The 1999 Mercury Cougar: protect your bum

Years of chronic back pain have taught me never to compromise the integrity of one's arse. Along with a steady diet of driving German cars, being the only man who appreciates the 496 New Balance shoes, and adding a spot of olive oil to great sourdough bread, the keeping comfortable of my own ass is one of the things I try to keep constant in my life. Thus, a car can live or die by the way it comforts me during a long journey. Simply, my car has to have a firm, but forgiving, throne.

Reilly Brennan Daily Driver

The 1999 Mercury Cougar has the worst seats I've ever had the displeasure of sitting in. They're perfectly firm, but way too hard in support of the lower lumbar section of the back.

Someone at Ford must have thought really hard about lumbar support, and then called in Sven - Mercury's resident contortionist who was born without 50 percent of his lower lumbar vertebrate due to his mother's penchant for Nutra-Sweet and long afternoons on swing sets - to test the seats. What we get in the Cougar is damn near torture. When you drive for more than 30 minutes, your entire back and rear end feel like they've just gone ten rounds on the Meijer one-cent pony ride, with Sven laughing at you and supplying the pennies.

The sad thing is, the Cougar could have been really good. Its design hails from Ford's European smaller sport hatches, the Ka and Puma.

Flawless in the bigger, American interpretation, the Cougar is a treat to look at. I still marvel at the car's lines and especially the rear tail lights - ones that my friend Courtney describes as "puss balls."

Especially with the new image Mercury is trying to erect, it's a shame they haven't changed the old logo. It's the same roaring-cat-in-a-circle that evokes older Mercury models - like the yellow Mercury Grand Marquis two-door my mother drove during the first five years of my life. That car definitely isn't anything Mercury should try to emulate. Its interior was a wash of yellow vinyl, and after the guy at the gas station put coolant in the oil reservoir, it probably started every other day and on occasional bank holidays.

Not long ago, I drove a 1999 Mercury Cougar V6 in order to test the car's highway prowess in a trip to Harbor Springs, Mich. Along with my friend and colleague Mellon, I had five good hours to experience the Cougar and do a little spirited driving.

Besides the horrible front seats, the Cougar's biggest downfall might be its V6 Duratec engine, one that Ford trumpets as an engineering masterpiece for fuel economy. But, what you might make up in a few dollars a month compared to other coupes, the Cougar's weird transmission and engine combination make for strange shifts. I'm not a racer, but regular shifting of the manual transmission is anything but regular.

Probably due to a heavy flywheel in the transmission, the entire car bucks when you shift. Why? Say you're shifting at 4,000 rpms from second gear into third, the revs don't fall to meet the next gear. Rather, they just loiter around where the last gear took it, and the car tries to make up for this laziness by bucking. This becomes really hard to get used to, and nearly requires re-educating yourself on how to shift.

Also linked to the problem mentioned above, the car has virtually no engine braking. What is engine braking? A manual transmission car will use the physics of the engine to slow down naturally if it is in gear, not using the brakes. The Cougar has almost no engine braking - it feels like the car is in neutral when really you're in gear. Beyond annoying and unnerving, this becomes almost dangerous if you're like me and don't use the brakes as much as downshifting and engine braking to slow the car.

The Cougar has a fully independent rear suspension, and really is quite good on the highway. The redoubtable Mellon can attest to the car's handling abilities, as an incident on I-94 would have ended his flawless visage, had it not been for the Cougar's sure-footedness. (He'll tell you it was a tire from the Grave Digger, but my estimate was the tire in the road ahead was nothing bigger than a tire from a full-sized sedan.)

In any event, Mellon was forced to swing the car into the lane next to his to avoid contact. The Cougar responded beautifully, keeping its composure and never transferring its weight too much to get the man in trouble. Good thing, too, because Mellon isn't that great of a driver.

Great drivers, or at least those who drive fast, won't like the Cougar's mysterious gauges. I've never seen a car that doesn't tell you where the red line is. The function of a car's red line is to act as a warning checkpoint for the driver, marking the point at which the gear is exceeding its driveable limit.

If you exceed the red line when driving, bad things happen. The Cougar, oddly, never tells you where the red line is. It does, however, have an electronic revolution limiter, that basically cuts off engine power past a certain point.

In the interest of research, I flogged the Cougar's engine for an afternoon, determined to find out when the engine slaps you on the wrist. 6,900 rpms is about that point, and rather abruptly at that. The car screams from 4,000 to 6,800 revolutions, and then violently cuts off at 6,900. What a tease!

At $20,535, I could not in good conscience recommend the Cougar over a hoard of other great coupes with decent engines. If this is your market, think Mitsubishi Eclipse GS, Honda Prelude, or even the (gasp) Toyota Celica.

For Mercury, this is definitely a step in the right direction, but still many paces from perfection.

- When not on the road, Reilly Brennan can be reached via e-mail at brennanr@umich.edu

1999 Mercury Cougar V-6

3 Base Price: $18,095

3 Price as Tested: $20, 535

3 Engine: Duratec 24-valve DOHC V-6

3 Power: 170 bhp @ 6250 rpm

3 Performance: 0-60 mph in 8.0 sec

3 Torque: 165 lb-ft @ 1250 rpm

3 EPA City driving: 19 mi/gal

Courtesy of Mercury Replete with bold styling cues, the 1999 Mercury Cougar is miles better than its predecessor, but still far from the top of the under-$20,000 coupe heap.

02-04-99