{"id":14716,"date":"2022-02-05T09:03:58","date_gmt":"2022-02-05T14:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/autosector.com\/?p=14716"},"modified":"2022-02-05T09:03:58","modified_gmt":"2022-02-05T14:03:58","slug":"junkyard-gem-1995-mercury-tracer-trio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/autosector.com\/?p=14716","title":{"rendered":"Junkyard Gem: 1995 Mercury Tracer Trio"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the rise of Radwood<\/a>, cars with exaggerated characteristics associated with the 1980s and 1990s are cool again<\/a>. That means some combination of pastel and\/or neon colors<\/a>, squiggly squeezed-from-toothpaste-tube graphics, nonfunctional decklid spoilers, giant TURBO badging<\/a>, and kicky youth-centric nomenclature are required if you want your wheels to be considered in compliance with the sacred tenets of Radism. I do my best to find rad machinery while crawling around in car graveyards<\/a>, and since I came of driving age in 1982<\/a> I know a bit about the subject. Today’s rare Junkyard Gem<\/a> shows us the Mercury Division’s<\/a> belated attempt to sell fun cars to rad-leaning youngsters: a Tracer<\/a> Trio, found in a Denver yard a few weeks back.<\/p>\n

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The Trio package added 310 bucks to the cost of the $11,280 base Tracer sedan (that’s about $575 on a $20,925 car in 2022 dollars), and it got the hip-and-trendy young buyer a leather-wrapped steering wheel, seven-spoke wheels, a decklid spoiler and these rad fender badges. I’m going to say that the much louder graphics and candy-cane-colored displacement badges on the Pontiac Sunbird W25<\/a> out-radded the Tracer Trio by a mile, but then Pontiac<\/a> generally out-radded everyone in those days. Even Plymouth<\/a> got into the act with such radness as the Breeze Expresso<\/a> and Sundance Duster<\/a> (we’ll overlook the anti-rad Horizon Miser<\/a> here). Perhaps tellingly, Mercury<\/a>, Pontiac<\/a> and Plymouth<\/a> all got the “Old Yeller” treatment not long after the Rad Era ended.<\/p>\n

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The Tracer name always went on Mercuries<\/a> built on Mazda<\/a> platforms, starting with the Australia-built, Ford Laser-based 1987-1989 cars<\/a> and then continuing with Mexico-assembled, Ford<\/a> Escort-based 1991-1996 cars. That generation of Escort<\/a>\/Tracer was mechanical twins with the Mazda Proteg\u00e9<\/a>, itself the bridge between the 323<\/a> and the Mazda3<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Some Tracers got the a 1.8-liter Mazda engine that was related to the Miata’s engine, but this one has the pure-Detroit CVH 1.9<\/a>. You’re looking at 88 horsepower right here; the Mazda 1.8 offered 127 horses.<\/p>\n

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At least the original buyer of this car got the base five-speed manual transmission<\/a> instead of forking over $815 extra (about $1,510 today) for the four-speed slushbox<\/a>. As a 29-year-old slacker living in San Francisco’s Mission District and driving a hooptie ’65 Chevy Impala sedan<\/a> at the time, I would have taken the manual transmission without<\/em> the Trio package, had I been forced to buy a new Tracer. I think I’d have taken the ’95 Honda Civic<\/a> over just about any new cheap new car<\/a> back then, though.<\/p>\n

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This cassette deck set the original buyer back 165 genuine American frogskins, or around $306 today. Now that even the cheapest possible misery boxes have very nice audio systems as factory equipment<\/a>, we forget how expensive it once was to get even rudimentary tunes in a new car<\/a>. In 1995, though, if you wanted to listen to the excellent hits of the era<\/a>, you had to pay.<\/p>\n\n

Kate Jackson<\/a> wanted you to know that the base Tracer had a bigger engine than the base models of the Sentra<\/a>, Corolla<\/a> and Civic<\/a>; with 1.9 liters, the Tracer’s mill crushed the 1.6s in the Nissan<\/a> and Corolla as well as the 1.5 in the Civic\u2026 in the displacement department.\u00a0 As for horsepower<\/em>, well, that’s another story; the Sentra had 110 horses, the Corolla had 105, and the Civic just 70 (but that was the compete-with-the-wretched-Tercel CX model; the DX that everyone actually bought had 102 hp).<\/p>\n\n

If you took all the new-car-buying advice from your family and friends in 1995, you’d definitely get\u2026 a Tracer? True, it was slightly cheaper than its Proteg\u00e9 platform-mate, but the near-identical Escort LX sedan cost just $11,040.<\/p>\n

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