1970 Mercury Cougar Eliminator

You're not going to see it at a show. Judges won't be able to tell whether it's there. In fact, it may not see the light of day again in our lifetimes.

But Eric Petosa still documented and then replicated the factory markings on the inside of the pumpkin of the Ford 9-inch axle in his 1970 Cougar Boss 302 Eliminator.

Insane? Obsessive? Anal retentive? You say those words as if they're derogatory.

In truth, Petosa probably has the most-documented Cougar Eliminator in existence. Marti report? Ford Customer Assistance Center report? Those are just the icing on the cake. He has the original invoice. He has the first registration card issued to this car. He has the canceled checks from the first three lease payments made on this car. He has previous owners' receipts from oil changes in the 1980s.

Disassembly of the Eliminator started soon after its purchase, and Petosa made sure to document and save absolutely everything, especially under the hood; every fastener remained with the car

Never mind that the Cougar is one of just 146 Eliminators to get the Boss 302 engine in 1970 and, according to Petosa, is the last Eliminator built (June 10, 1970) as well as the only Eliminator ordered with Lime Green Metallic paint and Medium Ivy Green interior and hubcaps.

Knowing all that, wouldn't you take the utmost care in restoring this Eliminator?

Actually, if you would have bought it in the condition Petosa did, you might not have considered restoring it. He bought the Eliminator in May 2000, becoming the fifth owner. Up to that point, the Cougar had spent its life in various Western states--Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, Washington and California--so it never saw the killer salt typical of Petosa's home in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.

Petosa said he actually drove the Eliminator around a bit shortly after he bought it, mostly to get a feel for what he would need to replace when he would tear it down. With about 122,000 miles on the odometer, though, and with everything still in place, from the Toploader wide-ratio four-speed manual transmission and its Hurst shifter to the 290hp Boss 302 engine, complete with all of its original smog equipment, Petosa had little to worry about when it came to the drivetrain. In fact, according to all the receipts Eric had gathered, the Eliminator had only been in shops for routine maintenance--brakes, bushings, repacking the wheel bearings, an idler arm in 1988, a clutch later that year. "Everything on the car worked, even the turn signals," Petosa said. "Nothing was missing on the whole car, including the smog pieces. Thank God those were all there, because those would have been real hard to find."

As for the body, the dealership that originally sold the Eliminator--Kumpf Motor Car Co. in Denver, Colorado--had installed an aftermarket black vinyl roof, which didn't quite fit in Petosa's plans to return the car to fresh-from-the-factory condition, so he chucked the vinyl to find nearly pristine sheetmetal underneath. "I actually took my paint sample to match the paint from the metal under the vinyl top," Petosa said. In fact, he only found surface rust on the inside of the front fenders, some rust bubbles on the bottoms of the doors (where drain holes plugged up) and rust-through on the lower left quarter, where it appeared the quarter had suffered damage and was at one point repainted. The original paint remained on the firewall and the original undercoating and overspray remained throughout the underside. The Eliminator decals on the rear quarters, which often rubbed off entirely, remained nearly intact.

Teardown began about three months later in Petosa's barn. The barn, which once housed horses many decades ago, had wooden floors where Petosa planned to restore the car, so he poured concrete floors in that section, hung plastic sheeting to keep the dust down and installed fluorescent lighting so he could see the car. Rather than dump all the old parts in a pile once he unbolted them from the car, Petosa meticulously documented and photographed each part, making sure to note installation orientations and any date-codes stamped, painted, etched or silk-screened into the part.

Who would have suspected the inside of the rear axle's pumpkin had markings, let alone that anyone would document and replicate them?

"I had a big rack, like a UPS rack, and I labeled every piece and put it in a plastic bag, and I even dated the bags to note when I took the part off of the car," Petosa said. "This was before digital cameras were as good as they are now, so I took a lot of Polaroids, but I also videotaped the disassembly procedure, and now I have eight hours of video of taking the car apart."

