by Ross Finlay (24 Sep 02)

Once it's long gone from the market, manufacturers are usually quite sporting about problems encountered in the early days of a model range. Ford has certainly been playing the game during the 40th anniversary of the week in September 1962 when the Mark I Cortina was launched, although the game has a few more twists and turns than even Ford seems to realise.

The car's original project name was Archbishop, selected by Ford of Britain "just for fun, to outrank a Ford of Germany project, code named Cardinal. Later, Ford's British product planners discovered that Cardinal referred to a bird, not a churchman's title."

Well, fine, but the Germans scored a double victory there: archbishops actually rank below cardinals.

Mind you, Ford has owned up to asking the mayor of Cortina in Italy if he would mind the town's name being used, while not being aware that it was about to market a car which would translate in Madrid, Barcelona and similar centres as the Ford Curtain.

That wasn't quite as bad as the narrowly-avoided decision to call a rather more luxurious saloon what would have turned out in German-speaking countries to be something, to put it politely, like the Rolls-Royce Silver Droppings. But you can understand why manufacturers these days often prefer model designations like 75 and XC90.

Rising In The Service

One great thing about the Archbishop/Cortina project was that it came in ahead of schedule and under budget. There were some very bright people involved in it. Terry Beckett - later Sir Terence and chairman of Ford of Britain - was the company's product planning chief at the time, and one of his staff was Alex Trotman, later Lord Trotman and chairman for a term of the parent company in Detroit.

An odd thing, though, was that the Cortina name came along quite late in the day. There were people within Ford who were keen to continue the Consul name - not a great idea when they were trying to turn over a new leaf in the catalogue.

Harry Calton, one of Ford's all-time finest PR men, and recently retired from doing the same job at Aston Martin, was in Scotland running a photo session with the prototype cars, badged Consul 225 and Consul 255.

Suddenly, a telegram arrived, saying that the plan had been changed, and new badges with "Consul Cortina" were on their way. He had to have them fitted, and unleash the photographers all over again. Eventually, of course, "Consul" was dropped altogether.

Cortina-Lotus-Cortina

Between 1962 and 1966, no fewer than 1,013,391 examples of the Mark I Cortina were built, 3301 of them the charismatic Lotus-Cortina. Even Ford, which used to prefer the name the other way round, now gives Lotus its due over the sporting versions built at Cheshunt instead of Dagenham.

Jack Sears won the 1963 British Saloon Car Championship, forerunner of the present-day BTCC, in a Cortina GT, and that model's rally successes included victories in the following year's Alpine with Vic Elford, and the Safari with Peter Hughes. Roger Clark's GT won the Scottish Rally in 1964 and 1965, when he also won the Gulf-London, and then he won the Welsh with a Lotus-Cortina during the same season.

Some of the Mark I's greatest races came in 1964, when Jim Clark took the British saloon car title in a Lotus-Cortina he used to corner flat-out, on any circuit you cared to name, with the inside front wheel frequently well off the ground. Perhaps that didn't say a lot for the car's chassis, but those were the days - Grand Prix drivers out enjoying themselves in lesser races too. Then Sir John Whitmore won the European Saloon Car Championship in 1965.

The Mark II Lotus-Cortinas (all 4032 of them built, this time, by Ford itself) were allowed to race in 1967 with FVA Formula 2 engines, and they were real fliers. So were the rally versions. In 1966/67 Bengt Soderström won the RAC, Swedish and Acropolis Rallies, and Roger Clark was leading the 1968 London-Sydney, close to the end, when his engine failed. In the showrooms, the Mark II Cortina range took almost 15% of the whole UK new-car market.

Then, of course, the Escort took over as the mainstay of Ford's competition programme. The Mark III Cortina - well, despite being involved in some one-model charity races, that "Coke-bottle" design was no sports saloon.

Difficulties With Japan

Ford started to sell it in Japan, but there was one major problem. The Japanese have always been keen on different tax rates for different sizes of car, and the Mark III Cortina was marginally too wide to get into the category Ford wanted. What to do?

You've guessed it. For Japan, the bodyshells were taken off the production line then "clamped and squeezed" to lose the vital few millimetres of width. I wonder how many survive - and did the bodywork ever ping out again?

When it came along in 1976, the Mark IV didn't have any sporting role, but as with its three predecessors it sold more than a million, including the Cortina 80 and the 30,000 last-of-the-line Crusader special editions.

Assembly of the Mark IV, and the Cortina model range altogether, came to an end in July 1982. But cars remained in stock for an incredibly long time. Ford says that its dealer network sold 11,598 in 1983, 139 in 1984, 68 in 1985, 62 in 1986, and the last nine in 1987, bringing the total sales figure to 2,816,639. What dealer sold the last Cortina of them all, nearly five years after it came off the production line?

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