FORD

Cortina

The Ford Cortina was launched on 20 September 1962 by Ford of Britain in Dagenham, conceived as a light, spacious, affordable family car to take on the Morris Oxford Farina and the Vauxhall Victor. Chief designer Roy Brown Jr., previously responsible for the ill-fated Edsel, gave the Cortina its clean three-box lines, and the car was engineered to be cheap to build and to run. It launched with a 1198 cc three-bearing engine, an enlarged version of the Anglia's unit, and within three months more than 60,000 had already been sold. The Ford Cortina quickly became a national institution, sold as saloon and estate and steadily updated: the Mk1 (1962-66), the bigger Mk2 (1966-70), the coke-bottle-styled Mk3 (1970-76), and the crisper Mk4 and Mk5 (1976-82). Its motorsport legend was written by the Lotus Cortina, born of a 1961 collaboration between Ford's Walter Hayes and Lotus founder Colin Chapman: a homologation special with a Lotus twin-cam engine, aluminium panels and revised suspension that dominated saloon car racing in the hands of Jim Clark. Around 7,400 Lotus Cortinas were built across the Mk1 and Mk2, far more than the 1,000 required for homologation. Practical, cheap and endlessly tunable, the Ford Cortina was Britain's best-seller for much of its life, and today clean survivors, and above all genuine Lotus Cortinas, are treasured classics.