What Motor? 1974 Ford Capri

The ’70-74 Capri and ’76-78 Capri II imported to the US were sold at Lincoln-Mercury dealers, but were never branded as Mercurys nor had any marque badging at all other than simply “Capri”. As such, Capri in the US during this era served as a sort of sub-marque for these Euro Ford captive imports.

I’ve long thought they should have revived that approach when they started importing Ford Sierra coupes for ’84, rather than inventing the unfamiliar and hard-to-pronounce Merkur marque for that. That probably would have required canceling or renaming the Fox-body Mercury Capri, which was never as strong a seller as its Mustang twin anyway, but also would have freed up the Fox-Capri’s handsome boxflared fenders for a later Mustang facelift (strange they didn’t eventually do that anyway for the ’87 Mustang, since they were also canceling the Fox-Capri then).

Anyway, that approach would have allowed for Capri to expand into a proper marque for Ford’s captive imports later, when they also started importing the Euro Ford Granada Scorpio hatchback sedan (’88-89 Merkur Scorpio), and later the Mazda-based and Australian-built ’91-94 Capri roadster that always seemed a poor fit under the Mercury marque, maybe also putting the Mazda-based ’87-89 1st-gen Mercury Tracer under the Capri marque as well.