It follows your lead like it is telepathic. Head out to the countryside and it tracks through twisty two lanes like a Beagle nosing a rabbit’s scent. It romps through the gears with the kind of enthusiasm usually found only in high-dollar European sports sedans. Deeper fascias front and rear, dual exhausts, fog lights and five-spoke wheels are the only tip off that this is a special model.Ĭonsidering its price of $22,900, it is the performance bargain of the year. It is the perfect stealth-mobile because it looks much like the standard-issue Contour. In spite of its sedate profile and seats for four, this much-modified Contour, built exclusively at Ford’s Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo, is more of a sports car than a family sedan. Waiting for it to enter the trailer was sad because this little hot rod and I had become fast friends in the last four months, thanks to its hyperactive V6 engine, 195 horsepower and a slick-shifting gearbox. This specific car, a hand-assembled prototype, built before actual production had begun, was not a “real” car and destined to have a limited life span.ĭid it represent a regular production car? If anything, it would be less reliable, less tight, but it was none of those things. That’s right, a perfectly good automobile had come to the end of its line. Its tenure in our household had expired, and it was heading back to the motor city where it would be scrapped. Only the Contour wouldn’t come back.įord agreed to an extended-use evaluation of the car because living with one reveals much more than a week-long test drive. ![]() ![]() As I stood in the darkened shopping center parking lot waiting for the truck driver to load the red SVT Contour into his covered transporter for its final trip back to Detroit, I felt like a dad sending his kid off to college.
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