Capri: The Development & Competition History of Ford's European GT Car [3 ed.] 0854298630, 9780854298631

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The Development & Competition History of Ford's European GT Car .

_ Jeremy Walton

—

It now goes without saying that the Capri has a well deserved place in the story of motoring. Its design allowed it to be any kind ofcar that the owner wanted - in many cases far more than just a handsome family coupé. Over its long life an honourable competition history has been established in road, rally and track racing, all of which is detailed in Jeremy Walton’s very thoroughly researched book. Included is much information that has not been published elsewhere at any time. The comprehensively documented evolution of the road cars forms a complementary foil to the Capri’s great success in motorsport. Particularly in its higher horsepower derivatives the Capri established both a reputable racing record and provided extraordinary value-for-money performance. Indeed, the Capri name proved so strong that it was resurrected in the late eighties for an Australian assembled 2+2, and is tipped to return to the European Ford range as an entirely new coupé. Amongst the nae eae tent chronicled in this book are numerous 24-hour race victories ane and abroad. The author provides a que perspective on these events from the point of view of having driven in them; he also worked for the Ford Motor Company when the Capri was building a sales record that would culminate in nearly 2 million models being manufactured. In this, the third edition of a book that has proved both definitive and popular, Jeremy Walton re-examines the Capri from its 1969 production birth to the last Capri 280 limited edition of 1986. Revised statistics cover performance of all popular British market derivatives and total production — the latter higher than originally estimated. A selection of additional photographs provide new insight into the Capri legend.

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The Development & Competition History of Ford's European GT Car

Jeremy Walton

This book is respectfully dedicated to Gerry Birrell. Born July 30, 1944, Gerry was a witty personality and gifted driver who, tragically, died racing a single-seater at Rouen, France, on June 23, 1973.

Gerry Birrell brought happiness, as well as his talent, to the many who worked with him on or off the track on the Capri programme.

First published 1981 Reprinted 1984 Second edition published 1987 Third edition published 1990 © Jeremy Walton

Essex County Library

1981, 1987 & 1990

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Published by: Haynes Publishing Group Sparkford, Near Yeovil, Somerset

Distributed in USA by: Haynes Publications Inc. 861 Lawrence Drive, Newbury 91320 USA

BA22

7JJ

Park, California

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Walton, Jeremy, 1946 Capri : the development & competition history of Ford’s European GT car.— 3rd ed. 1. Competition cars. Racing, history 2. Ford Capri cars, history

litle 629.2222 ISBN 0-85429-863-0 Library of Congress catalog card number

90-81223

Printed in England by: J.H. Haynes & Co. Ltd.

624, 2222

JS

05423

13.

German Racing Championship

187

14.

Racing

Worldwide

210

15

Injecting new life

25

16

Capris remembered

Zo

Preface Prelude Chapter:

1.

Groundwork

2

Showtime

3.

German

4

Classic Capri RS

5

Four-wheel-drive

6

European competition

7

Rallying and Racing

Appendixes:

background

I

II

See

Ill

9 71772 Championship

100

Racing 1973: BMW vy Ford

126

Road & Race RS3100: 1973-75

144

Capri II; 1974-78

162

European

IV

9 10

11. 12.

|

287

Specifications: Race Capris from 1969

296

Specifications: RS & X-Pack road cars from 1970

301

Yearly European Capri production

303

V_Those

Lia

who served...

305

VI

Capri: Important dates

307

VII

Performance figures

310

The last traditional Capris

1978-86

Competition record: Works Capris 1969-75

Index

312

I have known Jeremy Walton long enough to know that he always over-writes. So there will not be space to elaborate on why this rumpled and energetic former colleague at Ford Advanced Vehicle Operations fell in love with the elegant Capri. I can tell you that early in the life of Capri he used to bore the pants off us regarding its sporting potential. Of course Jeremy was right about that potential: Ford ended up with a car destined to rush round in circles with increasing success as European events became more production-orientated. The book reveals a record of success that was still being written from Britain to Australia, via Europe, as the book was completed, twelve years after Capri’s trans-European announcement. However, I was glad to see that Jeremy had not overwhelmed us with Capri in

competition. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Capri was the reasoning behind its existence, and the way in which it has been constantly revised and updated to suit changing public taste. After all, a sleek coupe that has survived two fuel crises, and concerted heavyweight opposition from some of the brightest and best motor manufacturers, must have a good story to tell .... Leafing my way through, looking for the inevitable slanders that ex-employees are tempted to use upon us virtuous fulltime taxpayers, I found there was little about Capri’s commercial, sporting, or sheer driving attraction, that covered. I enjoyed working with Jeremy; I enjoyed reading his book.

Walton

had

not

Stuart Turner Director, Ford European Motorsports

My reason for writing this book was uncomplicated. I have always enjoyed driving the Capri, preferably with a V6 engine, but I have also happily sampled the fours and the occasional non-production V8. It seemed to me the Capri was born to inject a little affordable glamour into our everyday lives. It is not an engineering dream — though its efficient aerodynamics and lithe body weight made it a much more attractive performance and competition car than many rivals wrapped in layers of engineering mystique. I was there when Capri was hurled into battle as a four-wheel-drive rallycross car. Battered, bellowing, machines that shot across British TV screens so quickly that baffled viewers only had time to say, ‘‘What the hell was fhat?’’. I was also there for many of the seasons when the Cologne team campaigned the factory Capris in the European Touring Car Championship. The immaculate blue and white cars fuelled my enthusiasm until an hybrid RS2600 (briefly) became my regular road transport. A spell working for Ford, until the Capri racing programme was curtailed by the fuel crisis, added further illumination. I started a book about Capris when my thenboss John Waddell, subsequently Vice-President, Ford Public Affairs in Europe, allowed me a fortnight to get something down on paper. Unfortunately I had accepted a brief for a book of a practical nature, and all I was interested in was the car’s development for the road and competition! That was in 1974: the book was inevitably stillborn. It was 1978 before I could begin writing books on my own account as a freelance, and midway through 1979 before I could get the publisher I wanted for this pet project. By then I had completed four books — one about how BMW developed into a saloon car force that beat the Capris in 1973! Still, I wanted to write the Capri book, and to their great credit Ford were still happy to co-operate wholeheartedly.

10

Capri This is not a factory publication in any sense. I have submitted my manuscript to the relevant departments in Britain and Germany, wherever factual checking was an obvious necessity, but only ‘facts’ have been altered in the light of subsequent information, not the tone or opinion. Naturally my warmest thanks go to the men of Ford Public Affairs and departments like Competitions and Engineering, but I must also say how impressed I was with the co-operation I received from Zakspeed in Niederzissen and CC Racing at Kirbymoorside. These two Capri racing specialists just could not go to enough trouble to help, especially with records of the Capris they built: an aspect Ford unfortunately could not duplicate, on the racing side, owing to internal numbering procedures. However, Ford of Germany and myself have produced a race-by-race record of factory Capri outings for the appendices. At Ford Public Affairs in Britain Mr.Waddell was the one who allowed me to get to grips with book-writing at all, and also gave his permission for me to race a company-owned Capri in the Spa 24 Hours. This when I had agreed not to race at all upon joining the company! John Waddell’s successor at Ford of Britain’s top PR post, Stuart Turner, made sure that co-operation extended to the point of flying me to Germany to do the Zakspeed and further Cologne research. Gordon Bruce accompanied me upon that trip and Geoffrey Howard (formerly of Autocar, now an independent authority on engineering) really made the early sections of the book 100% better. He did this by allowing me to use his extensively researched findings which had been used as the basis for Capri II and III press packs. The combination of this material and Harry Calton’s formidable memory/first hand experience made it possible to do a much better job on the original Capri launch than I had hoped. The book could not have become reality without the pictures Sheila Knapman and the Ford staff at South Ockendon laboured to produce, or those men of Ford Competitions at Boreham. Bill Meade and Mick Jones were particularly helpful over the fourwheel-drive Capris. Peter Ashcroft, ‘the Guvnor’, really made the early days of Capri work in Cologne live again for me, and John Griffiths could not have done more to help over Group | homologation queries and history. Engine builder Neil Brown was also particularly helpful in bringing me up to date on V6 engine development, completing the Group | plus racing picture that Dave Cook and Peter Clark drew in my mind, with occasional shrewd insights from Gordon Spice and many, many, others. Ford of Germany were an essential part of the way I wanted to tackle this personal record of the Capri. I would sum up Capri as born of American parentage, spawned and always well sold in Britain, but made in Germany, where the Capri was a fearsome

racer in turbocharged guise. ‘Made’ in the sense of its image, as well as the literal sense, for Germany is where most Capris have been made over the years — and where ail Capris have been manufactured since October 1976. So I obviously had a lot of demands to make on the staff of both Competitions and Press Departments in that country. The early competition material comes primarily from my own memories of races and interviews with men like Jochen Neerpasch. Later on I got to know Martin Braungart, then an emergent competition engineer and effective number 2 to Neerpasch. I think, if anyone could be ascribed with Capri’s saloon car racing success, it would be Martin. Unfortunately we were not able to talk as much as either of us would have liked for this book, but earlier conversations with Braungart (especially when he was at BMW) left me with nothing but respect for his abilities. Braungart’s successor at Cologne was Thomas Ammerschlager. He has made the most meticulous contribution to the competition story, especially pointing out where

Preface

11

my definition of his engineering would have led to disaster, if it had ever happened that way! My former Ford Competition Press equivalent in Germany, Rainer Nistl, contributed much racing Capri knowledge. From the same period I still grin at some of the evenings spent with Lutz Schilling, who seemed a rather efficient admin man, but eventually found photographing in Vietnam an easier task! Neerpasch was succeeded by Michael Kranefuss. Michael has never been anything less than charming and informative: it amazes me how Ford manage to breed the type of man who can run recalcitrant cars and drivers through perpetual crisis points and yet still have a word for the press, even if I did misquote them last week! Of the drivers, John Fitzpatrick, Jochen Mass, Dieter Glemser and Hans Heyer were always helpful. I hope I have portrayed the persistent courage with which Mass drove the Capri when it was taking a beating from BMW: wings or no wings Mass found a way of making it go faster than was scientifically possible. I spent most time with Gerry Birrell and enjoyed every minute with the effervescent Scot, prior to his premature death in 1973. Not so well known, but unfailingly courteous and the supplier of a great deal more background information than even we could include in this book, was Britain’s longestterm supporter of the racing Capri, Holman ‘Les’ Blackburn. Thanks a lot, and here’s to your next decade Mr.Blackburn. Photographically most of the material comes from a long session going through Ford archives, but my thanks go out (as ever) to London Art Tech, John Gaisford and Peter Osborne also contributed, with special thanks to Steve Clark and photographer Ken Shipton for making the cover and many other Capri pictures possible. The original cover was widely admired (and imitated!)... I expect no less of our 1986 ‘‘face’’. Textually I must thank W.J.Tee of Motoring News and MOTOR SPORT for employing me, and supplying my Capris through most of the period described. Naturally I have drawn a lot from material in these journals for this publication. Equally I must thank Simon Taylor, who seems to be promoted a little further up the Haymarket hierarchy every time I write a book! Simon took time off from a hectic round of meetings to give me the permission I so urgently needed to use a lot of Autosport material in the chapter dealing with the Zakspeed Capris, material that originally appeared in an article I wrote for that publication in 1980. Other magazine sources included Cars and Car Conversions and Auto Motor und Sport. Reading through the original work a couple of times left no feeling that we should change it radically, for the Capri survived far better than anticipated. Of course we have a lot of product material to add, for the injection 2.8 was months from introduction when the original manuscript was complete, and there have been factory-blessed turbos since that date too, plus a lot more racing success. To cater for the later information I have

totally revised the appendices and added completely new categories to cover performance and production, which was scheduled to cease ‘‘at the end of 1986’’, at press time. The advent of Group N production racing and rallying as more keenly contested international formula has allowed the Capri to garner new laurels, including a decisive 1985 win in Snetterton’s 24 hours, despite the presence of the new turbo and 16-valve (Mercedes, no less) generation. The Ford coupe also showed itself capable of winning production rally championship honours during 1985, so there has been plenty more to write in the sport department. As a concept, character and competitor, the Capri captivated me and I hope this revised third edition will have an equally positive effect on its readers. The classic Ford rendering of ‘the people’s performance coupe’ looks set to continue gathering trophies of one sort and another, even after production has ceased. Jeremy Walton, August *1 went

to see the last Capri being manufactured

in December

1986.

