The car was found via eBay, an unlikely vehicle for me to buy a car because normally you don’t get to inspect what you’ve bought unless you have enough money to fly there, but this was a local car. It had escaped two auctions and I called the owner, who happened to be a car dealer in a nearby town. We struck up a deal for $1,500 for the body. It was an intact car, fairly straight, but it had the Marauder package on it. It was a two barrel, 390, non-air conditioned car, very plebeian, nothing much, but the body still spelled NASCAR to me when I looked at it. Because of the way it was trimmed, had you elected to restore it, it would been a very expensive restoration.
I elected to strip the car and put it on a rotisserie and then the body went in one direction. It actually went back to the man’s shop who had built the Indy car all those years before. His son took over his business and we had been friends and they started the body work. Then at some point he decided that he was selling his business and one of his people started out on his own and took the car. He turned out to be a criminal and more or less hijacked the body for three years. Six months of which I didn’t know where the car was.
I saw this car at the Art Center College or Pasadena annual Car Classic last fall: http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2016/10/merc-marauder-at-art-center-classic.html
Petrolicious was so impressed by the car at the Car Classic that they did a full article and photo shoot https://petrolicious.com/articles/this-mercury-marauder-is-one-mans-hand-built-legacy
and that is when I found out about it being stolen and snagged that headline for this post
