Although my birth year coincided with the debut of the Pontiac GTO and I was born within a month of the launch of the Ford Mustang and the Plymouth Barracuda, by the time I approached driving age, thanks to two gas crisis and EPA emissions and safety regulations, the cool car party was long over. Due to increasingly stringent safety, emissions and gas mileage regulations, staid looking economy cars were king and anything with a V-8 engine, not to mention any modicum of performance, real or imagined, was verboten.
However, what came about at the Ford Motor Company as result of circumstances and government scrutiny, was actually quite good. Although, I had little use for the game changing 1978 Ford Fairmont and its corporate kissin' cousin, the Mercury Zephyr. Even in two-door guise like this '81 Fairmont.
To be honest, though, as good as these cars are based on what became known as the "Fox-body", or platform were, they have not aged well. At least in comparison to their far more famous sibling, the Ford Mustang. And to a lesser degree the 1979-1986 Mercury Capri. The Ford Motor Company used the Fox-body on a wide variety of automobiles across all three of their divisions including Lincoln. The origin of the name, by the way, the subject of much conjecture but the common notion is Ford named it after the Audi Fox which was supposedly the benchmark they aspired to when they first started drawing it up in 1973.
The "Fox-body" was a radical departure from most anything the Ford Motor Company or any domestic manufacturer had come with before it. The relatively lightweight, unit-bodied Foxes featured a then "space-age" Macpherson strut front suspension and rack-and-pinion steering that afforded drivers a near European level of ride and handling. Well, for at the time anyway.
Ah, but where it counted to pre-pubescent me, its simple styling was a decided turnoff; not that there were any Ford's of the era that I cared for save for any Fox-body Mustang or Capri with a "5.0" glued to its front fenders. Simple by design and straightforward in ways what they replaced (the Ford Maverick and Mercury Comet) certainly weren't, the Fairmont and Zephyr were the Ford Motor Company's literal and figurative interpretation of a Volvo 240. Ha, as if? Well, auto pundits raved about these cars in ways they didn't gush about General Motors downsized full and mid-sized models that were really, if we're being honest, nothing more than shrunken versions of what they had been pushing out for the past thirty years or so. Your opinion may vary, see dealer for details.
Funny how some of us have to learn life's lessons the hard way. While my first car, coincidentally or not, was a 1974 Mercury Comet, what I refer to as my "second first car", was exactly what I wanted in the first place - a big, spatially inefficient, V-8 powered "personal luxury car" that was a wallowing monster to handle. But I thought it cool as all hell even though I was smitten by the handling prowess of a friends tiny, early '80's Toyota Corolla. That little car along with a number of other smaller, sharp handling cars subliming stoking the coals of my inner race car driver; I didn't realize at the time that not only was I a budding automobile enthusiast, I actually really enjoyed driving.
Back to our '81 Fairmont here in the '23. I found this on Facebook Marketplace not long ago for sale near my home here on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio. Asking price was a fair $4,500 for a rust-free, forty-year-old, 50,000-mile anything although I chafe at the thought of dropping that on this. Attempting to look at it through the goggles of my 26-year-old, semi-car conscious older son, I still can't see past it's, as he would put it, "not in a good way, oh-so-'70's-vibe". He adores my 1977 Corvette so he does know a thing or two. I might me somewhat alone in my contempt for this car as I went back to Marketplace to find it and it seems to be gone.
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