers than a family cruiser, even though Mercury still marketed the Marauder lineup as a comfortable, three-across-the-bench full-size car.

It’s a reminder that muscle-car history isn’t only about Mustangs, GTOs, and Chevelles — Ford Motor Company was quietly building some of the fastest full-size cars in America under the Mercury badge, and racing them successfully on NASCAR’s biggest ovals, years before the pony-car wars ever started. A big, comfortable four-door-capable body with a race-proven fastback roof and a factory 425-horsepower engine option was a genuinely strange thing for a mainstream dealer to sell in 1964 — and that strangeness is exactly why cars like Zakarian’s still turn heads at shows more than sixty years later.

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