Mercury Lost Trans-Am to Ford by Two Points in 1967 — Then Mercury Quit the Series for Good

A near-forgotten Mercury Cougar factory team, driven by Dan Gurney and Parnelli Jones, lost the 1967 Trans-Am title to Ford by just two points — then Mercury walked away from the series entirely before building the Eliminator two years later.

Mercury lost the 1967 Trans-Am manufacturers’ championship to Ford by two points. Two. Not two races, not two wins — two championship points, decided at the very last event of the season, with a pair of future racing legends behind the wheel of the losing car. It should be one of the most famous near-misses in American racing history. Instead, almost nobody remembers that Mercury ever fielded a factory Trans-Am team at all, let alone one that came within a single finishing position of beating Carroll Shelby’s Ford Mustangs at their own game. The car was the Cougar, the team was run by a NASCAR legend named Bud Moore, and the whole effort vanished after a single season — two full years before Mercury ever built the street car most people associate with a “fast Cougar.”

The Trans-Am Season Mercury Lost by Two Points

In 1967, the SCCA’s Trans-American Sedan Championship was where Detroit’s pony cars actually proved themselves — twelve races a season, road courses instead of ovals or drag strips, built specifically to settle which manufacturer built the better-handling car. Ford had Carroll Shelby’s factory Mustang effort backing it, the same shop responsible for the GT350 and GT500, and it was the team every other manufacturer in the series measured itself against. Mercury answered with its own factory-backed Cougar program, built and campaigned by Bud Moore Engineering — the South Carolina outfit run by Bud Moore, a NASCAR car owner who would go on to decades of championship-winning engine work. Moore put two of the biggest names in American motorsport behind the wheel: Dan Gurney and Parnelli Jones, with Ed Leslie driving a third car in select races.

The Cougars were competitive from the opening weekend. Gurney and Jones qualified on the pole at Daytona with identical times, and at Green Valley Raceway in Texas the two Cougars finished first and second, with Gurney winning by less than a car length — reportedly the closest finish in Trans-Am history at that point. Mercury stayed in title contention all the way to the final race of the season at Kent, Washington, needing only a Cougar to finish ahead of the top Mustang to clinch the manufacturers’ championship. Gurney came up just short, crossing the line behind Ron Bucknum’s Mustang. When the points were tallied, Ford had 64 to Mercury’s 62. A two-point margin, decided on the last lap of the last race, by the car Mercury almost nobody remembers fielding at all.

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Mercury Walked Away While It Was Still Winning

What makes the story stranger is what happened next: nothing. There was no 1968 title defense, no follow-up season built on the momentum of nearly dethroning Shelby’s factory team. Mercury’s Trans-Am program ended after that single year, and by most accounts the decision had little to do with what happened on track — it came down to internal politics and shifting budget priorities inside Ford Motor Company rather than any lack of competitiveness. Ford kept backing Shelby’s Mustangs, which went on to build the kind of multi-year racing reputation that still sells Boss 302s and GT350s to collectors today. The Cougar’s Trans-Am chapter closed in a single season, before it ever had the chance to become a household name the way its closest rival did.

It’s also worth remembering exactly who Mercury had behind the wheel. Dan Gurney and Parnelli Jones weren’t journeyman road racers filling a factory ride — both men were already established as two of the most versatile drivers in American motorsport, with résumés that would go on to include Indianapolis 500 wins, Formula One starts, and NASCAR victories across multiple decades. Putting that kind of talent in a Cougar and coming within two points of a manufacturers’ title wasn’t a fluke of good luck; it was a legitimate factory effort that very nearly worked. Trans-Am mattered to Detroit precisely because it doubled as advertising — a manufacturer that could say its showroom pony car beat the competition on a real road course had a marketing line money couldn’t otherwise buy, which is exactly the line Ford got to keep and Mercury walked away from.

That timing matters, because it’s easy to confuse the racing Cougars with the street car that came two years later. The Trans-Am cars that put Gurney and Jones a lap away from a championship were purpose-built factory racers with no production equivalent. The “Eliminator,” the Cougar most enthusiasts actually picture when they hear the name, didn’t exist yet in 1967 — Mercury didn’t introduce it as an appearance and performance package until the 1969 model year, well after the factory racing effort had already been shut down.

The Eliminator Was the Encore, Not the Racer

The 1969 Eliminator carried bold body graphics, Mercury’s Competition Handling Package — stiffer springs and shocks, a larger front sway bar — and a choice of engines running from a 351 Windsor V8 up through a 390, a Boss 302, and the range-topping 428 Cobra Jet, officially rated at 335 horsepower. It was Mercury’s way of selling a car that looked and drove like it belonged on a road course, trading on a racing reputation the brand had mostly already walked away from. Only about 2,250 Eliminators were built for 1969, a rounding error next to the Mustangs Ford was moving that same year. The following model year, Mercury built more than 70,000 Cougars in total, and just 2,268 of them wore the Eliminator package. The Boss 302 version was rarer still — 169 built in its partial first year, 469 more in 1970, for a combined total of 638 cars across both model years.

Collectors who know the full story treat the right Eliminator seriously. A 1969 car with the 428 Cobra Jet and Competition Handling Package is genuinely quick by period standards, and the handful built with the Drag Pak option — upgrading the engine to Super Cobra Jet spec with a reinforced bottom end, an external oil cooler, and 3.91 rear gears — number only around 127 cars total. Those are Boss 302 and Shelby GT500 money in the right hands. Everyone else just has no reason to know to look, because the car’s two best stories — a two-point title fight with Gurney and Jones at the wheel, and a genuinely rare street package two years later — never got told as one continuous narrative.

Why the Cougar Still Gets Skipped Over

Part of the problem is simple timing. The Mustang had a three-year head start building its performance identity before the Cougar even existed as a nameplate, and Shelby’s name was already permanently attached to factory Fords by the time Mercury got serious about road racing. A single season, even one decided by two points with two of the biggest names in motorsport driving, doesn’t build the kind of multi-year legend that keeps a badge famous for sixty years. By the time the Eliminator arrived to cash in on that near-miss, the story had already gone cold — a performance package built on a racing legacy the brand itself had stopped talking about. The car that almost beat Carroll Shelby became the car nobody thinks to ask about.

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