“Mercury Speedster”

This car is one of many Model T Fords that had its original body replaced by a “speedster” style body early in its life. Speedsters were rakish and sleek and made a fashion statement that a factory-bodied Model T couldn’t hope to achieve. The company that manufactured the body on this car was the Mercury Body Corp. of Louisville, Kentucky, no connection to the Mercury-branded car Ford would build starting in 1939. The design was created by a young entrepeneur named Charles Ellsworth McCormick in 1920, and he founded a company to manufacture and sell the body starting in 1921. Between then and 1926, when the company fell prey to a soft economy, it manufactured about 1,600 bodies. There were competitors, but the McCormick design is considered to be the first and best of the genre, both in appearance and quality of manufacture. The cut-down style of the body allowed a Model T to go faster – every young man’s dream – and soon a booming industry emerged to supply other speed equipment for the cars, most notably cylinder heads for the engine that measurably improved performance over the factory version. Mercury offered the body as a kit for do-it-yourselfers or as a turn-key vehicle that could be ordered through a Ford dealer. It is estimated that only 70 of the Mercury Speedsters still exist today.