John Simister
John on classics that hide their light under a bushel
John’s take on the Q-car, a magic wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I’ve never been a fan of spoilers and fancy go-faster stripes. There is much more pleasure to be had from driving a car that looks gentle and unthreatening, ‘cooking’ rather than ‘hot’ as the car magazines used to say, yet which goes a whole lot faster than its looks suggest. A Q-car, the breed’s name possibly taken from naval Q-ships whose merchant-shipping looks disguised military speed and manoeuvrability.
One of my favourites, run as a long-term test car when I was on Car magazine, is the now practically extinct Ford Galaxy V6 MPV of the Nineties, or its Volkswagen Sharan VR6 clone. Of course the Ford used the narrow-angle, 2.8-litre, VW VR6 engine too, but the middle ‘R’ wasn’t in Ford’s engine lexicon.
This tall, capacious seven-seater went like the wind with its 174bhp, provided it had the manual gearbox, and had a fuel thirst to match. And as I was sitting higher than most other drivers, SUVS not being such a thing back then, it was a truly epic overtaker because I could see opportunities those other drivers couldn’t. It remains one of the most effective cross-country blasters I have ever driven, and the most deliciously inappropriate.
Majestic indeed
The Q-car idea goes back much further, of course. One early example was the bulky Daimler Majestic Major, whose 4.5-litre V8 engine’s 220bhp took this staid saloon to 119mph via a 17.9-second standing quarter mile. That’s quick for an early-sixties luxury car with no sporting genes. Another family hot rod, and described as such in its Motor magazine road test, was the facelifted 3.3-litre version of Vauxhall’s PB Cresta, whose surprising ability to out-accelerate an E-type in top gear was reported on with wonderment.
Britain’s fixation with badge-engineering threw up some marketing anomalies of surprising liveliness. Two were found in the Singer range of essentially upmarket Hillmans, in which pace was briefly enhanced relative to the workaday versions. As well as the walnut interior trim and extra chrome, the Singer Gazelle IIIA gained twin carburettors – dropped in the series IIIB and thereafter. Three years later, the larger Vogue got the aluminium cylinder head from the Sunbeam Rapier, plus a twin-choke carburettor, 78bhp and surprising speed.
Then there were Ford’s amazingly discreet GTS, in Corsair, Cortina and Escort forms with almost nothing but little badges and slightly wider wheels to identify the pace potential within. And if you took your Cortina MKII (or, later, MKIII or MKIV) to Jeff Uren’s Race Proved company, he could turn it into a Cortina Savage with a 3.0-litre Essex V6 engine.
And he could tune that lusty motor well beyond its regular 139bhp or so, if you wanted your humble-looking Cortina to go even faster.
In more recent times, one of my favourite Q-machines was a particularly understated and innocuous-looking BMW, the four-door saloon version of the E36 M3. Not only was it every bit as rapid as the regular two-door coupé, thanks to revised suspension settings it steered more sweetly and rode more smoothly. It attracted less attention while being more practical and useful.
Q for… quite fast!
I’ll finish with a tale of a What Car? group test that I wrote in the early Nineties, based around a suddenly popular breed of middle-sized cars fitted with engines meant for the next size up. They were an Audi 80 V6, a Mazda 626 V6, a Vauxhall Cavalier V6 and a Volkswagen Vento VR6. All looked quite demure, all went with ego-boosting vigour. We were doing cornering photographs on a wiggly road in the New Forest with sunken marshes low on each side, before today’s 40mph limit. Our new consumer editor, on her first group test, was driving the Vento for the camera. First run, much too slow. ‘Can you go a little faster, to make the car look like it’s working a bit?’ the photographer asked. Second run, much – much – faster. Panic-brake at the first corner, tail flies out, Vento leaves the road and rotates gently in mid-air before landing – splat – in the marsh. No harm done, driver a little shaky, Vento soon dragged back onto the road by the local breakdown company and missing only a couple of pieces of lower-body trim. Q for quagmire, that day.
John Simister has been at the heart of British motoring journalism for more than 30 years. A classic enthusiast, he currently owns a Mazda Eunos Roadster, a Rover 2000 TC and a Saab 96.