Greg Baxter
HEN my sister Natalie met her future husband Pete in 1967, I didn’t know it at the time but I was about to be introduced to petrolhead heaven.
He drove a 1964 Mark I Ford Cortina 1500 GT. This had a 2-door body (very sought after!) and was painted in an Arctic white with a crimson flash on the side. The GTs had chrome beading next to the flash as well as GT badges on the rear-quarter panel. Steel wide-rim wheels with a chrome trim ring, and a twin-pipe Power Thrust exhaust completed the look.
A GT steering wheel, GT gauges and black interior finished off the interior. Under the bonnet the motor was painted Ford blue with a chrome tappet cover. A downdraught Weber carb, banana branch and hot cam completed the package. Being 13 at the time, I was at an impressionable age and just fell in love with hot Cortinas.
As the V6 Peranas only came out later, one friend had a black 4-door GT with a V6 motor installed. Another drove an orange 4-door with a V8 squeezed into that small engine bay, as well as very wide back wheels. To see it scream up the road, tyres smoking, in Forest Hill, in the old South of Joeys, was truly something.
WIt was one of the must-have cars of the time. Pete only recently told me his car’s body originally came from then-Rhodesia, and it was from a Lotus Cortina. His cousin Freddie, who had built it for him, installed the GT motor.
The Lotus Cortina Mk I had a twin-cam cross-flow head with twin sidies, as they were and are affectionately known. A tuned GT produced about 100bhp (75kW), while a Lotus produced about 125bhp (93kW) – pretty powerful for its time and capable of a top speed of about 100mph (160km/h) – the magical “ton”.
To give an idea of power figures, my late brother George bought a brand new 1970 Cortina 1600 GT Mk2 with the crossflow motor that produced about 80 bhp (60kW). We drove down a flat road, where it took about 1km to just touch 100mph on the speedo!
Pete later had a 1966 4-door Mk I 1500 GT, arguably the nicest of all the Cortina range, a Mk II Cortina Perana 3-litre V6, then a Mk III Cortina Big Six (also a 3-litre V6), and lastly a Mk IV Cortina Xocet Interceptor (3-litre V6) in the team Ford colours of a white body with blue and black pinstripes and special limited-edition mag wheels.
The standard V6 motor pushed out 102kW, although the Big Six developed 115kW. Still, lots of power originally designed for a body that