MY OWN IMPORTS
The Granada
The first being my MK2 pre-facelift 2.8 Ghia Granada in gold with brown velour.Yes, all those details relevant, as that’s exactly what I wanted and a solid one of these for sale simply wasn’t for sale in the UK for years!The car I bought was Spanish and had quite a story even before I got to it. After spending its whole life with one owner it was snapped up by a member of Ford’s official museum at their plant in Cologne where the car was originally built. It somehow didn’t make it into the collection though, it was instead snapped up by a journalist from northern Germany who intended to personally use it.The pesky German government didn’t take kindly to the photocopied Spanish documents though and refused a registration!This left our German journo with an awkward car suited ideally to selling to a foreigner with a more lenient registration system! This trip ended up with me and Knut the seller becoming good friends, and later revisiting him in his old car once I had the Granada road legal and going to the Bremen Motorshow together!
An obscure situation perhaps, but one which I stumbled upon the same that anyone else could. You don’t generally get experiences or memories like that from a Facebook Marketplace sale from down the road!
The Sierra
My other personal import was a Mk1 Sierra Laser. Three-doors are rare enough in the UK full stop, but this one is a higher that usual specced Laser complete with central locking and plus trim! Plus the 1.8 Pinto is a bit perkier than the usual 1.3 or 1.6 we would have been sold.This car was a straightforward by-the-book sale. Found on Autoscout24 for a bargain three-figure price for sale at a small local dealer on behalf of an elderly gent who had recently given up driving. As I was dealing with the trade I was quite confident that everything would go as planned. Once I had convinced the seller that I was genuine and paid a small deposit they then went on to de-register the car from the Dutch system in preparation of its export.This only took a few days and the extra cost was minimal and covered by the seller as an act of goodwill. All I had to do was start planning how to get it home.