Cool Torino-Based NASCAR Prototypes to Appear at Lowes Motor Speedway

wow you guys are serious. it was a joke about ford copying datsun. calm down holy shit.

Both comments below are right, and wrong. These two specimens are fron the 1970 season meaning they were conjured up during the 1969 race season after Ford watched Mopar cruise to victory time and again with thier winged wonder cars the Dodge Daytonas and Plymouth Superbirds. The Datsun 240 appeared shortly after giving rise to the suspicion that the innovators were infact American made. Not that any one car is better than the other, NASCAR’s ban of supersized combustion chamber size spelled the end of Mopar’s dominance with the Daytonas and Superbirds. The comming gas crises helped to a large degree. The Mercury Cyclone 2 and Torino King Cobra were simply concepts that Ford was toying with. Datsun however built thier sports car which may appear to have similar design cues. However, Datsun DID have an incredible run with the little coupe, increasing size and muscularity over a two and a half decade run. (I may be corrected on that last fact, so we’ll just call it guestimation at this point)

So where Ford tried to copy Chrysler with a bullit type nose as a design feature, Datsun mostlikely tried to use rudimentary aerodynamics in thier design….after the Chrysler/Mopar products and Ford products were built.

Both of these Great automobiles will be showing with the Comet East Car Club at AutoFair. We will be located on Pit Road near turn 4. Please come by a check them out. The owner loves to show off his cars.

Don
http://www.cometeastcarclub.org

For the comment below… every automotive maker has “copied”, “borrowed”, or mimicked competitors ideas and designs since the moment they started mass production. That’s how the industry stays competitive and on the “cutting edge”.

Very beautiful car, sad to see such a car not be produced in larger numbers.

looks like Ford copied Datsun back in the 70s.

That’s gotta be the most beautiful Cyclone I’ve ever seen. Too bad it didn’t make it to mass production. If insurance and gas had stayed low and NASCAR didn’t change the rules on the aero wars, it probably would’ve.

This car is beautiful. There was an article written about it in the winter 2006 issue of Muscle Car Review, which was a real good read. The owner even owns a King Cobra as well. He bought the King Cobra from Holman-Moody in 1970, and asked a former Ford designer who worked on the cars if he had any more information about the King Cobra. The employee said that there were two more King Cobras, and Mercury had built a car(the Cyclone II) for Mose Lane, the vice president of Lincoln/Mercury.
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The owner tried to sell his King Cobra for $1,500 in the late 70’s and early 80’s, but no one wanted it because it was ugly. He brought the car to a show, were he became more interested. As he said,”I pulled up in the parking lot, and the place cleared out. Everybody came running. All of a sudden, I was a celebrity. So then I got a little more interested. I went ahead and cleaned the car up somewhat. I made sure everything was nice. I started going to a lot more Ford shows.”
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Now the owner was interested, and started looking into The history of the Mercury. He learned that Mose Lane retired to Indiana. After five trips to the state he found the farm, but it was now occupied by an Amish family, and all of Mose Lane’s cars had been auctioned off. The Amish man on the farm said everything was gone, but a boy walked up and said that there was one more car in the chicken barn that nobody wanted. And there it was, under a collapsed roof. Apparently there was no VIN number, because the car was experimental.
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This is a great car, with a great history. Thanks for posting this!

Wow that’s cool. I love it when old cars like that are reborn out of the woodwork.