Mercury Gave the 1970 Cyclone a Gunsight Nose to Fight Chrysler’s Wing Cars – Then Fired the Designer Before It Ever Hit Showrooms

Mercury wrapped the 1970 Cyclone’s nose around a gunsight-style grille built to counter Chrysler’s winged NASCAR cars, backed by a 429 Super Cobra Jet rated near 375 horsepower. The designer behind that face was fired within weeks of the car reaching dealers, and the real NASCAR homologation story is messier than the nose lets on.

Look at the nose on a 1970 Mercury Cyclone and it doesn’t read like a family sedan’s cousin — it reads like a target reticle welded onto a two-ton missile. That center-mounted gunsight grille wasn’t an accident of styling; it was Ford’s answer to a war Chrysler had already started on NASCAR’s high banks. Behind that face sat a company in the middle of a leadership purge, a designer who had already reshaped Corvettes and Mustangs before landing at Lincoln-Mercury, and an engine built to back up the attitude the sheet metal promised. By the time dealers hung the 1970 Cyclone on the showroom floor, the man who drew that face was already gone.

Rare Classic Cars & Automotive History walks through the design thinking behind the 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler in a short, focused breakdown of why the car’s face looks the way it does. The video zeroes in on the car’s restyled front end — the protruding nose, the stretched fenders, and the gunsight-style intake punched into the center of the grille — and frames it as a deliberate styling statement rather than a random facelift.

It’s a tight piece, built around a single idea: the Cyclone’s aggressive face was a response to a specific moment in Detroit’s muscle car arms race, not just a styling refresh for a new model year. That context is worth unpacking, because the full story behind the nose touches NASCAR rule books, a corporate firing, and an engine option most Cyclone buyers never actually ordered.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

A Grille Built to Answer Chrysler’s Wing Cars

By 1969, Chrysler had turned NASCAR into an aerodynamics contest. The winged Dodge Charger Daytona and Plymouth Superbird used pointed noses and towering rear wings to cut through the air at over 200 mph, and Ford needed its own answer on the Torino and Cyclone intermediates that carried its NASCAR hopes. The job of designing that answer fell to Larry Shinoda, the stylist who had already shaped the Corvette Sting Ray and the Mako Shark concept at Chevrolet before Ford hired him to run its Special Design Center. Shinoda’s team — including stylist Harvey Winn, who had previously helped shape the sheet metal on Dodge’s second-generation Charger, and engineer Ed Hall of the race-prep shop Kar Kraft — built an aero package for the Torino and Cyclone meant to counter Chrysler’s winged cars on the superspeedways.

The 1970 Cyclone’s restyled nose was part of that larger effort. The wheelbase grew an inch to 117 inches, while the overall length stretched 6.7 inches thanks to the new protruding front end — the same nose that carried the gunsight-style grille insert at its center. Mercury’s Cyclone lineup for 1970 spanned a base model, the Cyclone GT, and the range-topping Spoiler, and every one of them wore the new face, which meant Lincoln-Mercury dealers were suddenly selling a car that looked like it belonged on a superspeedway even in its mildest trim. On the street-going Spoiler, that look doubled as a brand statement: this was Mercury’s muscle car wearing a face built for a NASCAR fight, whether or not the buyer ever intended to see 180 mph.

The Cyclone shared its intermediate platform with the Ford Torino, and both cars got extended, aerodynamic noses for 1970 as part of the same Special Design Center push. But the two siblings didn’t end up looking alike: where the Torino’s restyle leaned toward a smoother, more conventional fastback profile, the Cyclone’s face carried the more overtly aggressive execution, right down to that gunsight-style center section that gave the car its nickname among collectors today. It’s the kind of detail that separates the two platform-mates at a glance, even decades after both left the Ford-Lincoln-Mercury lineup.

The Designer Fired Before His Nose Ever Reached Showrooms

Shinoda never got to see how the public reacted to it. Ford president Bunkie Knudsen — the executive who had pulled Shinoda out of GM and installed him at the Special Design Center — was fired by Henry Ford II in September 1969, the result of a power struggle that had been building for months. Shinoda, firmly identified as one of Knudsen’s hires, was dismissed roughly two weeks later by Ford design vice president Gene Bordinat. The 1970 Cyclone — carrying the nose Shinoda’s team had designed — hit dealers that fall, after the man responsible for its face was already off the payroll.

The homologation side of the story got messier still. Ford had planned a 1970 Cyclone Spoiler II as a NASCAR-certified aero special, wearing a unique nose of its own while sharing standard Cyclone Spoiler hardware everywhere else. Sources disagree on exactly how that program played out — some accounts describe several hundred planned units before the certification push was scaled back, while others say the homologation car ultimately shipped only with a 351 Windsor small-block rather than the big-block power buyers expected from a NASCAR special. Either way, the full-bore 429 Super Cobra Jet Cyclone that enthusiasts remember today was sold as a street performance option, not the race-honed homologation special its nose seemed to promise — a gap between what the car looked built for and what most buyers could actually order.

The Cyclone nameplate didn’t survive much longer than Shinoda’s tenure at Ford. Mercury discontinued the Cyclone after the 1971 model year as the muscle car market cooled under rising insurance surcharges and tightening emissions rules, folding what was left of its performance image into the standard Montego lineup. That makes the gunsight-nosed 1970 and 1971 cars the final, most aggressive expression of the nameplate before Mercury walked away from the segment — one last swing built in the middle of a corporate shakeup, aimed at a NASCAR fight the rulebook had already started moving past.

The 429 That Had to Live Up to the Face

What the nose needed to back it up was an engine, and Mercury had one. The 429 Super Cobra Jet option swapped the standard Cyclone’s Rochester Quadrajet carburetor for a 780-CFM Holley four-barrel, added a four-bolt main block for bottom-end strength, and used a mechanical flat-tappet camshaft tuned for high-rpm breathing. Rated at roughly 375 horsepower gross, the 429 SCJ gave the restyled Cyclone the kind of straight-line credibility its gunsight face implied, even though the car’s NASCAR lineage actually ran through that smaller-engined homologation special most buyers never saw.

Mercury’s performance credentials on NASCAR’s biggest stage were already established by 1970. Cale Yarborough had won the 1968 Daytona 500 driving a Woods Brothers-prepared Mercury Cyclone, two years before the gunsight-nosed Cyclone reached showrooms — proof the nameplate had real speedway pedigree even before Ford’s aero war with Chrysler reshaped its face. That pedigree is tangled up in a small piece of trivia that still trips people up decades later: when GMC needed a name for its turbocharged high-performance pickup in 1991, it wanted to call it the Syclone — but Mercury still held the rights to “Cyclone” from this very car, so GMC swapped the C for an S just to get the name on the fender.

Fifty-plus years on, the 1970 Cyclone’s design quirks are exactly what collectors chase. The gunsight nose that marked it as a child of Ford’s aero war is one of the most distinctive fronts of the entire muscle car era, and Mercury built a limited run of Cale Yarborough-edition Cyclones finished in the red-and-white colors of his Woods Brothers Daytona-winning car — a direct nod to that 1968 NASCAR pedigree. Surviving 429 Super Cobra Jet cars are scarce enough that unrestored originals turn up in barn-find stories almost as often as they do at auction blocks, and today the Cyclone tends to sell for less than its Torino sibling despite wearing the more aggressive face — one more quirk in a car engineered to answer a very specific rival and that ended up outliving the politics that shaped it.