Here Comes The Singer Milan

Milan 2: Premier Boogaloo

you gotta put this bad mother fucker on your list

The story thus far: In November of 2019 I bought a five-speed 2006 Mercury Milan from a young man whom I had coached on the Hilliard C&B Bikes BMX team some twenty-seven years prior. It was a one-owner car, having been bought for Denny by his father when it was new, but it was absolutely roached from the proverbial hard knock life. Why’d I buy it? Because in 2006, when it came off the showroom floor, I’d told the dad to let me know when and if it was for sale, and people don’t forget.

I loved that Milan and wrote about it for the insurance people when I took delivery. At the time I could get 49 cents a mile driving to company offices, which made the dilapidated Mercury more than just a stick-shift Mazda 6 with less theft potential; it was a real “Little Nose For Profits”. Until, that is, my brother got a job where they would pay him even more per mile. So I sold it to Bark, who made ten grand on it then forgot to do the mandatory 1.5 quarts of oil per thousand miles at which point the engine grenaded itself. He still owes me five hundred bucks!

ridin’ low and feelin’ mean

And that’s where the story should have ended, except for Tommy.

Tommy is an East Coast maniac whom I met during an enduro race years ago. You won’t find a better person with more love of anarchy. We raced against each other and together; at one AER race I accidentally qualified his car on class pole then had to sprint down to my garage so I could turn a better lap in my car before my entire team decided to beat my ass for disloyalty.

When Tommy saw my Milan he decided he wanted one — but since he has some money and some taste and some time, he decided to do it right.

That meant sourcing a Milan Premier rather than a plain-Jane Milan. Trust me, you really want the Premier trim, which has better wheels, better trim, better seats, automatic climate control, all that good stuff. It took a while for Tommy to find the right car, but once it was found he decided to, ah, Singer-ize it.

So the 2006 Premier in a fetching shade of grey went off to the nice people at Tailored Chassis Solutions where it got brand-new suspension and bushings all the way ‘round, new 17-inch polished alloys with Pirelli P7s, a new transmission, a Steeda short shift kit, an airdam, and many other detail pieces. TCS dropped it into the weeds and made it handle with just a touch of lift-off oversteer. Xenon headlights went in; the Ford CANBUS hates them and throws error warnings but they make the car usable at night for an old fellow such as myself.

you can get what you want, or you can just get old

Tommy pulled the whole interior out, steam-cleaned the good parts, and replaced the bad parts. All the touch points are new. He had custom quilted floormats made. Since he’s a detailer in his spare time, he ceramic-coated the whole car. It was as perfect as a Milan could be.

Then he found an LS1 Camaro SS for sale with something like 20,000 miles and one owner. Tommy isn’t hill trash like me, with a whole barn to hide one’s shame; he lives in a million-dollar home outside Boston. His driveway was already filled with fascinating stuff. Something had to go. So in February I flew out to Logan Airport and paid Tommy

Seven

Thousand

Dollars

for this perfect Milan. I don’t think Tommy made any money on the deal. But how often do you get a car that is like new — nah, better than new! — for that kind of money. Also, I had a job at the time, and that job would still pay me mileage. There was just one problem: the sound system was not up to par. I’d bought a hundred bucks’ worth of CDs at a thrift shop on the way out of Massachusetts just to make the Ohio drive tolerable, but I couldn’t see doing the Powell-to-Traverse-City roundtrip again and again that way.

I called Denny. “How’d you like to work on a much better Milan than yours?” He jumped at the chance. I paid him

Three

Thousand

Dollars

to make the Mercury thump but also to make the sound stage perfect and the Bluetooth integration flawless. While he was at it, Denny put in a backup camera and a wireless Qi charger.

Miami (University, of Ohio) is home of the bass

Now I had a ten thousand dollar Milan with 152,000 miles on it. This was a recipe only an idiot could create. You gotta do your cooking by the book! But that’s like calling a “Porsche Reimagined by Singer” a “shitty 964 with a tweed interior and a hand grenade engine, sold to wannabes by a wannabe.”

Maybe that was a bad example, because isn’t that exactly what a Singer is? Uh, possibly this isn’t a “Singer Milan” so much as it is a “Milan Classiche”, right? Back up to factory spec but just slightly improved in a few ways?

is it crazy that I want to hear this song right now?

Well, it’s now a ten thousand dollar Milan with 168,000 miles on it, because I drive it everywhere I don’t use a truck or a motorcycle. My poor Accord, fresh from a very expensive 100k belt job, hasn’t really moved in months. I’ll start it periodically to make sure it’s still alive, but otherwise it’s Milan time, all the time.

