eBay Find: John Bearce’s Bonneville Salt Flat ’70 Maverick

Anyone whose read their American auto literature closely enough knows that not all of our nation’s greatest performance cars were about displacement; many of them in fact were compacts who paved the way for small-engine performance, in the quarter-mile or otherwise.

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Even within our own search for horsepower we’ve stumbled across small car classics that have proven themselves against much more intimidating racers, even at the Bonneville salt flats where flat-out speed is everything. One of Bonneville’s most legendary land speed pilots was none other than John “Big John” Bearce, who by 1982 had managed to pull-off five international land speed records.

The car that Bearce made famous during the Bonneville National 24th Annual Speed Trials is our featured ’70 Maverick, a car that took the salt flat event by storm when it managed to achieve a top speed of 132.74 miles per hour, only 1.7 miles per hour short of setting a new world record.

The land speed Ford is fully custom built, and features a rare Bosch injection system from a Mercedes 300SL and a one-off head built in Australia. Bearce was well-known as a car dealer for Northwestern Ford in Milwaukee, and he established Northwestern’s high-performance division, called “Speed Unlimited.”

During the peak of his career, John Bearce was one of Carroll Shelby’s closest associates, and at one point Bearce was the only Shelby dealer in Wisconsin. After “Big John’s” Bosch-injected Maverick’s high-speed run on the salt flats, the car was stored and years later revamped by fellow dealership employees who gave the restored performance compact to Bearce as a gift, and as a reminder of his earliest days in the racing world.

John Bearce’s ’70 Maverick was on the eBay auction block out of Champaign, Illinois, for a starting bid of $2,225. Though it didn’t meet the reserve, this rare piece of Ford racing history is unique enough to turn some heads.