See our late photo

1980/April caption

story,

1990

page 255%

"|

|

© Q Ss =

Jo, = =

Driving a Capri in the eighties is a very different feeling to driving the same model when it was born in the late sixties. Yet the two cars are mechanically very similar. The principles are the same, but the appeal is very different. Originally the Capri simply seemed to be a European Mustang. A 2-door coupe based on saloon car components. Offering a whiff of sporty charm that has lured car buyers into the unusual since motoring began. Too often that kind of allure has been a seductive skin covering a putrid mechanical heart, but in Ford’s case they were really offering a very honest car dressed to transmit messages of individuality and above average performance. Ford of Britain also had to overcome the image of the early 1960s coupe derivative of the Classic, powered by a 1500 engine and badged ‘‘Capri GT’’. The original 1969 Capri took off in the sales race, just as the original recordbusting Mustang had in America. Those soothsayers who tell us that what happens in America happens in Europe ten years later looked to have got their prophecies right. In the four years, six months and five days from introduction date (January 24, 1969) the Capri sold a million. The impact of that first ‘European Mustang’ was every bit as dramatic as the Mustang’s assault on the sales charts of America had been when it was first launched. The Capri went into the eighties without the benefit of the American market, where it had been something of an ironic import success during much of the seventies. Yet Europe, in particular the British, kept buying this speciality car with a difference, so that it had a good 1.88 million sales behind it in December 1986. Capri was the car that changed character though, and that’s why it became such an interesting car to write about, and why I thought I’d tell you a little about the overall picture before examining the car more carefully. Starting life as a long-nosed speciality machine and undergoing an arduous factory long distance race and rally programme as part of that image building programme, the Capri suddenly changed course. So did the Western world. They discovered there was a limit to the amount of oil in the ground. The Arabs rammed home that message and image-conscious cars like the Capri looked doomed. Not so. Ford drummed up the third door or hatchback to come to the rescue of drooping sales. Capri II was the result. Launched in 1974 it revived interest in the car in Britain and temporarily revived sales in Germany too, but these soon dropped again. Britain has always been the strong Capri market. Even in 1972 the UK was taking

Prelude over 42,000 original Capris to the 31,000+ recorded in West Germany and 27,000 throughout the rest of Europe and Scandinavia. By 1976, when the Capri II was about halfway through its life, Britain took 36,000 units to 18,000 of Germany and 15,000 by the rest of Europe. By the close of business in 1985 over 1.8 million Capris had been manufactured. Output remained in Germany, but in RHD only for life into 1985. Those figures pale by comparison with the best years in America and Canada, when Capri was selling more than double the British market figure in 1972. These North American Capris were built in Germany and two factors finally put an end to them in 1977: the continually strengthening Dm versus Dollar rate and the parent company’s desire to sell Mustang on the home market. The ultimate accolade was that various features of the European Capri began to be used on the Mustang. Instead of inspiration coming from America, some began to flow back. Capri was one of the most influential factors in showing Ford Dearborn, and other American mass manufacturers, the standards of handling that could be obtained using normal sedan parts. Finally the pattern was completed when the Mustang, in its fourth major bodyshell change, adopted the alias Capri in Ford’s Mercury division alternative to the mainline product. However, Capri’s charisma could not be captured by a badge. There is still a club devoted to the original European Capris in the States and enthusiasm is still strong for the “*‘Sexy European’’. When Ford in Cologne stopped making Capri for the USA it was a major blow to the model. Volumes were never the kind to set a mass-producer’s like Ford’s heart alight and the following year (1978) a low of just 69,000 Capris were manufactured. Since then things have recovered with 85,000 plus recorded for the 1979 year, the first to feel the full impact of the third major Capri reskin, which I shall refer to as ‘Capri III’ in this book. The future beyond Capri had not been charted when this was written. Originally the car looked to have a gloomy future when it was relaunched as the 1978% Capri. However, even in 1986, the fuel injection version and the most powerful turbo cousins (Aston Martin Tickford and Zakspeed amongst them in the eighties) continued to weave new threads in the Capri story with further specials planned as I updated the 1980 manuscript. As a car of fashion, in that most people buy it for its looks first, according to Ford research, the Ford must always be subject to the whims of those who demand the latest look. When this was written a smaller, front-drive, concept seemed to be the way ahead. Ironic in Britain where the Capri has consistently outsold such small coupes, as well as many other saloons intended to reach the monthly sales top ten, only to find Capri securely resting there for month after month! The Capri did not drop outside the UK top twenty until post-1983. Even in Spring 1986 no firm closure date could be forecast, but nobody anticipated a convenient 1969-89 twenty year span! At one time or another the Capri has been sold in most corners of the Western world. Capri’s competition record is equally far-flung and embraces a surprising degree of adaptability, stretching from four-wheel-drive rallycross versions that stunned millions of TV viewers, through the expected production saloon car racing derivatives, to the works Capris that beat the best in Europe. The blue and white factory Fords also added World Championship events at Le Mans and the Nurburgring to their endurance record with some top ten placings overall against pure racing sports cars. Capris have been built as pick-ups, Formula | engined racers and for celebrities to drive or autograph for charitable causes.

13

Capri

14

Engines ranging from barely 5Obhp to over 1000bhp have been packed beneath Capri bonnets, running the range from shopping at 30 plus mpg to 200mph dragsters with over 7-litres of V8 power to pound them down the quarter-mile. The Capri revolutionised saloon car racing in Europe. From modified production cars that raced, Ford progressed to purpose-built racing cars that proved capable of finishing 1-2-3 in events like the 24 hour Belgian saloon car equivalent to Le Mans. Ironically the men who started that revolution in Germany left to defeat the Fords with another manufacturer — we tell that story too...

What’s it mean

to you?

All very glamorous, but what does the Capri do now that it did not offer buyers in the sixties? Has all that competition and sharp alteration of course benefited the new Capri owner? I think it has. In 1969 I took delivery of a 1600GT original Capri, complete with lurid gold metallic paint and the acres of matt black paint that then denoted clumsy badges like GT XLR in Ford marketing minds. Some eleven years later, a 16,000 mile Capri III stood outside the door of my house. A totally improved car that shows what could be done with detail work over a long period. Similarly the 2.81 provided many happy miles in the eighties. It’s no Porsche, but the 3-litre version, and the earlier RS2600/3100, are indelibly printed on my mind, offering enthusiasts more performance per £ spent than any mass-produced car offered during that eleven years. There is some sentiment to the statement. It’s born of hundreds of thousands of miles in Capris. Experience that encompasses cold morning starts to as many road racing miles as FOMoCo could be persuaded into, or the generosity of individuals like Dave Brodie, Chris Craft and Mike ‘BBC TV’ Smith. From a personal viewpoint I could not match my Escort racing record with the Capri outings. The satisfaction of winning in the smaller Ford could never be replaced, but I enjoyed driving Capris in 3-litre form much more! The Capri always sounded the part, its 3-litre V6 bashing out a note like a V8 on stimulant drugs. The competition handling was always dominated by the engine in the early days. It was a lot of weight to turn into a corner in 3-litre guise and had a lot more torque than Sin. rim and appropriate rubber could restrain. Celebrity races showed the cars ploughing in on understeer lock and emerging from corners in haloes of blue smoke, the drivers trying to hold the back wheels from overtaking the alleged fronts! The racing versions from Germany overcame this with properly designed parts and a basic car in which the weight, less of it, was properly distributed. In Britain the joke celebrity cars evolved into handicap racers, and then Group I, still exhibiting pretty hairy handling. Over the years constant work on locating suspension accurately, stopping the front struts ‘walking’ under duress and the back axles pattering up and down under power, has yielded a fantastic dividend. Since 1977 the 3-litre Capris have been handling over 200bhp, first on 6in. wide wheels and then on seven inch rims. It can be no accident that the road cars have similarly improved at the same time, even though many of the parts used in racing are too specialised, and expensive, to consider for mass production. Of the three main series of Capri I have least empathy with the MkII hatchback. At the time I thought it was a step back on the aerodynamic and weight fronts. These

were two factors which had helped earlier Capris score heavily in competition against rivals more powerfully engined than the simple pushrod Vee design used for most of Ford’s factory racing experience with Capri. .

Prelude However, it was the 3-litre S version of the MkII that developed Capri handling for the general road customer. The original smaller engined Capris were responsive in corners but lacked power. The original 3-litre had plenty of torque but ran out of road and puff with any kind of spirited driving. An uprated engine in 1971 took the 3-litre V6 motor’s capabilities into the 120mph region and emphasised how those rear wheels loved to step out of line. Some emission control and the II body drawbacks tamed Capri performance a little, but when they started putting gas-filled shock absorbers on the S-variants of Capri II, with its wider back track, and working to improve the roadholding, then the public really benefited. By 1980 we had, once again, the straightline speed of the original uprated 3-litre models but with qualities never found in 3.0 Capri before. Sidewind stability. Reasonable noise levels at autobahn speeds. cornering that featured a lot more traction and a lot less rock n’ roll. A ride that didn’t knock your teeth out in Continental motoring ... and that useful hatchback. Designed to project an image, you could not really have expected the Capri to be as long-lived and versatile as it has proved. It’s not a car aimed at filling the automobile hall of fame on an efficiency basis. It’s there to give a lot of people a lot of fun and style without breaking their bank balance into spiteful tales of insolvency. From that first 1600GT through the RS models to racers and literally hundreds of derivatives that I have driven, the Capri has delivered the goods. Looks are a matter of taste. I happen to think the latest car better looking than the first hatchbacks but lacking the sheer inspirational brio that first put the long-bonnet ‘hunchback’ on our roads. Performance has always been pretty good at the top of the range and a turbo option was offered in 1986. Equally important to me, given that the performance is delivered, is that it should be there all the time. I’ve only ever had one Capri stop on the road, and that original car was repaired with a coil found in a farmer’s yard, a three minute walk over a motorway embankment. The shape shows an aerodynamic advantage over most ordinary saloons of similar size and this contributes towards good fuel economy, proportionate to how hard you press the throttle. In the book there is a lot about what Ford have done with the car both for the public and competition use, but one of the extraordinary things about Capri has been the way the customers have worked with it over the years. Customising and Capri were just made to go together, a natural by-product of its strong looks, especially now that the original versions are available comparatively cheaply on the secondhand market. People didn’t stop at dressing them up though. Throughout the world there have been Capris with V8 engines — the best I tried sported a Boss Mustang 302 engine and transmission — and there was always the feeling that the ample under-bonnet space would more naturally be filled with eight cylinders. I’m sure somebody, somewhere, working on the same principles must have fitted the Jaguar V12! More common is the use of various ex-Leyland/Buick V8s ... Finally, it was a private concern in Germany that led to the 1978 racing revival in Germany — the flame-belching Zakspeed Capris, which I have described as fully as I can after visits to their Niederzissen factory. Privateers also took the Capri back into competition in Britain, Belgium and France, where it was a front running car in modified production form when I wrote this, as well as being a popular competition

15

16

Capri car in South Africa and Australia, where it has not been on sale for some years. A car that raises this kind of enthusiasm and cash from private owners’ pockets deserves a book written about its life. I hope the book does justice to the efforts of those that created it, kept it alive in production and competition and who allowed me to gain such a good look at its story ...

In a corporation as complex as Ford it is hard to pin down a precise beginning to almost any project. When one of the world’s biggest companies gets involved in something new, thousands of people will naturally be involved. That the Capri appeared in Europe can be directly traced to a pair of major influences. The sales success of the Mustang in the early sixties, which showed how mundane saloon car running gear could appear beneath seductive sheet metal work, and become desirable to a completely different class of buyer. Secondly potential buyers needed to be wealthy enough to afford a car in which practicality was relegated to a position behind blatant visual appeal. There was no question of needing this car, the way you might be forced into buying a Mini or a VW Beetle of the sixties. No, Ford had to make the buyer desire it as an image-booster to a lifestyle, or because it was simply fun to drive and own. Britain was the scene for much of the initial groundwork on the Capri project. By the time it reached fruition, Europe had become the market place as Ford of Europe was born during Capri’s gestation. That pregnancy from approval of the Colt-coded design study was under three years, a remarkably short period by car industry standards, especially when you remember that the German production was an afterthought to the main programme. The background in Britain was dominated by simple statistics. At the start of the sixties car sales were close to three-quarters of a million units: five years later the million-selling year was a fact, and so was the two-car family. The introduction of the Cortina provided an obvious base on which a European sized Mustang could be built in just the same way as the Falcon compact of the late fifties and early sixties had provided a platform for the Mustang in the USA, that Lee lacocoa-inspired Pony Car original launched in 1964.

Capri A 1963 model year Ford of

Britain publicity picture illustrates the original Capri coupe as sold in the UK. It was based on the ill-fated Ford Classic (itself an earlier alternative to Cortina) and had a good reputation when mated with the 1500GT Cortina/Corsair engine in later life. Mechanically

sound,

few

Classics or Capris of the original series survive owing to a body that did not display the same fortitude as the mechanical components.

