This first gold green edition of the Bettancourt Mercury is seldom seen in magazines. Three photo’s of it appeared in the ’52 “Restyle your Car”, the April ‘53 Issue of Popular Mechanics and it was featured on the cover and inside of the ’52 Motorama catalog.

The ayala brothers performed all of the customizing on the first edition of the Bettancourt Mercury. The ayala’s where together with Sam Barris and Jerry Quesnel the first to chop a ‘49 Mercury. Ayala chopped the top and created a very smooth flowing roofline and just as Sam did on his personal ’49 Mercury Ayala also created full fade away fenders. Not sure if these two builders had contact with each other or had seen each others work, or that is was just a case of two genious craftsman with the same idear at the same time.

A second grille shell was turned upside down and molded in the front gravel pan to create an extremely smooth and rounded opening in which a ’51 Kaiser floating grille bar was mounted. The hood corners where rounded with a large radious on the front which flows perfectly with the frenshed headlight and at the back of the hood the ends where cut of with a large radius and the remaining piece was molded to the cowl and front fender. The flowing line gently sweeps into the chopped windshield frame. The trunk corners where rounded in a similar fashion. Ayala created a very craceful taillights out of round rod and sheet metals and hand formed the lenses from red Lucite. What is really exceptional on this version of the car is that it has nearly no chrome accents on the outside. No side trim and even the side window trim was removed. Only a few accents chrome accents where added, the grille bar and a set of 112 Appleton spots mounted on the doors rather then on the A-pillars which is more common. The bumpers where stock 49 Mercury items. Most likely the interior could not be redone in time for a show and remained all stock. The body was painted with many coats of hand rubbed “Scintillating green gold” and the gauges clusters on the dash where chrome plated.