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Gord and Kelly Nelson found this Competition Orange 1970 Cougar Eliminator through a newspaper ad – exactly the kind of car on Gord’s bucket list. Under the hood sits a 428 Cobra Jet that Mercury rated at 335 horsepower but which actually made closer to 390 on the dyno. The Eliminator trim only lasted two model years, making survivors like this one increasingly hard to find. Here’s what made this engine special.
Tucked inside a private muscle car collection that almost never sees the light of day sits a genuine unicorn: a 1968 Mercury Cougar GT-E built with the 427, an engine Ford discontinued after just 357 cars. Backyard Barn Finds got rare access to the collector behind it, a hands-on enthusiast who’s spent years assembling some of the rarest American muscle still surviving. This isn’t a car you’ll see at your local cruise night. Watch to see what else is hiding in that garage.
Everyone knows the Corvette skipped a model year and the Trans Am’s T-tops leaked. Fewer know that a Southern California dealer scheme got Dodge to build the only production car ever sold new with factory Cragar wheels, or that the fearsome 440 Six Pack wasn’t even the rarest engine you could order in a 1970 Super Bee. Two more little-known muscle car facts worth knowing.
Only 357 Mercury Cougars were ever built with Ford’s legendary 427 side-oiler under the hood — and once emissions rules forced a switch to the 428 Cobra Jet in May 1968, that engine never appeared in a new Ford product again. The GT-E’s understated Cougar body hides one of the rarest big-block stories of the entire muscle car era. It’s proof that the wildest factory oddities don’t always wear the loudest badges.
A “sweetest moment” waits at the end of the video, but the real story is under the hood. This 1969 Mercury Cougar Eliminator carries the 320-horsepower 390 big block, a rarer choice than most Eliminator buyers made that year — only 260 of 2,250 total Eliminators got this engine. Built as Mercury’s answer to the Boss Mustang, it traded outright drag strip focus for genuine street presence.
The 1967 Mercury Cougar beat the brand-new Chevrolet Camaro to Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award in its very first model year, backed by a Mustang-based chassis, hidden headlights, and an available 390-cubic-inch V8. Here is how a slightly more upscale pony car from Lincoln-Mercury managed to out-launch its own corporate cousin.
A lime-green Cougar so radically reworked that showgoers assumed it was a new model altogether — that was Mercury’s 1970 El Gato concept, unveiled at back-to-back auto shows before vanishing for good. It borrowed its fastback roofline from a Mustang, swapped its back seat for a European-style cargo shelf, and tested run-flat tire technology that failed spectacularly. Ford’s standard practice of destroying show cars means no one has documented seeing it since 1970. Here’s the story behind Mercury’s strangest concept car.
By 1968, the Mercury Cougar had proven its European-flavored take on Ford’s pony car platform was no fluke, backed by three newly added V8 options topping out at a 390-horsepower 427. The rare XR7-G package, just 622 built, paid tribute to racing driver Dan Gurney with unique trim and an available sunroof. Under the polished intake and Hooker headers of a modified example like this one lies a car built during the Cougar’s most ambitious model year yet.
Every car on this list has one thing in common: buyers keep paying a premium regardless of what else is happening in the market. Rarity, documented history, and a wave of nostalgia driven demand, especially from younger collectors introduced to these cars through film and pop culture, keep pushing prices for even once affordable muscle cars steadily upward. It is a reminder that horsepower alone was never the whole story.
A first-generation Dodge Challenger R/T that has never left one family is rarer than it sounds — Dodge built fewer than 1,000 R/T convertibles, and most examples changed hands, got modified, or disappeared decades ago. Built to challenge the Mustang and Camaro with everything from a 383 V8 to the 426 Hemi, the R/T was never meant to be a garage queen. So how does a car built for the street survive intact for half a century?
This blue Cougar XR-7 might just look like another 1970 pony car at first glance, but its wood-rimmed wheel and simulated walnut dash tell a different story. Mercury built it to feel like a personal luxury coupe, not a stripped-down performance car, and buyers agreed in far smaller numbers than you’d expect. Before casting a vote, here’s what actually separates this car from its Mustang cousin.
This 1969 Mercury Cougar pairs the loaded XR7 trim with the top-shelf 428 Cobra Jet V8, a combination that turned out to be far rarer than the factory brochure let on. Mercury built roughly 100,000 Cougars that year, but only a small handful got this exact engine and trim pairing, with some production records citing as few as 53 built. The Cobra Jet came backed by heavy-duty axles and radiators built specifically to survive its power. That’s what actually made this the baddest Cougar money could buy in ’69.
Mercury sold the Cougar as the refined alternative to a Mustang, but the 428 Cobra Jet option quietly turned a handful of them into some of the rarest muscle cars of 1969. Fewer than 130 Cougars left the factory with Ram Air Cobra Jet power that year, and this convertible represents one of the scarcest combinations of all.