The Car you always Promised yourself.
I can tell you the exact occasion when the Ford Capri first entered my consciousness. It was sometime around 1991-1992 when I was working with my dad as a house painter.
We were working at a house in Surrey Hills with an unfinished Datsun project in the driveway. One the rooms was full of Ford stuff and the owner mentioned it was her son's room and he was obssessed with the car he had just bought and given up on the Datsun in the driveway.
Later that day the son returned home and I still remember the Gunmetal Grey V6 Capri rumbling around the corner as I sat in the front garden eating my lunch. I had my Cortina there that day and I briefly spoke to the son about that Capri before going back to work.
The following year I went to uni in "Ford Town" and saw an Orange V6 Capri for sale in a car yard for $4000. The car quickly sold before I could arrange a "student loan" but the search for a Capri had begun.
After a very brief search I bought the first Capri I could find within my budget of $2500. It was a Mk 1 Automatic 1600 Deluxe Capri and I proceeded to thrash the hell out of it for a week, shattering the drive plate and leaving me with a very expensive paperweight in my driveway.
Fortunately I still had my Cortina so that was used for a few months to get me through till the summer break and decide what I was going to do with the Capri. After a mis-diagnosis of a blown bottom bearing, the Capri became an endless series of costly repairs, patch ups and finally death nail 9 years later when structural rust was found in the A-pillar.
It was time to find something a bit more reliable....
We were working at a house in Surrey Hills with an unfinished Datsun project in the driveway. One the rooms was full of Ford stuff and the owner mentioned it was her son's room and he was obssessed with the car he had just bought and given up on the Datsun in the driveway.
Later that day the son returned home and I still remember the Gunmetal Grey V6 Capri rumbling around the corner as I sat in the front garden eating my lunch. I had my Cortina there that day and I briefly spoke to the son about that Capri before going back to work.
The following year I went to uni in "Ford Town" and saw an Orange V6 Capri for sale in a car yard for $4000. The car quickly sold before I could arrange a "student loan" but the search for a Capri had begun.
After a very brief search I bought the first Capri I could find within my budget of $2500. It was a Mk 1 Automatic 1600 Deluxe Capri and I proceeded to thrash the hell out of it for a week, shattering the drive plate and leaving me with a very expensive paperweight in my driveway.
Fortunately I still had my Cortina so that was used for a few months to get me through till the summer break and decide what I was going to do with the Capri. After a mis-diagnosis of a blown bottom bearing, the Capri became an endless series of costly repairs, patch ups and finally death nail 9 years later when structural rust was found in the A-pillar.
It was time to find something a bit more reliable....
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