Two cars line up on a backroad somewhere near Toronto, Canada in 1979. This is your average street race…a few bystanders, those in the know. No heavy crowds and nobody else nearby to cause a problem. Two cars, a 1969 Camaro and a 1970 Mercury Cougar, line up. The Camaro’s situation isn’t known, but the Cougar is well documented: the driver is Dieter Scharschmidt, a well-known street racer, and the Mercury isn’t anything to trifle with. A Cougar Eliminator was already a pretty stout piece, but the Cougar had started life as one of Ford of Canada’s racing team cars, a H/S runner wheeled by Vic Beleny and Bruce Fitzgibbon. Scharschmidt bought the car minus engine and trans in 1971 after Ford of Canada decided to let the team go amid the 75% racing budget cuts within the company and got to work building it into something wicked. Without question, his money was well spent because between the time he got the car finished to when he sold it in 1983, it was nearly unbeaten…”nearly” because it did record a loss, but Scharschmidt vehemently claims that the other car jumped the start.
Depending on what you read, either the Mercury was restored back to it’s original racing setup (complete with a 428 CJ that would be sure to put the fear of God into any street warrior) or was totaled out sometime in the mid-1990s and was never heard from again…tracking the story gets difficult, so if anyone knows the truth, we’d like to hear it. Meanwhile, check out some footage of the Eliminator putting in work in 1979:
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