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Now this is the kind of thing we love to find out at a car show. It’s unique, it’s well built, and it’s awesome. This 1972 Mercury Capri belongs to Dave Dennis of Puyallup, Washington, and he’s had it for quite some time. “This was my first car,” Dave explained. “I got it in 1976 when I was 16 years old.” We weren’t the only ones that thought this was an impressive car either, Dave won the award for best Ford engine in a Ford car.
Back when Dave was in high school he had his eyes on a 428 Cobra Jet Mustang, but it had Tennessee plates on it and his dad was convinced it must have been a whiskey runner. Instead, Dave found this and thought it was different, so he bought it.
There is several decades of history in four pictures: Dave when he first got the car, the car as it was taken apart and waiting for repair, the car in progress, and the car today. It looks just a little different now than it did 40-years ago.
“It was fun,” Dave explained. “I put cyclone wheels on it, ladder bars, and all that kind of bolt-on stuff that I could get. It was really neat.” He had to do all the mechanical work himself so it was a great learning experience. He even did an emergency clutch replacement on the side of the highway between Centralia and Aberdeen.
The tail fin is off a Porsche 911 and the side-pipes are off of a Corvette. This is the kind of car where everything done, had to be done custom.
“This was originally a four-cylinder car,” Dave said, “but I was showing off it the parking lot at the high school and I blew up the motor. That kind of ended it’s run.” Dave started dismantling the car and ordering parts for It with intentions to fix it. “I tore it apart now knowing it would take 40-years to put it back together. I had parts all of in my apartment.”
So for the next four-decades, everywhere that Dave went in life, the car followed him. A neighbor at one point even called him in for having a non-operation vehicle in front of his house and it got towed out of his yard.
It’s really been in the last five-years that Dave got back on it and got the car done. “I’ve actually got doodles from when I was in high school of what I wanted to do with the car,” he explained. “And it didn’t turn out all that much different.”
This is just a really well built car and we were glad to see it get the attention it deserves from the win at the show.
The engine is a 2.8-liter V6 with 10.5:1 pistons, a race cam, an Offenhauser dual plane manifold, and Holley Terminator electronic fuel injection. He is also running a 4-speed manual transmission and the stock rearend.
We love Dave’s Capri, and we’d love to see what you folks are driving out there. If you love it, odds are good that we will too, so shoot us an email with a couple pictures and a little information on your ride, you might just see it here as one of our Street Features.
The interior is another place where this car really shines. It's a clean, modest custom job that fits the overall build really, really well.