The Cortina had arrived in 1962 and very soon strayed from its strictly orthodox family role. It fell in amongst the brigands of the motor sporting fraternity who scooped out its innards and sent it out to race and rally as part of Ford’s then-global commitment to imprinting the company name on every strata of motor sport. From a sales viewpoint the 1963 Cortina 1SOOGT and image-building, low production, Lotus Cortina twin cam-engined racers of 1964 onward were influential rather than best sellers. They made it credible that Ford should produce a sporting car. Against a background where even accountants were making agreeable noises about sporty cars, the cash from Mustang’s success rattling a further welcome from the company coffers, the atmosphere was just right for both the European and American ends of the company to start sketching up something to parallel Mustang success in the European context. Of course car companies have people drawing up improbable products all the time, especially in America where fashion sold cars through the fifties and sixties. Now there was little that was hit or miss about the Ford drawings, for they had an example to follow. In eight months of 1964 the Mustang sold a record 300,000 units, half of those sales were taken at the expense of other manufacturers. By the close of 1964 Ford knew what they wanted of a potential Pony Car for Europe. The parameters were: * Good looks.

* To be sold at a price a family could afford. * Low price dependent on using as many components from existing models as possible. * Room for four. * Wide range of engine and equipment adaptability. * Exceptional sporty handling. * Low noise levels.

Groundwork

19

Stan Gillen, then the American who was Ford of Britain’s Chief Executive when

these aims were being outlined, summarised their aims at the time as: ‘‘to put the fun back into motoring by making a personal car which is exciting to own and rewarding to drive.”’ Early in 1965 approval was given for the styling studios to start drawing up the Colt and turn it into model and subsequent full size styling dummies for assessment. In America, Britain and Germany they turned pencil dreams into models, some for serious aerodynamic testing, but mostly just to produce something that could be judged. A starting point that could serve as a base for further development. ‘*An American clay model was chosen,’’ remembers

one British Ford executive,

“‘though there were others that were better aerodynamically, it was felt that this one best summed up the halfway house between sports and GT car that we needed.’’ Ford had become fans of the Customer Clinic approach to gauge the sales potential of new models, even though they had good reason to know that even the most extensive market research does not guarantee a winner. To judge public reaction to a sporty car at mass production prices, Ford showed two designs called ‘‘Flowline’’ and ‘‘GBX”’ to carefully selected cross-sections of the public in London, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, Milan, Hamburg and Geneva. The public were not told who the manufacturer was, but asked to assess the car’s styling at this stage against both rival in-house styling drawings and other sporting cars. The reaction was favourable enough to proceed. Meanwhile the company was also preoccupied in estimating through its production and engineering departments how much it was going to cost. The public reaction to those consumer clinics was tremendously important. The car’s basic shape had to be attractive enough to make sure the company could charge a premium for a car with less passenger and luggage space, and reduced accessibility via two doors, compared to an equivalent-sized four-door saloon. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight some Ford executives believe that, “the only thing we got wrong was the financial planning. The company have never been satisfied with the volumes, in spite of beating sales predictions constantly. If it is ever dropped, there’ll be no replacement.”’ That is a rather pessimistic verdict. Even 11 years after its birth the Capri was capable of figuring in the top ten sellers in Britain and that seems a remarkable achievement for a car conceived as something of a speciality. If there is a doubt over what the Capri achieved today, there can be none about the success of the original car ... perhaps its sporty appeal has now actually been diminished by its hatchback versatility, especially in the German market? Back to the plot. July 14, 1966 is the significant date in the life of the Capri embryo. It was then that a Ford management meeting in Britain, headed by Stan Gillen, decided to go ahead.

However, it was not a nationalistic Britain-only approval. The pattern of AngloGerman production co-operation was beginning to emerge. Most people attribute the 1968-launched Ford Escort as the first example of such a link, but it was actually the class-leading Transit van (also based on an American concept, like the Capri) that finally saw Ford of Britain and Ford of Germany making the same model. At least they looked the same, but under the skin they were mechanically dissimilar. The Escort was the pioneer in the use of common engines and the Capri followed the same common body/running gear path, though British and German-made Capris continued to differ, particularly in engine choice through most of the seventies. They still differed, even when ail Capri production finally settled on Cologne after October 1976, when

Capri

20

These

early

1968

pictures

show how close Ford got to

launching a Capri with even. more limited three-quarter vision than the actual 1969 car. Coded ‘Colt’, this particular Essex-registered Capri displays the Mustangstyle rear side window

that

was deleted before production, and the fuel tank filler cap chromed instead of hidden by the production flap. The side-mouldings, an echo of an earlier Mustang theme, did make production.

Groundwork production

ceased at Ford of Britain’s Halewood

21 plant. Halewood,

Liverpool,

had

made 253,418 original style Capris and 84,073 Capri IIs. It was a farsighted decision that Gillen and his executives made in the Summer of 1966, for it was not until June 1967 that Ford of Europe was given the formal go-ahead at a Paris meeting chaired by Henry Ford II. By 1967 the present site of the British end of Ford’s engineering effort would also have opened at Dunton. This little jewel, complete with banked test track, cost a mere £10.5 million.

Another early Capri styling effort echoed the Mercury

twist to Mustang theme in the USA, though the centre motif was pure Mustang.

Dunton would major on engine work for the Capri in later years, leaving body and chassis to the Merkenich counterpart in Germany, but the first Capri prototypes were the work of the British engineering teams. By the late seventies Merkenich, which is on the outskirts of Cologne, had a staff of 2000 and was responsible for all aspects of Capri, save specific engines like the 3-litre Essex V6 that came from Britain originally. Oddly enough, when the 3-litre engine was finally phased out, after a decade as the top capacity Capri motor, the engineering for the new Capri flagship (powered by the German 2.8-litre V6) came from a small team in Britain! Back in 1966 it was estimated that the cost of producing the new Capri from approval of GBX as a working base to appearance in showroom would be £20 million. A policy document that later fell into the author’s hands, written in 1978, ascribed the cost of birth as £22 million, so those estimates were pretty accurate compared with Government estimates of public spending! The man who had done the development engineering on the 1966 Corsair GT — a forgotten model these days, alongside the original Capri 1SOOGT coupe extension of the ill-fated Classic — was entrusted with Capri practical development. John Hitchman remembered that the first working prototypes were put together in 1966 and that there was never any question of putting together ‘‘anything outlandish’’, like the rumoured mid-engine designs that some observers thought might be tempting to Ford, following their Le Mans successes with the GT 40 and cousins. Such prototypes were running long before Ford of Europe was formed, and the German side of the business, together with the engineering needed to accommodate the differing engines, was not really apparent to the development engineers until after the formation of Ford of Europe. It is suspected that Capri’s basic passenger accommodation was shaped around the minimum possible accommodation for four adults. The front seat occupants were al-

22

Capri ways well-catered for in the Mustang or American compact style, but accommodation at the rear was always provided on the basis that it had to be there for selling, but that such rear seat accommodation should not compromise the essential sporty styling. At the time there was a story that Capri was designed very simply in the passenger area by drawing space around four adults on existing car seats. This seems unlikely, unless the rear seat occupants were shock-resistant gnomes! Many of that original prototype engineering team can still be found at Ford, Dunton. They remember that the brief was for a ‘‘close-coupled 2+2 that offered handling rather than ride quality.”’ The company instructed them that no new engines were to be used, so the basic task was to develop a coupe capable of accommodating engines from the 1.3-litre fourcylinder inline (used on Escort) to the 2-litre V4 of Corsair/Transit van parentage. The bigger engines, and the sporting alternative of the 16-valve Ford Cosworth engine were not apparent, or part of that original prototype development. Hitchman and colleagues like Bill Cook, then titled Executive Engineer, Special Projects, remember that the biggest problems they had stemmed from the fact that this was a car dictated by style as the strongest motive for buying. The first prototype was actually a Cortina with new suspension and geometry,

A wilder shot at the Capri theme was this Falcon GTinspired line. Later, this roofline would become the hallmark of Australian high performance Fords with V8 motors.

thought out on the known weight and suspension travel that would be offered by Capri. “That was the best handling car we ever produced,’’ remembered Hitchman. ‘‘It even had crossply tyres on at first and a ‘glass house’ to disguise the lines. We did that with chrome sticky tape and made it look quite a presentable four-door fastback! Harley Copp (then obsessed with the Ford ‘Noise, Vibration and Harshness’ programme, coded NVH) was quite taken with it. ‘“We did most of our test mileage at Boreham and in Europe, soon extending into the Ford Lommel facility in Belgium as it became a common programme. During that programme,

as we went into 1967, there were months of lunchtime consumer

clinics

and we could see there was a problem with the GBX style.”’ That is a painfully accurate memory. The customers who got a chance to sit in the rear ofthe full size models were marking the car down severely on ‘‘that great big bit of steel across the rear side window ... it makes me feel claustrophobic.’’ That was an integral part of the GBX style, offering a closed in echo of the Mustang hardtop

Groundwork

23

(notchback, rather than sloping rear end GT style) which had been one ofthe main ingredients in the success of the US version. It was not for Europe though. Customer clinic reaction showed Ford that they had encountered a serious problem. It seemed quite possible that those who bothered to try the rear accommodation in a show room would object sufficiently to rack up a no-sale. The styling men worked flat out. The result was the classic U-shape lying on its side that went into production; stylists just receded the rear window line until it was acceptable to the clinic assessors. Sounds simple, but by then items like the dashboard — which had a very full complement of strongly styled circular instruments and printed circuit wiring — were already being made. The change to the larger rear side window was agreed in October 1967. By that time another major decision had been ratified — what to call the car? Although Colt was the obvious sibling to Mustang and just right for a European audience, it was found that ‘‘a Japanese tractor company already held the copyright,’’ according to Ford memos of the period. Another name had to be found. A marketing brief of the time asked, ‘‘is this a sporty car with room for the family, or a family-sized car with sporting appeal?’’ To answer this question 500 people attended a special version of the ubiquitous consumer clinic in London. They were shown a glassfibre model of the car and asked questions to try and resolve this dilemma. The crowd were divided roughly into thirds: there is no other way to divide S00 and come out with complete human beings! The first group just saw the car. The second were shown a three minute commercial and visuals that emphasised the sporty approach. The final grouping experienced another commercial, this time with a family bias. The sporting tack won hands down. the name came down to a choice amongst labels they knew they cou/d use. A precedent had been set in the use of the Escort name for the small car that succeeded Anglia. Even though that name really had little going |

.

|

RsaI OEWt

' arena Seangeecreertemoemperemmmmneen emibage iia

1968 prototype almost made it, the displays an even abruptly curtailed rear window, American-orithat

entated

road

wheel

trims,

and a more _ distinctive division between fastback roofline and rear deck panels. ‘Notchback’ in Mustang terms, but not a style destined to make European production.

24

Capri for it in image — it had been used for an estate car based on the previous Anglia/ Popular range — it was used for the new small Ford to be marketed throughout Europe. Capri had been used before too, on a little two door coupe variant of the Classic saloon car range, and it was Capri that was eventually chosen, despite the rude derivatives that rivals were prone to twist from the name. The only other link in Ford’s nameplate thinking that I can recall is the use of the Cortina leisure resort as a name. Capri has similar European connotations, being a Mediterranean island a short boat ride off the Italian port of Naples. The Capri tag was adopted in November 1967. Aside from the restyling of the rear side windows, there were other problems to overcome before production. Bill Cook recalled, ‘‘the stylists dictated that the Capri sit down close to the road, even unladen. The package presented to us meant limited interior capacity and very short travel suspension at the rear.”’ Ford were able to alleviate the problem by using a conventional leaf spring, with a control arm to limit axle travel, as well as locate the axle a little under acceleration or sudden braking. Bump stop rubbers (still present in the eighties) were needed frequently unless, ‘‘we used the stiffest rates we had ever tried for a production car’’, in the prototype engineering team’s words. From an early stage Ford had decided to use the Cortina floorpan. In fact it didn’t make it into production, though many magazines of the period were convinced that this Capri was simply a two-door Cortina. This was not surprising as the wheelbase was practically identical at 100.5in. (Mk1 Cortina) and 100.8in. for the first Capri. However, I was told, and accept, that the production floorpan for Capri was substantially different to Cortina in respect of suspension mounting points, the fitment of axle location rods, this especially at the rear end where a low ride height was demanded to go with that roadhugging look. Indeed Ford probably went too far in this direction, for the Capri rode decidedly nose-up under motorway conditions in its original form, in line with the American dragster cult, but not commensurate with crosswind stability! Comparing even the 5% inch-rimmed Lotus Cortina with the Capri, it can be seen that the product planners had achieved an overall track stretch as well. The sporting Cortina had a front track of 51.5in. while the Capri stood at 53in. with a rear Capri track of 52in. standing up against Cortina in Lotus guise at just 50.5in. Height was another critical area for the proponents of the long, sleek look. The Capri was 169.4in. long and only 50.2in. high (a half-inch higher without the 3-litre V6) while even the sportiest Lotus Cortina measured 166in. and a dumpy S53in., and that was after Mr.Chapman had been at the suspension. Weights? A 1558cc Lotus Cortina tipped the scales at 1820lb in its original street racer form while a 1600GT Capri had to haul 2030lb: the V6 would add another 3501b to that, but then it also offered a horsepower and torque bonus. The British development team had particular cause to be grateful to Harold Willis, technical representative from Armstrong, who played a significant part in trying to balance the impossible compromise between first rate handling, an acceptable ride and short travel rear suspension. He worked alongside the British team as they struggled with this seemingly insuperable problem and then eventually produced a reasonable compromise, with Girling also listed as alternative suppliers in this critical ride/handling area. Although the Cortina had shown what could be done with MacPherson strut front suspension and live axle located by simple links, it was the Lotus Cortina’s exclusive use of the rack and pinion steering that literally steered the development team into specifying such a system for the Capri, although by the time it reached production it _ was by no means a first for Ford in mass production terms, the Escort had already been

