À la Europe
THE cars that first registered in my mind as beautiful were the Ford Capri Mk 1 and the Cortina Mk 3, both cars which took the centre stage in the early 1970s, breaking the boring and frumpy European styling mould with something altogether more exciting, alluring and dramatic.
The Ford Capri was a reinterpretation of the long-nosed and very phallic sports cars of the 1950s and 1960s for the family man and immediately found a large adoring crowd waiting.
If there is any rule for successful car design its: keep it low and make it long and the Capri made good use of it.
If you don’t agree, name one car that is low and long that people think is ugly. Send your list to shamsulyunos1970@gmail.com.
The Cortina, on the other hand was a family car and in the 1970s they tended to be rather plain and uninteresting, especially if they came from Britain, Sweden or Germany, a shade too interesting if they are Italian and rather mechanically challenging if it had a French name.
Ford in Dagenham and Cologne must have sent their designers to Detroit and forced them to look at flamboyant full-size American sedans for months on end and told them that the next car they design had better look as good.
They came back and drew a car that had a waist, hip and pouting lips. They had adopted the cokebottle design language that had taken Detroit by storm. Suddenly everything coming out of Motor City had a waist and hip.
It was Ford UK design chief Harley Copp’s last hurrah before returning to Detroit.
Copp was quite the legend, having a finger in the development of the original Ferrari -beating GT-40 and the Ford-Cosworth DFV racing engine.
The Cortina Mk3 was a sensuous four-door, large family saloon that executives were proud to drive to work and show off to their friends. Although the second-generation Cortina had achieved Ford’s goal of having the most popular family car in Britain, the third generation cars sold even better.
The Cortina Mk3 is a landmark car for Ford Europe, this was their first large car project after Ford Germany and Ford UK was merged into Ford Europe.
Ford Germany had a separate large car programme under the Taunus name so the first joint project had TC codename to denote Taunus-Cortina.
I remembered my first encounter with the Mk3 very clearly as a neighbour had brought one home and remembered thinking how fantastic it looked. The car was yellow and had black stripes and vinyl roof.
The Cortina was quite not quite the top car to have as the official car in Malaysia then, people preferred Volvos but the Cortina was a good
took everything good about American car design and interpreted it into a unique large European sedan.
second tier vehicle for organisations that were less than lavish with their spending.
I remember that Universiti
Sains Malaysia used to have a few of them as work cars and when my father, who worked as a researcher there, brought one back home for outstation work I was gobsmacked. It even had air conditioning.
I got to follow him on his outstation work and loved every airconditioned minute.
Well, maybe it was the air conditioning that really got me excited about the Cortina and less the styling but my memory of it is quite hazy and I would rather tell you that I loved the styling.
Worldwide the car came in so many variants in so many markets that no one really knows how many different Cortina Mk3 you need to have for a complete collection.
The smallest engine was
1.3-litre crossflow unit while those carazy buggers from down under shoehorned a 4.1-litre under the bonnet and called it Falcon.
In Malaysia, the 2.0 was the range topper and those with tight purse strings opted for the 1.3-litre.
Obviously the 1.3 with a power output of around 55 horsepower is considered asthmatic by today’s standards but then it was an acceptable engine for a family sedan.
The 2.0 was the only model that offered any sort of real driving fun with 86 horsepower.
The Cortina Mk3 is a substantially heavier car than its predecessors because Europe was just starting to wake up to vehicle safety standards and began demanding stronger and sturdier body shells. They also wanted more refinement and this meant slapping on more sound insulation.
All these added weight and made the Mk3 a bit of a dullard to drive, especially when compared to the lighter and nimbler Mk2 which built on the competition success of the original Cortina.
Well, I did start by saying that we are going to talk about good looks today.
The Cortina Mk3 is in my list of among the top 100 most beautiful family sedan of all time. I hope you don’t agree and will send me some e-mails.