John Simister
John is a big fan of Ford’s fifty-year old marvel
John remembers his first Capri drive.
The Ford Capri, cover star of this PC issue. Memories abound, from sitting in an original-type, Classic-based Capri (yellow, with a white roof) in the showroom of Ford mega-dealer Godfrey Davis of Neasden when a small boy in 1963, through to a twin test for Motor magazine of a Capri 280 final edition in 1987.
The premise of that twin test was new versus classic: would you be better off buying a tasty old car for the money you’d pay for a dimly-comparable but less exotic new one? That’s a theme often visited over the years, but the Capri’s rival back then was telling: an Aston Martin DB6, available then for around the £11,000 or so that you’d pay for the Capri. Today a really good Capri 280 might sell for £25,000, a really good DB6 for 20 times as much.
This test of two six-cylinder GT coupés in dark metallic green wasn’t especially conclusive as it pitted maintenance costs against prestige, convenience against cachet and all the other pros, cons, ifs and buts of such stories. I liked them both, and was reminded of the tantalisingly close, but unfulfilled, relationship my father had with the previous-shape Capri, the one launched in 1968. We call that one the MKI, despite that eponymous Classic-based coupé launched in 1961 and marketed by Ford as a ‘personal car’, a sort of European equivalent of a Thunderbird.
Teenage kicks
To the thrill of the teenage me, my father was quite keen to have a new Capri in 1968. The thrill evaporated when he decided it had insufficent room in the back for my two sisters and me. This time the marketing line was ‘The Car You Always Promised Yourself’. However, help was at hand to make up for the unfulfilment of this promise thanks to the launch by the Gluv shoe company of the Gluv Capri, ‘The Shoe You Always Promised Yourself’, complete with a picture of the appropriate car on the box. My father bought a pair of the casual, brown leather slip-ons, of course.
A few years later he was offered a new job that came with a Capri RS3100 – imagine! – as a company car. My older sister had left home so the family would now fit, but he didn’t take the job. So, I had to wait another three years for my first hands-on Capri experience, and two came along at once. It was the mid-seventies and I had a job as a graduate trainee at Brown Brothers, the motor factors. The branch manager had a brand-new Capri II in beige, the assistant branch manager a mid-life-facelift MKI in metallic blue with a vinyl roof. I drove both; never before had I driven anything so low, so rakishly stylish, with such a long bonnet. I was smitten
Not until 1984 did I drive a Capri again, this time for a Motor twin test of a 2.8 Injection Special to compare with the new, and upstart, Sierra XR4I: cart-sprung (albeit single-leaf) classic versus biplane-winged futurism. Was the Capri on borrowed time, an irrelevant anachronism in the face of the new wave? It wasn’t. It’s clear from the test that, even then, I inclined towards the classic cause.
‘Let’s get one thing straight before we start,’ said my technical editor. ‘However appealing the Capri might be, the Sierra is the better car.’ And that, he made clear, was how I was to write the test. Objectively he was right, of course, but the Capri was the car I bagged for the following weekend for a trip to the Peak District. Its brakes weren’t that bad, the ride not that jittery. And those looks, those leather-edged Recaros…
Worth the wait
Post-motor I enjoyed no more Capri action until 2016, when I got to drive the yellow RS2600 that lives in Ford’s Cologne heritage collection. It was even better than I’d hoped, its V6 a free-revving, softly-snarling joy, its steering and handling as sharp and forgiving as an Escort Mexico’s, it’s looks the epitome of tasteful sporting minimalism. It’s my absolute favourite Capri, and in my top half-dozen favourite cars of all types. Sadly, it’s also utterly unaffordable today.
Meanwhile, my friend Bryan is debating whether to forsake his usual notions of forensic purity, provenance and correctness in cars and build a V8-powered version of an original 1962 Capri. He’s been eyeing one in yellow with a white roof. Which is where we came in.