Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1960 Mercury Comet Sedan
Reacting to small-car competition from American Motors, Volkswagen and even Renault, each member of the Detroit Big Three developed its own compact car to debut for the 1960 model year. For General Motors, this was the radical rear-engined Corvair, while Chrysler created the rugged Valiant. Ford scored the biggest long-term success with its small car for the new decade: the Falcon and its Mercury-badged twin, the Comet. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those first-year cars, found in a self-service yard next door to Denver, Colorado.
The platform designed for the 1960 Falcon went on to become the basis for the original Mustang, the first-generation Econoline, the Fairlane/Torino/Ranchero, the Maverick, the Granada and all their Mercury- and Lincoln-badged brethren. After 1980, when the final Falcon-derived Ford Granadas, Mercury Monarchs and (whatever the plural for Lincoln Versailles might be) were built for the United States market, production of what amounted to the 1960 Falcon continued in Argentina all the way through 1991.
This chassis design was a fairly ordinary unibody rig with a leaf-sprung solid rear axle in the back and a front suspension with coil springs atop the upper control arms. The big spring towers made for a characteristically narrow engine compartment that made it tough to squeeze in extra-wide V8 engines later on and the tortured front suspension geometry made road-racing setup a challenge, but so what? These cars could be built cheaply, millions upon millions of them, and they served their owners well for decades.