25

Groundwork praised for making use of this system. A feature which had been considered an integral part of many other popular British cars for decades, the quick response given by the rack and pinion in the Capri, coupled to an extraordinarily relaxed driving position in the sporting mould was an essential part of Capri character. Indeed some members of that Capri development team feel that subsequent models have never matched the sporty feel of the original, and there is something to be said for that in the days of power-steered Capri IIIs. The eighties Capris do offer a much better ride though, thanks to the development of gas-filled shock absorbers for the masses and a different overall emphasis to the car’s concept. There were ten original prototypes under the supervision of development engineer Jim Moncrieff. His team of engineers did a lot of mileage on Belgian public roads and a lot more on test tracks like Lommel. The latter was the scene of the first recorded Capri accident, one driver getting a precious prototype sideways within view of the administration offices! Unfortunately it dug two wheels into soft ground and flipped. The driver was not injured, but the car had to be taken back to Dunton for a lengthy rebuild. That sort of impromptu crash testing was also accompanied by the real thing. At least five full scale runs into concrete blocks by prototypes, which represented over £30,000, had to be completed before the necessary approval could be obtained to sell

5 ae (2

&

q |

Capri shape emerges in a fibre model of March 1966, Ford then sure about the

front, but opinions divided over threequarter rear treatment.

across Europe. A lot more detail crash testing was carried out on modified Cortinas and Corsairs, checking components under crash duress. A rear end test to check how the fuel tank behaved was another part of the procedure, but here the Capri’s thick quarter rear panel design proved itself more than just a styling quirk — something the company had to fight their way round when it came to compensating for the insertion of a hatchback in the seventies. As pre-production got underway somewhat belatedly in 1968 — the launch date had been selected as Autumn that year — the marketing men sat down to sort out how

26

Capri they would present this addition to the Ford range. In Britain there was little danger of it harming any other Ford product, for the range then simply covered the Cortina and derivative Corsair, the MkIV Zephyr/Zodiacs and Escort. It was true to say that there was a little bit of each model in the Capri line, particularly on the engine front in Britain. There Capri literally drew motors from the rest of the range, handling all of them in a way that said a lot more than any company speech could have done about the effectiveness of the Dunton development engineers on the chassis side! Marketing talked two early prototypes out of engineering so that some initial moving and still-photography could take place against an obvious Mediterranean background. Such pictures were used to present the way in which launch advertisements, point of sale material, posters and brochures would look. It was vital to get an angle at which the car looked its best, and show off the interior, for these would be strong points to show potential customers. On August 2 1968, three advertising agencies presented themselves and their ideas at Ford’s multi-storey office block in rural Essex. Up in the modestly plush executive offices of the sixth floor, American marketing director Ed Molina and the American influence seemed to have the most pull. They wanted to present the Capri with one central theme across Europe, and they certainly gave the car a concerted launch across Europe with a side view and the clever come-on ‘‘Capri — the car you always promised yourself.”’ The basic theme behind the advertising was that it should be easy to translate across Europe and — this very much to the credit of those who briefed the stylists before those first drawings — the items to stress were very much those listed in the first place as priorities. However there was a change in emphasis. At the August 2 meeting it was decided that the family would be the primary target, rather than going overboard on sportiness. J. Walter Thompson would shoot the moving pictures; Collett Dickenson, Pearce and Partners (CDP) would be responsible for still photography and copy, while Germany’s specific needs would be looked after by the company’s agency in that country, Gerstner, Gredinger & Kutter.

A

1600GT

production

model shot in 1968 during the pre-production publicity sortie. This 1600GT is not spoilt by the GT matt black paint and displays the original, cleaner, approach

’ BVWIOG °

{ ’

to best advantage, The dummy three-quarter rear panel ‘louvres’, XL badging

above the 1600GT and

afterthought

badge driving

lamps do obstruct a style that sent Europeans scurry-

ing

to

rooms

their

Ford

almost

as

showfast

as

Mustang had lured Americans.

Groundwork

27

The photography sessions were pretty interesting. In order to get the misty soft light art directors love and that’s often faked by using smoke canisters, pre-production Capris were taken to Cascais, a short drive up the coast from Lisbon in Portugal. Over 700 different still shots were required to satisfy the needs of company divisions

like

Sales,

Service

and

Parts.

A

pair

of exceptionally

light-conscious

photographers were hired with the prospect of at least a month’s work to keep them David from Brooklyn and _ Denis Montgomery busy: fashion photographer Grippentrog, a fast-working car specialist. It took two months to get the arrangements finalised and six Capris. They came in pairs of red, green and silver only and their specifications could be changed ‘‘with the speed of a Soho stripper,’’ in the words of one Ford PR wit. There were 28 men, some pretty models and 31 days to get the job done. Using aces from the styling department, double-sided sellotape and Dynoc rolls, cars changed badges and even colour schemes at the pace referred to by that PR. Despite bad weather the job and over 10,000 individual pictures were completed on schedule, but even a book this size cannot record the natural alarums and excursions that had to be mastered before the best could be picked, possibly rejected, and a campaign of compromise arrived at. All of which left the large number of ‘cooks’ mumbling about the quality of each other’s work. Such reaction was inevitable, given the number of creative people employed and the number of Ford personnel involved in approving such a visible part of the company’s activities. The advertising in national, motoring press and colour magazines was initially all colour concentrated on a blitz period of three weeks. Expenditure on this alone amounted to £125,000. Then there were 5,750 poster sites in Britain and all the dealer

advertising, which echoed the corporate theme. The posters were particularly important as, although the launch looked very smooth and assured, Ford were embarrassed

by a shortage of cars on initial launch, so there would be few cars to be seen outside launch stock. All over Europe the expenditure must have amounted to millions, but advertising Red herring! Bonnet bulge and Dunlop-shod Minilite wheels of pre-production press launch Capri 1.6 with

Ford Cosworth

1600 BDA

power unit. Note nonproduction spotlamps on this handbuilt example.

28

Capri was just one aspect. Ford’s reputation for inventive and efficient public relations had to be maintained, and then there were the dealers ... For just £48 a head dealers could spend three nights at the Malta Hilton, or Sheraton, and meet both British managing director Bill Batty and the new car. They first saw Capri on the coach ride to the hotel — in action on an RAF base runway! The motoring press, over 250 Europeans, got even better treatment. They were whisked away to Cyprus on a FOC basis (normal motor industry practice) to drive a selection of Capris. Some of these were very interesting indeed. There were eight 1600GTs that had been handbuilt with the Ford Cosworth BDA 16-valve engine that would become famous in competition Escorts in RS1600 guise. These could be identified by their glassfibre bonnets. Minilite six inch-wide wheels and a ‘‘cobbled up exhaust system’’, in the words of then-Ford press fleet manager Harry Calton, who also grinned at the memory of the temporary GLC registrations the cars wore after being run-in at Boreham and transported to Cyprus. The 2-litre V4 version actually didn’t get out to the public for several months after the launch of 1300 and 1600 fourcylinder models in Britain, but the press were able to try yet more handbuilt cars. These came from Dunton and wound up in Greece as part of a sales deal! Harry, with Alf Belson at Ford’s Brentford base for press cars in England, had been known to run such an efficient service that bedazzled journalists declared such wonderful devices as the Zephyr/Zodiac ‘Aircraft Carrier’ MkIVs the best thing since Henry offered us the Model T. Harry also remembered one registration particularly. TLN 39G was the car that stood on static display, dazzling occupants of the hotel ballroom when they attended the press reception. They sold that car to the hotel manager! I expect all of those Capris on the press drive have tales to tell, if they are with us today, but none more so than ‘‘the one that bastard Henry Taylor nicked off the fleet’’. The term was affectionate respect for Ford’s competition manager from a thenmember of the Ford PR staff in Britain. Part of the Capri launch that was to echo the Escort’s, but roughly a year later, was the requisite TV Rallycross victory for the new Ford Capri. To score that snowy win Roger Clark was strapped into a four wheel drive version of Capri: nobody could accuse the company of not trying every avenue to promote their new model! There were to be many more competition miles for four-wheel drive Capris to thunder across TV screens in showers of slimy mud, but much more serious problems occupied Ford as they headed toward the planned launch date of February 5, 1969. The Brussels International Motor Show ended 14 days before that scheduled release. Dare the company reveal Capri, even though they knew they hadn’t sufficient cars to satisfy demand?

Press bonanza Ford took the plunge. They decided they could take two bites at launching Capri to Europeans. They did show the Capri on the last day of the Belgian Show ... but the vehicle did not go on sale until February 5, and even then it was before the full planned range of bigger engines Capris could join the first four-cylinder models in Britain and Germany. In Britain there were nearly 500 Ford showrooms geared up for the addition to the range. That Maltese trip had given them an enthusiasm for this new venture that could not have been achieved by a pep talk and some slides. There weren’t enough cars in Britain, but at least each dealership had something to show the public and the enormous media coverage would sustain interest.

Epitome of ‘‘The car you always promised yourself’’

advertising theme the 3000GT pictured before release in 1969.

Capri

30

Typically clean Collins cutaway shows con-

ventional engineering that underpinned Capri’s glamourous appearance. rear

suspension

top

link

(looks _ beefier actually

was!)

3-litre | propshaft, simple strut front suspension with roll bar linking into lower arm.

Ford had gambled that the show unveiling would simply stimulate interest, and could not hurt them as no existing model in the range was to be replaced. They were right. The claim at the time was that the company had, ‘‘received greater visibility and more editorial coverage than any other UK automotive launch before’’. The amount of comment could only be measured in air time, film footage and column inches. In publicity terms Ford felt they had set a record ... one which was unlikely to be broken until the massive interest generated around Europe for Fiesta, or in purely British terms, the Mini Metro, which had full national coverage and sneak pictures a good two years before its anticipated launch in October 1980. According to an internal Ford briefing, ‘‘sales took off like a rocket with the Capri selling at twice the anticipated rate during the days immediately following the launch’’. In 21 months 68,000 were sold in Britain and twice that overseas, the market share, around 3 per cent in Britain and 3% per cent in Germany, a little below the four or five per cent quoted as the market share target in the London Sunday Times introduction to Capri, had been anticipated to repay the £20 million plus gamble. As we shall see, the initial flush of enthusiasm for the Capri was strangely not maintained in Germany, though it was to become ‘home’ for the Capri. In Britain they loved it, and even after 11 years and three distinct models (with literally hundreds of running changes), it can hold its head up with a consistent 3 per cent, or so, of total British car sales. From that massive press coverage it was evident that Ford had got over the fact that this was a car they wanted to sell to families more than enthusiastic drivers, but the sporting press still gave the car plenty of coverage. At the time of Capri’s introduction I worked for Cars and Car Conversions, then the first UK motoring magazine aiming at the younger driver. Such magazines were strictly non-U compared with the establishment at MOTOR SPORT, Autocar and Motor, but the efficiency of Ford’s press side meant that even ‘Triple C’ (as the magazine was nicknamed) managed to get a preview of Capri at Boreham airfield and the test driving session in Cyprus. The result was a two page colour spread of TLN 19G, a gold 1600GT unblemished by the acres of matt black paint that were to disfigure so many of the earlier models, and a subsequent page of black and white featuring one of Terry Collins’ splendid and accurate cutaways. This included the red herring of the 16-valve engine that attracted so much comment from enthusiasts at the time, but which was going nowhere at all!

An image builder while they worked frantically on the 3-litre to bring it to production.

