Cortina 1600E
Its sun-scorched form may have been ignominiously stu ed with a Toyota diesel motor, but Ruben Schembri knew just how to turn this genuine Cortina 1600E around…
The Maltese know how to build a Ford and this mild custom Mk2 seals the deal.
The letter E has done a lot of heavy lifting in the world of car badges over the years. For Porsche 911 owners, it stood for ‘einspritzung’. The same was true for the Opel Manta GT/E. With the Toyota Carina E it meant… er, nothing really. And the Cortina 1600E? Well, if this example is anything to go by, it must stand for ‘envy’.
It’s certainly green enough. Its endlessly enthusiastic Maltese owner, Ruben Schembri, has seen fit to reimagine the more-door in stunning Fern Green Metallic, giving it a glorious Hot Wheels vibe — and, as regular readers will no doubt suspect, the beauty is way more than skin-deep. Cast your mind back to our October 2013 issue, and you may recall Ruben’s YB-powered Mk1 Escort; this is a man who does things properly and, like so many enthusiasts on Malta, the Ford essence swims in his blood. His first car, at the age of 15, was a Mk1 Escort, and he’s had 17 more Blue Ovals since — Consuls, Sierras, Transits, Sapphire Cosworths, you name it. The thread which runs through them all is that he has a distinct style of modifying, and an obsessive level of attention-to-detail. So when he happened upon this 1600E, its fate was written in the stars.
Special order
“I found the car in a local village, I used to see it parked up every time I went there,” he recalls. “One time I pulled up and realised that it was a genuine 1600E, and a special order from the factory — aubergine with a white interior — so I left a note on the windscreen, but the owner wasn’t interested in selling.”
The car was evidently a workhorse, being a daily driver retro-fitted (somewhat improbably) with a Toyota diesel engine, but Ruben wasn’t prepared to give up. He kept on chasing, until one day he saw it driving down the road with one of his lorry-driver mates behind the wheel. “I was a bit sad that he’d bought it when I hadn’t been able to,” he says, “but after a month or so he rang me to ask if I wanted to buy it.”
Ruben didn’t need asking twice. Having been looking elsewhere for 1600Es and finding them all too pricey, he near-enough tore his friend’s hand off to acquire it. Within half-anhour he was driving the Cortina back to his house, a broad smile plastered across his face.
Now, Malta is quite a small place, but that doesn’t make the next chapter any less strange: “When I parked the car on the street, I was approached by a neighbour who said he’d owned one just like it, with the white interior special-ordered from the factory,” says Ruben. “He was 17 when he owned it; he dug out some old photos and we were sure right away that it was the same car. So it was getting more valuable to me all the time, the Cortina had so many stories behind it.”
And who better to write a new story with it than Ruben himself? Having commuted in the ’Tina for a while to get the measure of it, he stuck it in the garage, cracked out the spanners, and set about reinventing.
All in all, the restoration took around a year, beavering away every day. The shell wasn’t too bad, with just a few little dents and the sun-damaged paint to address (testament to living out in the balmy Mediterranean), along with a little rust in one front wing and some panel gaps that needed straightening. So the first major job was to pull out that Toyota motor, which was giving Ruben a headache every time he opened the bonnet, and make some magic happen under there.
“I blasted the bay, then sourced a proper 711M-block 1600 Crossflow,” he says. “This was rebuilt with a ported head, +40 pistons, Kent Cams semi-race cam and twin 40 Webers.” A gorgeous old-school spec, and of course Ruben was just getting started.
The splits
“I ordered the Image split-rims so I could take measurements to fit them under the arches,” he continues, “then started buying bits and pieces from the UK like chrome, dash, rubber and stuff! All the work was done by me and my brother Roderick, so a massive thanks to him for letting me use his workshop — and the sprayer Jurgen, with whom we managed to paint the car in 15 days.”
The engineering work was not without its challenges, particularly the front end which required a lot of fettling to tuck it in a full 2 inches while leaving the factory steering box fully functional, but with the help of a friend by the name of Malcolm the guys forged their own path through it. The result is a wonderful fusion of old and new; the original body with the fresh paint over the modern split-rims, the classic interior with the surprisingly massive sound system, the suspension setup that fuses high-tech coil-overs at one end with modded leaf springs and lowering blocks at the other… it’s Ruben’s own interpretation of what a 1600E should be.
“THE CORTINA HAD SO MANY STORIES BEHIND IT THAT I HAD TO DO IT JUSTICE”
“I wanted to build it to my own formula, to prove that a four-door can be cool if you show it some love,” he grins. And that’s exactly what he’s done. That E on the badge could denote anything from ‘excellent’ to ‘effervescent’, ‘enthralling’ to ‘enchanting’… but for us, we’re once again going to have to furnish Ruben’s work with the label ‘extraordinary’.