1972 FORD CORTINA GXL
PETER CROMPTON LANCASHIRE
‘Barn Find?’ laughs Peter Crompton, the proud restorer and owner of this ne Cortina GXL. ‘This car didn’t even have the luxury of a barn to protect it. It lay abandoned and hidden in a load of brambles and was only spotted by a passing lorry driver high up in his cab!
‘I heard about it through the Mk3 Cortina Owners’ Club and knew right away that I was going to buy it, particularly because it is a very rare two-door version of Ford’s GXL. and therefore just too special to miss. Unfortunately the farmer who owned the eld refused to release the car and it took me two years before I managed to do a deal in 2019.’
Peter was able to take stock of the enormity of the task that lay ahead when he got the car back to his workshop: ‘I was soon able to conrm that this was going to be a total restoration so I set about completely dismantling the car and uploading updates to my Youtube channel where kind Patreon supporters generously helped to fund some of my costs.’
Stripping all of the faded yellow paint o£ revealed the lovely original shade of Silver Fox beneath. ‘I made certain that every speck of rust was eradicated, which wasn’t an easy or quick job,’ remembers Pete. ‘The car received a new roof skin, inner and outer sills, a new oorpan, bulkhead, scuttle, boot oor, rear quarter panels and wings. I also needed to make some extensive chassis repairs.’
But this wasn’t a ‘throw away and replace everything re-build’: ‘I was determined to keep the maximum amount of original metal in place as possible, which made it an exhausting experience to be honest. But I’m so glad that I kept going and saved the car.’
Peter thought long and hard about the use that the car would receive as he approached completion of the restoration: ‘The Cortina – and the GXL in particular – would have provided fast, comfortable and luxurious transport over long distances for senior management as a company car when it was new,’ says Peter. ‘I wanted to bring the car up to a standard that allowed those original abilities but modied for the trac conditions that now exist some 50 years later. I upgraded the car extensively but as discreetly as possible, so there’s a four-speed automatic gearbox from a Sierra for quieter highspeed cruising as well as a fully re-built 2.1-litre Pinto engine. The steering is now power-assisted and there’s cruise control taken from a later Granada.
‘I built in rain sensing wipers and heated washer jets and heated seats to make those cold early-morning trips to distant shows much more pleasant. I also added a Blaupunkt Hamburg stereo as a retrot option but upgraded with Bluetooth music streaming and handsfree Alexa assistance.
‘The result is a quiet and smooth motorway cruiser that’s a real pleasure to drive. I kept my spirits up during the toughest parts of the restoration by visualising how great it would feel to drive the nished car to Italy, and last year the Cortina took me all the way to Cortina in Italy – a dream come true!’