Showtime That was one reaction. At the aggressive end of the scale Car magazine’s February 1969 issue punched right in with the cover line ‘‘Well, is it what you’ve promised yourself?’’ This was accompanied by the use, twice, of a full colour picture on the cover and inside (!) of the same action side view of a red 1600GT apparently lost amidst a sea of green. Whereas Triple C had now-Ford PR Martyn Watkins complete the driving impressions. Car drew on Messrs Jeff Daniels (later technical editor of Autocar) and Mike Twite (former Motoring News editor who subsequently went on to edit Practical Motorist) for their impressions under the further question mark — “*Promise fulfilled?”’ Car’s initial reaction was that the Capri 1600 was ‘‘just a Cortina with a different body’’, but admitted that further driving showed some important improvements. Most noticeable was the improvement in noise levels followed by the seating, an area in which Ford had been notoriously bad, along with the rest of the British massproduction car industry. Both Journals recorded the GT Capri at 95mph and commented favourably on its manner at that speed, conclusions that I comment on in a later chapter devoted to personal experience in racing and road use. Such comment shows the breadth of reaction to Capri, even amongst the supposedly best-informed magazine men, but before we leave them we should quote Jeff Daniels’ closing sentences in Car: ‘‘One could be cynical and say that the emergence of Europe as an American-sized market was the thing that justified an American-style assault with an American-type car. And you wouldn’t be far wrong at that.”’ In the Ford publication The Big Idea it is revealed that: ‘‘in 1969 Western Europe’s vehicle output was 10.6 million, passing the United States (10.2 million) for the first time’’. I award Jeff Daniels full marks for perception! Shrewd cynicism aside, what were the public offered in the first UK Capri range?’ Compared to the Mustang inspiration a lot less sheet metal! The Capri, compared with the equivalent notchback Mustang, was 19in. shorter overall, minus 7in. on the

wheelbase and carried a width 6in. less too. Weight, even compared with a six-cylinder Mustang, was a good S00lb less. Yet the Capri offered much the same interior accommodation ....

We could not squeeze the original Capri boot picture into the first edition — and you would be hard-pressed to squeeze four adults and their luggage into the first Capri. However, the author disregarded common sense and compressed four adults in for a trip to bumpy

Belgium ouch!

...

and_

back:

31

32

Capri In November 1968 Ford Operations Manager Stan Cross pressed the button to begin production at the Halewood, Liverpool, factory which was to produce Capris for Britain until all production went to Germany in the late seventies. Millions had been invested but the customers were drawn in by the advertising that featured ‘‘Ford Capri: the car you always promised yourself”’ and ‘‘From £890’’ in the biggest, boldest type. The range did indeed start at £890.7s.10d. in pre-decimal money, but this was a real ‘loss leader’ machine with none of the multiple options packs included, and a puny 52bhp crossflow engine of Escort extraction. : Mind you, with the then good (claimed) drag factor of 0.410 the Capri’s aerodynamics could make that little engine realise nearly 85mph. However the obvious and considerable weight penalty compared to an Escort made acceleration a leisurely affair and 20 seconds was quoted for that base 1300’s ascension from rest to 60mph for the 1,940lb Capri 1300. The rest of the launch range consisted of the 1600 at £936.1s.9d; 1300GT at £985.13s.11d. with the 1600GT needed before you broke the £1,000 barrier. This is minus option packs, and very, very few such cars were sold, especially in the bigger engine sizes. The 2000, with V4 engine, was advertised from the start at £1,088 in round figures, but did not go into production until March 1969: it would be a further half-year before

You

could

get rid of the

bulge, but not the stripes. A

1969 R-pack German 1700GT Capri does without three-quarter rear dummy louvres.

A German 2000GT XL brought you bulges, louvres and the sports-styled steel roadwheels that were a

feature

of,

the

sporting Capris.

original

Showtime

33

the 3-litre was produced to become the real flagship in the range. If this sounds like there were production problems in Britain, then it rings true. Ford had hoped to have about 20,000 vehicles in launch stock, but a Girling strike and other hold-ups amongst the components industry knocked production right back to

four Capris an hour, instead of the planned 200+ a day during some of the vital leadin production time of December. The ‘gloss’ that persuaded some owners they had purchased a highly individual car came from the option packs. These, like the widest range of engine fitments to one basic car that the industry had seen in Britain, were a widely heralded first for the marketing men who played such a strong part in Capri’s conception. Ironically they further the analogy between Mustang and Capri, for such ‘hop-up’ packs have been, and still are, a feature of North American

car sales.

Looking back from the vantage point of the eighties one can laugh at these option packs and declare that they were nothing but a gimmick. Only Ford know if the idea was basically to highlight some extra equipment and then goad some extra sales when they included much of it in the basic specification in subsequent years. All I know today is that such option packs are not a feature of Capri marketing, and they never have been since the original launch. True, there have been bewildering numbers of names applied to Capri in an effort to emphasise either the sporting or luxury sides to its character — GXL, Executive, Ghia and so on — but the option packs remain a quaint period piece that may be worth recalling. I say ‘may be’ because I am sure some of the older readers were simply revolted by the whole marketing effort that accompanied Capri, the option packs being just an extension of their worst fears. What Ford offered in these motoring scene as anything I can the purist, but it does sum up how to spend something extra on the Ford’s behalf to try and modify

various packs is as evocative of the sixties massbring to mind. It is not the thoroughbred world of Ford thought the everyday man might be persuaded new car. Perhaps it was all a nervous reaction on the car’s basic non-essential character?

The first ‘‘X-pack’’ was ludicrously cheap by the standards of the eighties. Just £32.12s.10d. brought you some interior improvements like recling seats, the bucket rear seat — I’ve never seen a Capri without those perches — a second interior light, handbrake warning light, dipping rear view mirror, anaemic two-tone horns and pair of reversing lamps. In short, items we would take for granted today. To picture what they meant in the sixties you just have to look at a 1969 Cortina or Austin 100. Slowly you will remember how motor manufacturers made a big thing out of items like the reclining seat until overseas attacks from the Japanese made the Europeans look to their laurels, and offer a decent basic standard of equipment. There was money in them there extras ... and there still is today, though our expectations have risen to include standard items like four-speaker stereo, power steering and electric windows without causing a murmer amongst the neighbours. The ‘‘L-pack’’ always the one I loathed. It had the overt American influence up front’, with ornaments heavily emphasised through extra badging, bumper riders, bright wheel and body trim plus dummy airscoops. Most useful item, made it almost worthwhile at only £15.0s.4d., was a locking petrol cap! They would combine the packs as ‘‘XL”’ for £44.7s.10d., offering the usual

‘right overwhich

Ford

discount for bulk buying. There was a separate ‘‘R-pack’’, but it was only sold for GT models and was almost always to be found in combination with the XL trim, producing such designations as ‘‘1600GT XLR”’ as routine. This combination of letters and numbers

Capri

34

to impress the consumer did not escape the Japanese , or others keen to invade either the European or American markets in later years. Anyway, the ‘‘R-pack’’ comprised Sin. rim wheels with pressed steel ‘spokes’ to replace the standard 4% rim width; a 15in. diameter sports steering wheel with three spokes and massive, safety-conscious centre; tiny fog and spotlamps (Wipac were one supplier originally, as I found out when I dared to criticise them as ineffective!) and there was a flexible stalk map-reading lamp. This was something of a period piece, in the way that gas lamps have now become prize possessions. Unfortunately this family publisher is unlikely to let me tell you what these lamps were useful for (As if JW would know! Ed.), but suffice it to say that they were best employed on attractive ladies rather than maps! The ‘‘R-pack’’ listed at £39.3s.4d. and also included a splash of matt black paint to the bonnet, door sills, and flat panels beneath the bootlid, unless you were sharp enough to say ‘no’ to such garish emphasis on the boy-racer character. Naturally the company did a composite deal that offered ‘‘XLR’’ as one package of £79.12s.10d. On top of this you had to pay £14.0s.9d. for inertia reel seat belts. Now it all seems ridiculously cheap, but I’m sure that Ford could produce figures that show the average working man has to work less hours to get the latest Capri, with a far higher level of trim, than did his counterpart for the first Capri in 1969 .... So, for under £1,300, you could own the top-of-the-line Capri. or for under £900 you could have the starter. What did you get for your money?

The Original Product The basic dimensions were as given in the previous chapter. A length of 167.8in. encompassed the 100.8in. wheelbase and an overall width of 64.8in. Quoted height varied from 50.2in. to 50.7in., the higher figure for non-GT models and those with the engines above 1.6-litres. Looking at those figures in the eighties you will see that the Capri III hatchback is longer (172.2in.) on virtually the same wheelbase (100.9in.), but both wider and at least as high at 66.9in. and 50.7in. respectively. Yet the drag factor is lower, according to Ford figures. The question of height became very important to those racing in the production classes in later years. Just to show what can be achieved with a little ingenuity, low profile racing tyres and lowered suspension, I add that an overall height of 48in. could be raced without the authorities objecting overtly in Britain! The body was always alleged by Ford to have been drawn around four adults for its minimum dimensions. I never understood this. The car was good for front seat occupants in the long-legged Texan mode of Mustang, but the rear was simply a claustrophobic bin where unhappy passengers could be relegated. The short travel rear suspension and small windows assured that this was an aspect of the car that only small children enjoyed. You could take five people on an international journey across Europe. I did — but on the return journey awoke from artificially-induced sleep to find myself bounced against the low roof. Ride in the rear was certainly lively over Belgian cobblestones! The basic interior was not much to shout about, but the GTs had that heavily

padded steering wheel, heavily shaped plastic-covered seating and six-dial instrumen tation to play with. There was a line of four rocker switches to the left of the fuel and water temperature guages that controlled wipers, panel lights, extra lamps of the R-

Showtime

35

Wy

ae

5

8

7

19

nil

Original GT handbook gives the inside story ... Capri G.T. fascia 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Aeroflow fascia vent. Cigar/cigarette lighter Heater controls. Panel light switch. Windscreen wiper control. Heater boost switch. Windscreen washer control.

8 Ashtray. 9 10 11. 12 13 14 15 16

Electric clock. Gear level. Handbrake. Clutch pedal. Brake pedal. Accelerator pedal. Temperature gauge. Speedometer.

17 Trip meter. 18 19 20 21 22 23

Tachometer. Battery condition indicator. Oil pressure gauge. Fuel gauge. Light switch. Headlamp flasher/diréction horn/dipper switch.

pack and a heated rear window. At night it was standard procedure to confuse al! these and curse Ford for the ensuing chaos. On the basic car there was only the wiper and panel switch, so the room for error was less. In all Capris it was easy to step on the windscreen washer foot control instead of the clutch, or during hard cornering; a fine spray obliterating forward vision just when you needed it .... Across the fascia was a wood grain of the most obvious fake type that belonged in a kitchen, but the general interior air, especially of a fully equipped GT, was of a lot of heavy black plastic that would endure while you learnt to operate the slick gearchange, twiddle the beautifully positioned steering wheel (perhaps the best driving position until Mercedes and BMW got serious in the seventies?) and were soothed by yet more matt black pile carpeting. A melancholic stood no chance in the original Capri of surviving black mood, though the long bonnet and general safety equipment meant the car’s occupants survived some pretty suicidal driving, from press launch onward. A feature of the interior that will stick in the minds of car thieves was the inbuilt radio. For the first time Ford had submerged the radio as an integral part of the fascia: it might not be a particulary brilliant receiver by the standards of today, prone to sudden mysterious wheezes and crackles as it strove to relay the closing of the Flower Power period, but, by God, it was difficult to steal! Unfortunately villains resorted to carving out the complete fascia area that surrounded the radio, above the conventional slide heater controls. The body was really that of the GBX prototype, but without the heavy steel hindquarter. The window space was not generous upon the sides of the threequarters panels, but it was a lot more than GBX had offered. Most road testers commented upon the obvious difficulty of entering motorways or any angled junction safely, and their comment remains just as valid today. The Capri remains one of those cars, certainly in its original form, that demands door mirrors. The overall body style undeniably had impact. The first cars did not have the bonnet bulge that later became part of the specification after a marketing-inspired special run had imitated the 3-litre ‘bulge’ and the total effect was of a strongly

indicator/

36

Capri individual design. A crease running from behind the rear wheel to beside the headlamps emphasised a dividing line in this schizophrenic character. Above the crease, this Ford made sense. Clean lines, boldly drawn for maximum use of the short trunk (8.2 cu ft) long snout syndrome. Below the crease we entered Mustang fantasy land. The dummy air scoops, highlighted by chrome when options applied, and a plethora of badges when the owner had spent more than the base price. Above the dividing line nice, sturdy, push-button doors; today we get miserly folding handles that attack the hand; Below, an optional model would proudly display dummy alloy sports wheels. Only competitors knew that plain steel rims of the Lotus Cortina/Escort Twin Cam types were the only Ford wheels strong enough for racing .... From the front we had small Escort-type rectangular lamps surrounded by flashers and assisted in their miserable night performance by auxiliary lamps, wherever the right pack had been specified. Even so, lighting remained a rear weakness of the first Capris, only attacked in a facelift operation. At the back the rear window sunk within fashionable flying buttresses and, to either side, the plain tail lamps looking rather uninspired on this exotic machine. The reversing lamps, where fitted, were idiotically placed beneath the back bumper, an enviable position for attracting road dirt and defeating their original purpose. Full

Heart to many a sporting Capri. The V6 engine with its block-mounted camshaft and single carburettor intake exposed in 1971, the year in which it was uprated by at least 10bhp.

marks went to the heating and ventilation system though. The Cortina had shown what could be done with Ford’s much-vaunted aeroflow system and the Capri confirmed it, but without the noise and fuss. Playing a substantial part in this were extractor slots beneath the recessed rear window. British development engineers remember how one of the few bones of contention between the British and the Germans on the Capri development programme was simply

Showtime the way in which blasts of cold air would emit from the system at high speed when the heat was turned off. This didn’t bother British customers too much, but when you spend three or four hours cruising at the Capri’s maximum speed on the Autobahn, Teutonic thought on the matter makes sense. Body weights of the inline fours varied from the base 1300’s 1,940lb to a 1600GT at 2,0301b. The 2000GT was 2,117lb: today’s equivalent touches 2,268lb in hatchback guise.