As if that didn't provide enough reference, he also had a 1970 Mustang Boss 302 with a build date 30 days off of his Eliminator and he bought another 1970 Cougar with about 45,000 miles on it and all of its original hardware, paint, coatings and markings. "That car was so valuable for reference," Petosa said. "I still look at it from time to time to see if anything needs to be changed on my Eliminator."

Petosa soon befriended Bob Perkins, the Mustang Club of America's chief national judge and the owner of Perkins Restoration in Juneau, Wisconsin, who would prove invaluable for the restoration. Petosa said he spent an entire week at Perkins' shop in Wisconsin, picking his brain for tips on finishes, on correct parts and on assembly line procedures. "Without him, I couldn't have done the car," Petosa said. He said he returned home from that week with three boxes full of Boss 302-specific parts. "All the hard parts," he said, and a wallet that was $20,000 thinner.

The preponderance of date codes on the Boss 302 Cougars and Mustangs made the restoration of this Eliminator particularly challenging. Just about everything on a Boss 302 car, from the battery to the driveshaft, is either date coded or marked specifically for a Boss 302 drivetrain. The factory stamped both the engine and the transmission with the car's VIN. Even the air cleaner has markings specific to a Boss 302 car. "A regular Cougar isn't as date coded as a Boss 302 Eliminator," Petosa said. "Maybe they suspected from the start that these cars would be valuable someday. But it was probably so that they wouldn't get in trouble with Trans-Am's production rules, so they made sure everything was documented."

As the fully restored car sits today, one could swear it rolled off the hauler right into a time capsule

The documentation helped Petosa iron out a few inconsistencies with his Eliminator, as did discussions with the car's original owner, Henry Brenniman. For example, every Eliminator came with color-keyed side mirrors, but his had chrome mirrors on both sides because that's the way Henry ordered the car. Petosa noticed a line on the invoice that read "Delete Install Rear Spoiler," and confirmed with Henry that he did indeed order the car that way, but that the spoiler still came in the trunk. While not on the invoice, Petosa did discover that, while most Eliminators came with 14-inch Magnum 500s, his originally came with 14-inch steel wheels (Date coded, of course. Boss Mustangs came with 15-inch wheels.) decorated with dog-dish hubcaps and trim rings, which Kumpf Motor Car replaced with full hubcaps. Those hubcaps remained with the car when Petosa bought it, but he sourced the dog-dishes--specific to 1970 cars--one by one. The trim rings, fortunately, remained unchanged and they weren't date coded from 1967 to 1970, making the search for replacements much simpler.

About a year's worth of weekends and evenings later, Petosa had the Eliminator stripped and documented, down to the last nut and bolt. He then turned his attention toward the few rust issues. He said he located an NOS rear quarter to repair the rust on the Eliminator. "I went with NOS rather than the reproduction quarter panels they have out now because the originals have a little recess around the drain hole at the bottom of the quarter and the reproduction panels ignore that recess," Petosa said. He then cut the NOS panel to obtain a correct patch panel of the necessary size and welded the panel in using a Hobart Handler 135 MIG welder. As for the rust bubbles on the door, Petosa said they cropped up in a flat section of the door skin, so he just used a piece of flat steel of the same gauge as the door skin and welded that in.

Ahead of Petosa lay not just the effort of stripping the car down to bare metal and painting it, but the more monumental task of reassembling the Eliminator precisely according to his disassembly notes and of rounding up the NOS parts necessary for such an authentic rebuild.

OWNER'S VIEW

Eric Petosa, 46, owner of a construction company in the Catskill Mountains, said his whole intention with this Eliminator was to find the most original and intact Boss 302-powered Cougar possible.

"I wouldn't have gone this far if it weren't such a rare car," he said. "I definitely spent a lot more time researching this car and looking for parts than I did actually putting it together. I chose the Cougar because I already had a Boss Mustang, and I think the Cougar just looks and rides a lot nicer than the Mustang. This Cougar just looked so slick, especially with the Eliminator package blacking out everything. Plus, the Mercurys really are rarer cars than the Fords.

"If I had to do this car all over again, I might not have spent $100,000 in the restoration, but it was worth it, especially when I got to see Bob Perkins's face after

I finished it."--Daniel Strohl