‘I Use Mine Everyday…’
Brian Johnson tells us why his Cortina makes sense as a daily driver
Why a Ford Cortina GT makes for a great daily driver.
My classic is definitely not a museum piece – the Cortina was a car that built to be used and not tucked away in a garage for half the year! Our GT is as happy on the school run and being filled with stuff from the garden centre, as it is on a longer journey. I went to Hastings recently and the car performed perfectly well, as it always does. Nevertheless, the total mileage each year isn’t huge as my daily driving mostly involves the local area, commuting, doing shopping and fetching my son Toby from school, where as you can imagine it always attracts attention. His teachers have been known to come outside to admire it and the other kids seem to like it, as it’s quite different from the usual cars turning up each day! The daily driving does tend to take a bit longer than it would in a modern car, as the Cortina creates conversations wherever it goes. When we have time, we’re always happy to take admirers for the odd drive now
and then! As enthusiasts, Toby and I go to shows in the car quite regularly, but my wife is less keen on the attention.
It’s a rare four-door Cortina GT – available as special order when new and in this case, with optional extras such as the red stripes and some extra chrome. The car was previously owned by a friend of mine, who bought it new in 1966. He was a lorry driver I met when I worked in a garage in the late Seventies and lived on a farm in Cambridgeshire where I used to go and help him rebuild his barns.
Sometime in 1984, the car ended up in one of those barns and stayed there until 2014, when I had a call from his daughter to say that her dad was in hospital and that he had announced that he wanted me to have the car. I went to fetch it and promised it would go back on the road. The front suspension struts had gone, so we recommissioned it over the next two years and it has been a part of our daily lives ever since. The engine (it is still the original) is a bit smoky nowadays, but I have a spare unit that we’re rebuilding at the moment to install as a temporary measure. I’ll then swap them over and rebuild the original lump, so she’ll be ready for the next fifty years!