Mechanically Speaking Some critics were disappointed that Capri explored no new ground, save that of an unprecedented number of engine options and trims for one model in Europe. The UK front-mounted engines comprised crossflow 1300 and 1300GT from the Escort at DIN bhp figures of 52 and 64 respectively. Then there were the ex-Cortina crossflows (ie, carburation on the opposite side to the exhaust) of 1599cc that offered 64 DIN bhp in 1600 guise and 82bhp in 1600GT guise. The 1996ccV4 engine offered in Britain had no lustre of glory about it from days spent in the Corsair — where it was overshadowed by the smaller and more reliable inline fours — or the Transit. Yet, for Capri, Ford made an effort and allowed it to breathe a little less asthmatically than before, particular attention having been paid to opening out both inlet manifolding and porting. The result was a gross SAE bhp figure of 110bhp at 5700rpm, probably equating to slightly under 100bhp in today’s more accurate installed terms of DIN brake horsepower. Diaphragm single plate clutches were a common feature. The inline fours had 7.Sin. plate diameter (19.2cm) but the 2000 had the benefit of an extra inch diameter to cope with torque that was 21lb. ft. up at the same 4000rpm peak as quoted for the 1600GT. Curse of the clutch department was the cable operation. Certainly it was cheap and light, but it would break at the most inopportune moments! They still do .... Gearboxes were based on the Cortina MkII and Corsair range of that era, but all had single rail, remote operation gearchanges, as introduced on the Escort with its light-weight German boxes. A Borg Warner 35 automatic 3-speed was an option for 1.6 and 2.0-litre Capris only. A look at the ratios shows that the 1600GT/2000GT were the ones with the Cortina/Corsair ancestry while the 1600, 1300 and 1300GT had rather wider touring ratios. A hypoid bevel drive within the conventional and comparatively lightweight rear axle carried a different final drive ratio for each model. The 1300/1300GT started the ball rolling on a 4.125:1 ratio and the plain 1600 took a 3.9:1. The 1600GT sported the familiar Escort TC sporting ratio of 3.77:1 (though some of the Lotus-engined Escorts did have 3.9:1) while the 2000GT had quite a long stride at 19mph per thousand rpm, whereas the 1300s were down at 16.3mph per thousand crankshaft rpm. Suspension reflected that stolid engineering background that many criticised — but often fetched up operating as they could not afford the servicing bills or initial cost of prestige machinery! Capri was certainly not the car that would see Ford dispense

with the MacPherson strut for Britons. The struts on the Capri were perfectly straighforward with ‘‘double acting’’ shock absorbers (bump and rebound?). The struts were somewhat loosely located by rubber

37

38

Capri top mountings, the bottom end following Ford practice of the time with a front roll bar feeding into the single lower arm Ford denote as the Track Control Arm (TCA). Later, a great deal of work would be devoted to the struts to provide negative camber suspension for sportier models, either by variable top mounting positions or combined with new TCAs/new crossmember attachment points for same. The back axle location was quite sophisticated by standards than prevailing, though coil springs had been ruled out by the early insistence on a Cortina-like leafsprung floorpan. Besides which coil springs didn’t look likely to help either the cramped rear accommodation or stubby boot capacity. Instead the semi-elliptic leaf springs were assisted in the fight against torque and braking forces via staggered shock absorbers. This popular move in American cars simply meant that one damper was mounted in front of the axle, the other behind. The dampers, as we said by Girling or Armstrong in Britain, were mounted in a near vertical stance. Then thought quite clever as the Escort in rally trim featured a virtually redesigned rear end with vertical dampers to try and relay the power of 1.8-litre Twin Cam engines to recalcitrant surfaces composed mainly of mobile stones and dust. Axle location rods, with soft rubber bushings at each end in the interests of low road noise as part of the Ford preoccupation with NVH, ran from the floorpan in front of the axle up to the top of the axle casing on each side. The rack and pinion steering was one of Capri’s best features. A super driving position and some flexible joints built into the column meant that steering a Capri was one area in which the model delivered the promise of its looks with a vengeance. It was not until the larger wheel rim widths became fashionable, and part of the standard specification, that the remote feel of power steering was considered for the larger engined models. To start with Capri came on 13in. diameter wheels throughout the range. That was still true in the eighties, but originally only GT models came with radial ply tyres! Standard steel rim width was 44%2J, but the R-pack option brought 5J rims, a width that was the maximum on production Capris long after the models racing in showroom categories had acquired the familiar 512J plain steel wheels that served Escort and Lotus Cortina so well. Production cars didn’t officially get 5'2in. rims until the advent of Capri II and an alloy option. Cortina 1600E wheels were a good-looking alternative, but rare. Standard equipment on the 1300/1600 were 6.00 by 13 crossplies, probably Dunlop and Goodyear in Britain — Avon can be superb, if you have a hankering for crossplies. The radial shod GTs and optional wider-wheeled versions usually came with 165 by 13 Goodyear G800 or Pirelli Cinturato tyres. The normal braking layout was a disc drum system with a servo fitted as standard to all models above the 1600GT and optionally available beneath. Export vehicles from Britain often had a dual line braking system installed, where local laws were advanced enough to call for such a belt and braces fitment in 1969. Development and alternative equipment appeared to be going on through the public launch and afterwards, for two main types of brakes were fitted (or was that the effect of strikes?). A 9.59in. front disc was a feature of all from 1300 to 1600GT, but at the back 1300GTs might wear an 8in. diameter drum, or 9in., and the same went for the plain 1600. The 1300 always had 8in. rear drums and the 1600GT 9.0in. The 2000GT also shared the 9.0in. rear drum with 1.75 width, rather than the smaller capacity Capris’ 1.5in. rear drum thickness.

However the 2000GT did herald the use of a different front disc for 3-litre by adopting the 9.625in. diameter disc. Hard though it may be to believe, some models

Showtime from the mix 1300GT-1600-1600GT also had the bigger front discs. Even by the eighties the 3-litre Capri was comparatively lacking on the disc front end. This despite the widespread availability of ventilated units from Granada and favourable experience with RS models, plus the experience in competition, which had always pointed to an improvement in braking as a high priority. The early Capris were obviously fitted with what was available, the only British specification certainly being that the models beyond 1600GT all had the larger units. All had self-adjusting rears that were meant to do their stuff whenever you backed up. Until the 3-litre materialised, all Capris came with a 10% gallon fuel tank that was tucked up above the rear axle, behind the back seats. The 3-litre offered an extra 3

gallons. The cooling system had extra capacity and larger radiators for models above the 1300GT, the 1600s holding 11.45 imp. pints, 2000s, 13.5 and the 3-litre 19.8.

Convertible

Capri

came

courtesy of Crayford engin-

eering,

Kentish

specialists.

The European market was not sufficiently large for Ford to consider this option seriously: shame ...

A Range Awaiting a Leader ... Depending which British press release you read there were 26 or 27 new models in the Capri line with five levels of engine tune and two distinct layouts for four-cylinders. Playing with those option packs brought enough permutations, never mind the availability of optional transmissions, and a delete option on that matt paint scheme with the R-pack. Ford obviously felt the lack of a flagship pretty badly in Britain. Originally they didn’t even have the 2-litre in production, so the announcement of the productionised Cosworth Formula 2 engine for the Capri — based on the 1600GT engine block (and bottom end reciprocating components in production trim) was a useful PR exercise. There was no production future for a Capri with the 120bhp Cosworth Belt Drive A-series (BDA). Nor was there a competition future for this 1.6-litre, despite its four valves per cylinder and advanced alloy cylinder head from the deal that had already that brought Ford the Four Valve A-series (FVA), the 1.6-litre Formula 2 racing engine Ford the as known formally V8, Prix Grand foretold the stunning success of the 3-litre Formula Cosworth Double Four Valve (DFV). No, the BDA’s future lay with 2-litre rallying. and racing for Escorts of 2 racing cars and a tremendous variety Those who drove that clever Cosworth-engined Capri red herring reported that

39

40

Capri sounded sporty enough, but was naturally down on torque compared to the 2-litre. Thus it needed rowing along on the gearlever to show any advantage over the illregarded V4. What sort of performance could the customer for those original Capris expect? The basic 1300 we have covered, the GT version reckoned to be capable of 0-60mph in under 15 seconds (doubtful) and 92mph. A 1600 was slightly slower off the mark than the 1300GT, owing to the taller final drive with a similar top speed. I drove a lot of 1600GTs for frustrated tuners who wanted a base before converting Capris for customers fed up with waiting for performance to match the car’s looks. They all seemed capable of just beneath, or beyond 100mph, reaching 60mph from rest in 12'%%-13% seconds. The 2000GT was a much better car than expected and came with two axle ratios. Prior to October 1970 it hauled a 3.44:1 with a 3.54:1 substituted thereafter. Either way 105-107 mph was on in the press cars with 60mph reached in a snappy 11 secs or less. From 1600GT upward I was very impressed by low level noise levels. This and the road manners, areas in which Ford Europe offered their customers more than a Mustang owner from the pre-Shelby era could have imagined. Even the best Mustangs lag way behind in steering finesse, and I think the Capri was one car that convinced the Americans that a smaller mass-produced car could be fun to own. There’s still a suspicion that Capri was too good for comfort when sold alongside seventies emissionstrangled Mustangs that had lost most of their straighline fire. Fuel consumption was something of a revelation. Driven hard you could get 24-27mpg from 1600GT and 22-24mpg from the V4. A 30mpg average was a distinct possibility for slower driven 1600GTs and smaller engined models. However, throughout that Summer in Britain there was a feeling of waiting for the proper topline Capri. Performance was one reason, the other was that the enormous engine compartment obviously needed filling with something a little more in character with the V8s that beat their uneven way beneath hoods of that transatlantic cousin. Some couldn’t wait of course. Broadspeed and Super Speed, both well known for Ford saloon car preparation on the race track, prepared their hotter 1600GTs with a reasonably honest 100bhp. Broadspeed even got to the stage of fitting a front spoiler and dressing the result up in their traditional racing colours. You lost a little of Ford’s multi-million pound attack on noise levels, but gained 110mph and 0-60mph in 10 seconds or so as compensation. My first introduction to 3-litre Capri motoring came through Lumo Cars up in Luton in the month that Ford actually commenced production of their version. Commencing in September 1969 and on sale from the following month at chassis number ECJ.22021, the 3000GT went on sale at just £1,427.12s.8d. in the more usually purchased XLR trim. The 3-litre programme of development had been quite intensive. It was realised that the clientele for Capri would corner in rather more spirited fashion than had those of the Zodiac ‘barge’ from which the 60-degreeV6 engine and wide-ratio four-speed gearbox had been obtained. So the V6 was beefed up. ‘‘We had to fit new bearings, revise the oil pump pick-up to guard it against surge and baffle the sump before we were happy to see it used in Capri;’’, one of the original Dunton development team told me. This was no surprise as 1G was the figure claimed as a routine cornering figure for development Capris, at which they would show no sign of breakaway. The body itself was strengthened around the front Suspension pick-up points (particularly to the top strut mounting) and new engine compartment side rails. ‘‘The

Showtime chassis was well able to handle the extra weight (2380lb instead of 21171b of the 2-litre) and power’’, said the men from Dunton. That was after they had further uprated the GT settings, arriving at 122lb front springs and 125lb rear, amongst the stiffest production 3-litre settings I could find on record. Harder bushes for the anti-roll bar and firmer shock absorber settings were also chosen. Although rim widths stayed the same, tyre specification was a lot more generous with 185(70)HR Grand Prix Goodyears doing the job. To get the engine in it was apparently necessary to put in the famous bonnet bulge that subsequently spread down the Capri line, but the 3-litre could also be identified by the twin exhaust at the rear. Under bonnet changes also included a larger radiator and battery, adding to the extra nose weight already inflicted by the large cast iron motor, which lived under a new air cleaner in this application. The fuel tank now accommodated 13% gallons and the brake lining swept area at the rear had been increased with an extra half-inch on the lining. A better fade-resistant quality was obtained in new pads and linings. Complete with its new air cleaner and tubular steel three-branch manifolding, that went into a single pipe beneath the car, before exiting as two pipes from one silencer, the 2994cc motor obviously overawed Ford from the variety of power outputs quoted! Claims for the unit went from a gross 144bhp at 4740rpm to a slightly more credible 136bhp at the same engine rpm, though even this was wide of the truth when it came to tuners converting the engine, or Ford’s later uprated version, as we shall see. Incidentally this torquey unit (165 DIN lb.ft. at 3000rpm) had been widely used in Britain for performance application before the advent of 3-litre Capri. Marcos, Reliant and TVR made regular use of the unit in their glassfibre-bodied cars and a number of

The 3-litre brought new power to weight ratio standards for Ford but retained the clean rear light cluster (from Escort) and neat fuel filler flap. This is Gillian Fortescue Thomas _highlighting how useful a limited slip differential could be!