This constant use has been hard on the car. Some idiot in Michigan kicked a big dent in the driver’s side back door, there have been various scratches in various places. A big chip came off the hood. There’s now a little vibration in the driveline that I need to track down. It no longer feels like a brand new car. More like a car with 16,000 hard miles on it.

Everybody got secrets... Didn't know you liked to get wet!

No worries, because it’s still absolutely brilliant. To begin with, it’s quiet as the grave courtesy of Denny’s take-no-prisoners Dynamat installation, right up until the moment you want it to boom out some trash Miami rap or Rudy van Gelder recording. The Kenwood Excelon head unit takes Android Auto a lot more seriously than most new cars do, so it’s actually usable on a daily basis.

And the chassis! This thing handles and it hustles with almost no body roll. Tommy put a “Hybrid” badge on the back so he could take advantage of some Commie-ass parking regulations in Boston. Therefore, every Macan or SQ5 driver in Columbus feels compelled to tailgate me on the freeway. I let them do it all the way to a cloverleaf exit ramp, then I innocently take said ramp at 2-3x the listed speed at which point my pursuer grinds his front tires off in a flurry of wheel-flail and stability control. Good times.

The 2.3-liter Duratec has just enough power for most situations, as long as you’re vigorous in rowing the notchy, high-effort shifter. It makes a vaguely exotic growl I remember well from my Spec Focus days, and it revs past 6500 with little complaint. Between the handling and the modest power you’re always working the car a bit, which is delightful. Visibility is first-rate, this generation of sedan being the last one to not have tree-trunk A-pillars. The rear seat is spacious enough for my son, the trunk is generous despite having a fair amount of subwoofer and amplifier tucked in.

check right headlamp! Thanks, xenon install kit

It’s been a great car and I wouldn’t change a thing. Except I would, of course. I’d like to find a new-old-stock Lincoln MKZ wheel with a leather wrap. Denny made sure all the radio switches work with the new stereo, so I could just plug them into the Lincoln wheel and be good to go. Wouldn’t mind having more supportive seats, as well. There, too, Lincoln has the answer, in the form of the contrast-piped extra-cost chairs from the 2012 MKZ.

Next question: Could it be faster, and if so… how? While neither Ford nor Mercury ever paired the 3.0-liter V6 with a five-speed, Mazda did it with the contemporaneous Mazda6, so we know it’s not impossible. That’s not quite what I’m looking for, however. I want more brio, not just more speed. And a little bit of relaxation on the highway wouldn’t hurt.

That makes the answer obvious: swap in a 2.5-liter Duratec and six-speed transmission from the post-facelift Fusion and Milan, then build the 2.5 up to Fab9 Stage 3 levels. That means 225 wheel horsepower at 7300rpm, titanium valve springs too. Should result in a very high 13-second quarter mile at maybe 103mph, plus a little more willingness to reach triple digits on the freeway, where prudent of course.

Doing this would turn this Milan into a sixteen thousand dollar Milan. Toss in the Lincoln bits and it’s probably a nineteen thousand dollar Milan. Which sounds horrifying, right? But it’s no dumber than paying $500k for a Porsche 964 that can’t hang with a stock C6 Vette around most racetracks.

It might be worth the money. There’s been a lot made in certain corners of the press lately about “the gray man strategy”, which boils down to: if you want to have any viewpoint in America that is right of, say, Sonia Sotomayor, you’d better work on making yourself and your children as invisible to The Powers That Be as possible. That means you don’t wear a Heckler&Koch t-shirt to the Amelia Island Concours, for example. (Oops.)

This Milan is the gray car. Both literally and figuratively. It barely even exists when you look at it, because it’s more or less identical to what the working poor drive now. Spend ten minutes in the Midwest and you’ll see someone driving a Milan to his job at Burger King. Twice. The “HYBRID” badge means it’s a joke to flyover country and morally acceptable on the coasts. Cops don’t look at it, nobody gets agitated or envious about it.

As fate would have it, I got about a dozen messages from friends who saw my 2009 Audi S5 at Monterey Car Week. There was a time when I was a bit of a high-flyer, you see. A one-off custom Audi, an astoundingly curvy stripper for a girlfriend, a half-dozen other sure things in my Blackberry at all times, on the road every weekend and drunk four nights out of seven. I had a lot of fun and I have no regrets. The Audi was very much who I was at the time. Today, I’m more like the Milan. Old and tired, dinged and dented, but still reasonably shipshape and ready to run as hard as I can. A lot of life left in both of us. Maybe a few upgrades yet to come. As the lady used to (not quite) say, you’ll want to keep both of us on your list.

Photography by Matt Tierney (interiors) and Alejandro Della Torre (exterior rollers). Thank you for being faithful friends when others couldn’t quite manage that particular trick.