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A Bright Yellow 1969 Cougar Eliminator is headed to a no-reserve auction with its original G-code paperwork intact, proof it left Dearborn with Ford’s rare Boss 302 and a mandatory four-speed. Somewhere along the way that engine vanished in favor of a 351 and an automatic, and nobody wrote down why. Whoever buys it next has to decide whether the car’s real value is in what it is now, or what it once was.
The Cougar Eliminator replaced the Cougar GT on April 1, 1969, and just 302 of the 2,250 built left the factory with a 428 Cobra Jet under the scoop. Jay Leno spends an afternoon with one of the survivors — a big-block pony car with a genuine Trans-Am pedigree and a 335-horsepower rating almost nobody believes.
Gord Nelson had a bucket list, and near the top of it sat a Mercury Cougar Eliminator most muscle car fans overlook in favor of its Mustang cousin. When he found one buried in the newspaper classifieds, his wife told him to go get it. What he ended up with wears an engine rating that never quite matched what these cars could do at the strip. Read on to find out the real story under that Competition Orange hood.
Gord Nelson had a Cougar Eliminator on his bucket list for years before his wife Kelly spotted the right ad and told him to go get it. The car that resulted is a 1970 Cougar Eliminator CJ 428 in Competition Orange — one of Mercury’s rarest pony car packages, shown at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals. Watch to see what made the Nelsons’ hunt worth it.
Mercury built the Cougar Eliminator to answer a question nobody asked out loud: could the plush, buttoned-down Cougar throw a punch like a Boss Mustang? With engine options running from a workable 351 to a 428 Cobra Jet, and production numbers this thin, finding one today is harder than most people think. Read on to find out what actually made this muscle cat rare.
Road Test TV lines up one of only 182 factory-built 428 Cobra Jet Cougar Eliminator four-speeds against an equally rare 1969 Chevelle SS396 running the high-winding L78 396. It is a genuine Ford-versus-Chevy grudge match between two cars scarce enough to anchor any serious muscle car collection. Watch the full quarter-mile pass to see which rare survivor comes out ahead.