41

Capri

42

or entrepreneurs had taken to inserting the weighty lump in unfortunate Escorts unwieldy Transit vans, where they found a receptive home, years before Ford did the same thing properly. Hitched up to the extensively revised V6 was the side-opening Zodiac MkIV gearbox with Transit casing with adaptation to a floor gearchange, as that of the Zephyr/Zodiac was on the steering column. A remote linkage was devised, but was never terribly satisfactory, clanking and baulking its way through ratios designed to haul caravans up remote mountains and down the other side, but with a distinct lack of choice in between. A two-piece propshaft and a further inch in clutch diameter (9.5in.) were also specified, along with a 3.22:1 final drive. The result was a car that went in very similar manner to that Lumo Capri conversion that gave me my first taste of V6 Capri motoring. However, that Capri had to be over-revved to get 60mph in second gear, bringing the time down below 10 seconds. The production Capri, according to Autocar in October 1969, sprinted from rest to 60mph in 10.3s, returned 19.3mpg and had an average top speed of 114mph. The conversion men now moved on to improving the 3000GT. The potential for more power from that lazy V6 was apparent, and any car with 57 per cent of the weight over the front end and all that torque could probably use a handling improvement ... Ford were also working on the Capri, but it was to be a while before we saw that they too

realised

that

121-128

DIN

bhp

from

3-litres was

not

very

efficient,

and

that

something had to be done about that horrid gearbox. Incidentally V4 and V6 engines shared the same bore and stroke, and bowl-in-piston design concept.

A New

World to Conquer

On April 3, 1970, the Capri was ready for the biggest boost yet in production. It appeared at the New York Show of that year. Already a quarter-million had been sold all over Europe, and some unlikely corners of the globe. Now it was time for the ‘“‘Ruropean Sporty Car’’ to conquer the New World. Offered initially only with 1.6 Kent crossflow or 2.0-litre Pinto power (first was 1.6) the Capri really did the trick, attracting over 3 million dollars of orders. At first running gear and instrumentation came from Britain, but the usual British car industry wars were being fought out. The Capri in Federal form gradually became an enormous sole asset to Ford of Germany, as you will read later on. The month before that Capri’s success the 3000E for ‘‘Executive’’, then Ford’s pet marketing label, became available. It must have been sitting around in stock for a while, as production had begun in November of the previous year. The E wrapped up most of the XLR options and added some extra touches like a vinyl roof, pushbutton Ford-branded radio, electric rear screen, opening rear quarter windows and very welcome cloth inserts for the seats.

More Power for the Small Fours Drawing engines from the Escort, Capri benefited from a programme that saw new camshaft profiles, revised carburettor jetting and modified shaping of both cylinder

Showtime head porting and bowl-in-piston layout, so it became a semi-Heron head layout. The 1300 was up Sbhp (57 total), the 1300 GT offered another 8 horsepower (72 DIN bhp) and it didn’t stop there. The same kind of programme had been applied to the 1600s as well, moving them to the dizzy heights of 68bhp for the 1600 and a useful 86bhp from the 1600GT motor. (This engine became very familiar to enthusiasts through Formula Ford and the Escort Mexico/Sport series.) Ford claimed it gave the car a 102mph top speed, and the capability of 0-60mph in under 12 seconds. More like 13s. sticks in my memory with the top speed claim certainly justified. Simultaneously the option packs were slightly simplified. Now you could specify L and XL or, for GT customers only, the complete XLR package. Exit a few more puzzled salesmen and their clients! Detail improvements included brake servo assistance as a standard feature across the range and an improvement, much overdue and still not the total answer, from Lucas for the auxiliary lights. In fact the only real answer to the lighting problems of the first Capris was to fit a high quality lens and halogen/quartz bulbs, the best example in Britain available from Cibie as the Caprima conversion. In January 1970 Ford Advanced Vehicles Operation was an Anglo-German reality, a factory in South Ockendon, Essex, making the first RS1600 and Escort Mexicos while British and German engineers had made the first of the legendary high performance RS2600 fuel injection Capris that were to form the basis of their racing effort. More on that later. FAVO’s influence could be felt on the September 1971 Capri Special just through marketing, a proprietary rear spoiler similar to Boss 302 Mustang’s, and rear slats. These had also been part of a 1969 package for Mustang and were an obvious dress-up for Capri. The rest of the Capri Special was simply a 2000GT painted in Vista orange with optional extras like the vinyl roof, heated backlight, pushbutton radio and the now acceptable cloth trim for seats. By then a 2000GT XLR listed at £1,310 with the most expensive 3000E model stretching for £1,600. The rear ‘wing’ of these Capri Specials did very little for the 1200 cars produced in aerodynamic terms. However, it did let one club Capri racer foretell what the factory

racing cars would have to do, allowing him to mount a bootlid air dam. Alas for Ford racing hopes, a proper wing did not arrive until the RS3100 of the 1973/74 fuel crisis period. October 13, 1971 and the Earls Court Motor Show were the time and place for Ford to announce, ‘‘the new Capri 3000GT and 3000E models are the fastest production line cars ever to be sold by Ford in Britain. Their maximum speed is increased from 114 to 122mph and the time taken to accelerate from rest to 60mph is reduced from 9.2 to 8 seconds. For those models equipped with automatic transmission (again a Borg Warner unit — J.W.), the maximum speed rises by 8mph to 118mph, and the 0-60mph time is reduced by 2 seconds to 9.4 seconds.’’ What had been done? Quite a lot. In the eighties I was told that some of the later V6s of the old type were actually down to 121 DIN bhp instead of the advertised 136. According to the Ford press release ‘‘power output of the engine has increased by 8 per cent to 138bhp DIN.”’ That would mean the original engine’s output was a best of 128bhp. The torque figures were always as confused for this engine ranging from a low of 165 DIN lb.ft. up to over 190 Ib.ft., but all at 3000rpm. The same figure for rpm is accompanied by the DIN figure of 174 Ib.ft. today, and since the engine is theoretically producing 138bhp still — that is the figure I accept. For some mysterious reason, German engineers tell me, power tends to drop off during a production run, even when no changes are made.

43

Capri

Slats

and

phasised

rear

spoiler

Boss Mustang

em-

in-

fluence from America on this Capri production special. It was primarily sold in a retiring ‘‘Vista

Orange’’ paintwork!

They think it is to do with wear in the assembly tooling. Taking the DIN figure as gospel, torque had actually been improved by 9 Ib. ft. Bulk of the power increase came from a new camshaft profile. This allowed the engine to rev more freely. Before it had difficulty wheezing over 5000rpm, now it would touch 6000 revs easily, if you were not careful. Higher lift and increased valve overlap were combined with bigger inlet ports and valves. Inlet manifolding was reshaped to mate up with the new intake porting and the carburettor was equipped with new jets to allow the flow of extra fuel. Despite this, a new exhaust system and air cleaner were claimed to not only provide extra power, but also lower harmful emission levels in the exhaust gases. The plastic cooling fan design was changed from the previous air-beating design to a viscous coupling for the fan drive of automatic versions, never spinning at more than 3000 rpm. It is possible that the subsequent introduction of this feature to the manual transmission cars compensated to some extent for that power drop-off during production that was noted earlier. Other changes included a much needed 3.09:1 final drive ratio, which just brought 22mph per 1000rpm within reach (21.8mph) and the insertion of a 1.95:1 second gear to replace the original Zodiac 2.29:1. This meant that 63mph instead of 53mph was

October 13, 1971, and Capri 3000GT and 3000E are ‘‘the fastest production line cars ever to be marketed by Ford of Britain.’’ Ford claimed that maximum speed was boosted from 114mph to 122mph; a power increase of 8% and

“no increase in touring fuel consumption.’’ very enjoyable

They cars,

were very

cheap on the secondhand market at the start of the

eighties.

Showtime

45

obtainable in second gear, greatly closing the gap on the 80 plus mph third gear, despite the retention of the official 5800rpm redline. External changes were confined to the larger lens area of the Lucas auxiliary lamps, and a later version of the spoked steel road-wheel styling, still of 5J as standard and wearing 185 Goodyears. However the suspension and braking had been changed a little. The rear Suspension spring rates had been softened. Looking at Capri history overall one can see there had been a continuous fiddling with spring rates, not only to cater for the wide range of engines, but the changing market conditions and taste, though the travel at the rear was to be a limiting factor. The October 1971 brake improvement came from trying to mount the disc a little more in the air stream at the front and a bigger servo (8 inch instead of 7). New hubs were specified and there was a slight improvement in pedal feel. Quite why bigger discs were not specified at this stage is unknown, save a general reluctance to spend money on what was a very small run high performance model to the Ford accounting system. I didn’t test this important change to 3-litre Capri motoring until February 1972. By then Ford had ‘rationalised’ their sales system again and the 3-litre Capri was sold as the 3000GT XL at £1,584.45p, or 3000GT XLR at £1,627.8p. The XLR pack cost £93.33p while the Golde sunroof listed as an option on the 3000E I drove listed at £43.28p and the comfortable cloth inserts for the seats a princely £6.14p! The 3000E itself, which continued to absorb all the features of the XLR package (minus that map light), added in the pushbutton radio and padded dash. Plus the other features originally listed, it now

cost £1,721.25p.

It was worth the wait, and the price. Using the same track as before in much the same conditions I recorded the following fifth wheel figures for Motoring News in the uprated 3-litre. This model demonstrated a two second improvement in 0-60mph capability (now 8.2s) and a time of 24.6s to 100mph compared with 39.6s for the original! We also clipped a second off the old quarter-mile time of 16.2s and improved our overall fuel consumption from 19.2 to 22.1mpg. This was the best Capri yet and I preferred the softer back end, making it easier to keep the rear wheels on the ground and supplying some semblance of power around tight corners.

Getting Ready for Capri II Preparing for some fundamental changes to keep the Capri alive and well in the market place, June 1972 saw Ford offer another series of specials based on 1600, 2000 and 3000GT. These came in either ebony black or emerald green with contrasting side coachlines in red or gold: the black 3-litre models were well publicised by appearing in the second-ever Capri celebrity race at Brands Hatch, their damaged remains auctioned off after a particularly hectic barging match for the lead, which went to Frank Gardner. Their significance was to introduce the bonnet bulge for the smaller capacity Capris, but they also featured a backlight heating element, cloth trim, inertia reel belts, the 3000E’s opening rear windows, four-way hazard flashers, matt black dash and a centre console. As ever Ford were showing what they would soon offer in standard model runs, gauging reaction before commitment to larger volumes, as well as getting rid of some old stock! On September 27 1972 the model range was thoroughly overhauled. These were

Capri

Uprated Capri 3-litre proved over 2s a lap faster around the Brands Hatch short circuit than its predecessor had been in an equally exciting Ford Sport celebrity race. This must be a practice shot, the car is not

damaged

introduced

as 1973

Capris and internal company

briefings

referred

...

to 151 detail

improvements, 194 on US Capris! Externally the cars are easy to tell because of the lighting. On rectangular head-

lamp models much bigger semi-sealed beam units were fitted, while a new flagship to the range — 3000GXL — had the lighting problem completely licked by using quadruple headlamps with halogen bulbs. All Capris had new and larger tail lamps with reversing lamps incorporated and the front flashing indicators had been moved into the bumper. The power bulge bonnet became standard throughout the range and grilles were new, their colour and form graded to go with the status of model. Inside there was a completely new dash and a glovebox, plus a two-spoke steering wheel. Clearer white on grey instrumentation carried over into Capri II,as did the suspension/floorpan underpinnings. Now S inch rim steel road-wheels were spread across the range and the rear suspension lost the location links of before. The idea was that a rear anti-roll bar would compensate for the enormous drop in spring rates: on the 3-litre the front rating was now 94lb and the rear 89lb. The result was to make the cars prone to pitch and wallow unduly unless they were equipped with the previous now ““Heavy Duty’’-coded rates; the rear anti-roll bar picked up on the old radius arm Facelifted

the

rear.

