If you have been a regular at home in this column for years, the baby blue Mercury Park Lane may look familiar in these photos. That may very well be true, exactly this copy was already caught by the same Techzle reader more than four years ago! Michael Holleman ran into Mercury’s 50-year-old flagship a second time.
We currently know Lincoln as the top luxury brand of Ford, but until 2010 Ford Motor Company also had Mercury in its portfolio. In Europe, Mercury tried with cars like the Sable, Grand Marquis and Villager until the 1990s, but large numbers were never put away. The really appealing Mercury’s date from a different period. This 1966 Park Lane is an excellent example of a battleship from a time when the trees reached the sky and the measure of happiness was measured by the size and opulence of your car at about 5.5 meters in length. .
The Park Lane in these photos is the second generation of the model that topped the Mercury food chain, one step above the Montclair. Lincoln supplied the Park Lane as a two-door hardtop, as a convertible and as a four-door sedan, but also as a four-door hardtop, without a B-pillar and with a different roofline. The copy in these photos is ‘just’ the four-door sedan, but this is also really a feast for the eyes. With its upright rear window and a tailgate where you can park a two-axle vehicle, this stretched chunk of steel is in every way a beautiful example of car design as it is completely unimaginable today.
Mercury Park Lane interior (photo from 2016)
The first time this car appeared in In het Wild was in 2016. In 2017, the Park Lane ended up with a new owner, an owner who – fortunately – looks good for this considerable number of linear meters of automotive history. Blame him or her. The 2-ton sedan also has a 6.7-liter V8 under the hood, a machine that sends 330 hp to the rear wheels. That 6.7 V8 was not even the largest power plant that Mercury delivered in the Park Lane, a step above it was a 7.0 …