Sweet Dreams

When life threw Nathan Mercer some devastating curveballs, he knew just what he had to do: channel his energies into building the fast Ford he’d always dreamed of…

- Dan Bevis

If there’s one piece of advice we’d all do well to remember, it’s that you only live once, life is short, and you’ve got to roll the dice sometimes. Our fleeting time on this earth is all too brief for what-ifs, and when fate throws tragedy into your path, you’ve got to scoop it up with both arms and channel that negative energy into something positive.

“I started looking for a project car after the family suffered a hard year,” recalls Nathan Mercer. “I lost my mum in December 2014, and really didn’t know what to do with myself; I threw myself into work, tried to pick up a few hobbies, started playing basketball. Then with my dad getting ill the following March, I knew what I needed to do – get myself the sort of project I’d have wanted to build back when I was a teenager.”

It’s a natural and wholly logical response, to want to anchor oneself in happier times of days gone by, and for Nathan it made perfect sense to pick up a Ford project as he’d been a Blue Oval man from day one. “I got an Orion when I was 17, and started modifying it straight away, with Cosworth bumpers, Series 1 RS Turbo skirts and so on,” he explains. “I had the idea of putting an RS lump in there, but my wife and I ended up having our first child at 19, Joshua, so I had to sell the Orion. A few years later our second child, Elissa, came along so I had to give up on the modifying – my wife and I needed to work hard to build a life for our family.”