3000GXL

Note

from

restyled

sports wheels and abbreviated louvres on lower panel.

Showtime

GXL, perhaps the best 3-litre Capri, seen from the front in October 1973 guise. Specification included a pushbutton

radio,

heated

back screen, four halogen lamps, opening rear windows and the vinyl roof at a very

competitive

as always with engine model.

price

...

the

big-

location points and, ‘‘did nothing’’, in the words of one laughing Ford engineer. In Germany they went over entirely to overhead camshaft engines, right down to 1300, but the British took only the Cortina MkII]-sourced overhead camshaft 1600 des-

cendants of the original Pinto design. The engines were the 72bhp 1600 and the twin

The instrument panel warning light positions for the L and XL models. 1

Headlight main warning light

2

Direction

3

warning light Handbrake and dual line braking

beam

indicator

system

warning

light Arn

22.

201918 7

16 1514 1312 11

Oil pressure warning light Ignition warning light

987

Facia panel controls - general

Top:

fascia.

facelifted

Below:

GT layout.

L and

XL

long-lived

1 Ventilation control for aeroflaw system 2 Internal fan boost switch for heater 3 Heater temperature control 4 Heater distribution control 5 Side lights switch 6 Side and dip headlight switch 7 Bonnet release 8 Hazard flasher switch 9 Horn button 10 Indicator contro! 11 Rear window washer control 12 Rear window wiper switch 13 Choke control knob 14 Windscreen wiper switches 15 Cigarette lighter 16 Clock 17 Rear window heater-switch 18 Windscreen washer and wiper control 19 Rear fog lamp switch 20 Front fog lamp switch 21 Glove box

22

Passenger grab handle (Ghia only)

48

Capri prechoke carburettor 88bhp GT derivative, the latter a 100mph car like its pushrod launch original decessor. Only the engines of 1300 and 2000 V4 survived this facelift in form, the 1300GT was dropped. Noise had been attacked again both through 13 extra sound deadening moves, and the adoption of the viscous-coupled fan for manual 3-litre models. With a Teflon covered hub the engine fan ran at 2000-2700rpm, cutting noise, and boosting claimed horsepower back to 140 DIN bhp at 5300rpm.

Interior

of

1973 models

the

facelifted

included cloth

seat inserts instead of allplastic, and a more pronounced bucket shape.

There were other important mechanical changes to the 3-litre as well. The horrible Zodiac box went and was replaced by the Ford of Germany Consul/Granada E-box that came from their 2.6-litre range originally and graduated to 2.8 before adoption on the British 3-litre V6. It was colloquially known as the ‘‘Hummer’”’ gearbox. With a conventional top. opening, a simpler single rail remote gearchange could be adopted. This finally got over most of the baulking problems that afflicted hard driven 3-litres. Germany now shared the 3-litre on top of their range too, though it meant having two models within 10bhp of each other as the RS2600 was still sold. The interior changes also covered new switchgear, Consul/Granada inspired, and much more support from the semi-bucket front seats, which had their rear panels indented in an effort to provide a half-inch extra leg room. Incidentally two-speed wipers became standard across the range, instead of just on GTs as they had been originally: radial ply tyres became the norm too, save on the 1300. The line in Britain now covered single-choke carburettor 1300; the two new 1593cc-ohc engined models, 2000 V4 and the 3-litre. The task was to make sense of the option packs and derivatives. Based on three years experience they selected L, XL, GT and GXL to cover the range, exactly halving the designations and losing E, XLR and plain base models, plus the chance of combining L or other packages on an already GT-equipped car. However, there was still a decor group offered on GT — sports road-

Showtime

49

wheels the most obvious with twin driving lamps, body stripe and the map reading light also listed alongside the breathtaking spectacle of a leather gearshift knob. Ford calculated that customers could choose from 19 engine, trim and option alternatives in Britain, 28 in Germany (including four Federal USA Capris): multiplying this by left and right-hand-drive, even ignoring colour scheme, Ford were building over 900 permutations of Capri! At this re-launch of the now substantially re-worked Capri, Ford were able to take stock of what they had achieved since January 1969. In three years and eight months 742,159 Capris had been made and they could confidently claim 800,000 sales when launch time came for revamped Capri in September 1972. They could also expect to count on at least 80,000 Capri sales in the USA alone for 1972, for some 79,200 had been shipped there during 1971.

A detailed confidential analysis showed production in Britain and Germany since launch had been as follows: Ford of Britain

Ford of Germany

1968 1969 1970 1971 1972

79,600 69,173 41,113

758 134,344 169, 740 168,726

(first 5 months)

21,608

57,097

211,494

530,665

Grand total 1968-June

1, 1972

=

742,159.

We can see that the German effort had consistently been double that of output in Britain, or more. For the 1973 model year the Germans would continue to supply cars for all Common Market Countries and Switzerland: America would also be supplied. Britain would look after all other EFTA markets as well as the home sales. When introduced in 1972 the range-topping 3-litre Capris retailed at £1,654.21 for 3000GT and £1,830.62 to cover the quad-lamp 3000GXL. A year later the 3000GXL in automatic

For

1973

the

Capri

was

facelifted to include larger front is a with that

and rear lamps. This 1600XL from Britain the SOHC 1600 motor first

saw

light in Cortina.

European

Options/

accessories include sports wheels, vinyl roof and wing mirrors.

form had broken the £2,000 barrier.

50

Capri

Original and 1973 rear light clusters.

On the transmission side you could see what was going to happen on the automatic front when the late model 1600s became available with a Ford auto in place of the BW 35. The automatic was not a bad choice as the plain 1600 had the wide ratio manual gearbox drawn from Cortina. The 1600GT retained the old Cortina 1600E/GT/ 2000E four speeder with its better ratios. The Borg Warner equipped 3000GXL kept its promised press release performance. Autocar timed one at 115mph, 0-60mph in 9.7s and a time of only 1 second slower in the standing quarter-mile than the manual had managed. The mpg penalty was a reported 19.2 versus the manual Capri 3000GXL’s 20.7mpg overall. A milestone for Capri was passed on August 29 1973 at 2.30pm, when the millionth Capri (an RS2600) slipped off the lines in Cologne. It was 4 years, 6 months and 5 days since the car had been shown in Brussels.... Although the Germans were making plenty of Capris, it was an increasingly hard job to sell the car in that market. Let’s take a look at how they tackled the task, both through their production offerings and in competition with the original car, before the advent of Capri II in February 1974 — a design that was almost totally ignored by the factory for competition.

facelift

5]

Showtime

As

for

tailights,

headlight is later Worthwhile!

bigger

version.

eis WSS

re ree WES.

These pick-up conversions were popular in the seventies. This red Mk1 survived into 1989 with its enthusiastic owner, Andy Hadland of Henley, Oxon.

The Continental Approach Remembering Germany’s role in Europe throughout the motorised twentieth century, it is not surprising to see that the German end of Ford operations has more of a stopstart history. The Capri was one of the components in the company’s remarkable comeback on the German scene. A return to health that saw Ford Germany production leap spectacularly forward into the eighties as the biggest source of Ford cars outside the USA, even if many of them came from the 1962-acquired plant at Ghenk in Belgium.

German cutaway of original Capri shows V6 with a more realistic view of the rear axle locating links, though the artist’s three-dimensional viewpoint seems to have been hindered compared with the British rendition.

German background

The 2300GT got the full bulge treatment in 1969. Nice looking without option packs.

The Rhine-side 52 acre Ford Cologne site goes back to 1929 when then-Mayor (later Federal Chancellor) Konrad Adenauer invited Ford to the town during a push the company were then making to acquire European sites for manufacturing. The course of history and German internal politics saw the Cologne plant actually shut in the thirties, though it was able to re-open by using a greater quantity of German-made parts. By 1932 Ford had fallen from a previous position of second overall in the market to ninth. Through the thirties the Cologne plant lived with the Nazi requirement for total German-manufacture in vehicles sold. To everyone’s surprise Cologne survived the war remarkably unscathed: four days after Germany’s surrender it was producing trucks again! However with 40 per cent of their old markets removed, because East Germany was now behind communist lines, it took until 1952 before output passed even pre-WWII levels. Ford in France looked poorly, and the overall performance of the now-fast recovering German industry persuaded Dearborn that money should be poured into that area of the company for maximum benefit in European terms. Ford France was sold (to Simca). By the start of the sixties Ford of Germany production had multiplied eight times and the Cologne site had grown to 476 acres! In 1960 the Taunus 17M was launched and it was that saloon car range’s V4 and subsequent V6 engines that provided the source of engines and some running gear which led to the differing mechanical specification between British-manufactured Capris and those in Germany. Although, by the 1969 year of Capri launch, the German market had outgrown Britain for the first time since the war, Ford was not yet the happiest of operations in Germany. A front wheel drive Taunus design (Cardinal, which also used the V-engine as part of its philisophy) had flopped and the introduction of common designs like

53

Capri

54

Escort and Transit was vital if the sagging home market performance was to be boosted. Germany had gone through its economic miracle and was developing faster and faster into the car market of Europe with a fine manufacturing reputation. Ford needed a much bigger share of that action, and Capri was just the job to boost both sales and image, especially now that a third plant was Ford of Germany’s responsibility at Saarlouis, close to the French

border.

Escort helped the Ford revival in Germany by 2.2% in 1969, but so did the spectacular Capri. The market loved coupes anyway — remember that Taunus/Cortina and Granada all had coupe versions in Germany in the seventies, models unloved elsewhere — and the Capri made an astonishing impact. Capturing 3% per cent of the market originally, the initial launch could be counted an exceptional success for a speciality car. It also set rivals at General Motors Opel and elsewhere scurrying for this new personality coupe section of the market, one identified so accurately by Capri. The big difference between the ranges of Britain and Germany was the use of 60-degree cast iron vee motors throughout the German launch Capri range. They started with a SObhp four-cylinder of 1.3-litres and culminated in a 108bhp six-cylinder a litre bigger. Promised for later in the year, in just the same way as the British market had been tackled, was unlike the big V6 offered in Britain, capacity as before, 2.3-litres. It would and then only to 2.6-litres. The launch range of engines are

Model

Cyls

CCs

1300

v4

1500

v4

1700GT 2000

a GT version with more power (125bhp), but the extra power came from a unit of the same be 1970 before extra cubic capacity was offered,

tabled below:

Bore x Stroke

C/R

Carburettor

1288

84x58.86mm

She S|

FoMoCo C8GH-A

1488

90x58 .86mm

8.0:1

Solex 32TDID

v4

1688

90x66.8mm

9.0:1

Solex 32TDID

V6

1999

84x60.14mm

8.0:1

Solex 32DDIST

2000R

V6

1999

84x60.14mm

9.0:1

Solex 32DDIST

2300GT

V6

2294

90x60.14mm

9.0:1

Solex 32DDIST

Performance Model

BHP

(Ford figures):

& RPM

Max. torque (lb.ft/Mkg @ rpm)

1300

50 @ 5000

68.7/9.5 @ 2500

1500

60 @ 4800

82.5/11.4 @ 2400

1700GT

75 @ 5000

94/13.0 @ 2500

2000

85 @ 5000

109/15.1

2000R

2300GT

Top speed (mph/km/h)

Accel. 0-62mph (100km/h)

8225/1133

23.8s.

87/140

19.4s.

96/155

14.6s.

@ 3000

101/162

IBESS,

90 @ 5000

114/15.8 @ 3000

103/165

1225S.

108 @ 5100

134/18.5 @ 3000

111/178

10.8s.

German background

55

This 1970 Capri seems a bit over-decorated, but if you wear a blue uniform (or grey, or green in Germany) it’s nice to dress the Capri

up too... ORES

TE

Paes | e,

Twin pipe, single outlet, exhaust identified bigger GT V6 models in Britain and Germany.

All the engines shared the basic short stroke configuration with conventional piston and combustion chamber layouts. At the same time Ford of Britain were obsessed with the bowl-in-piston Heron Head layout. The inherent feature of the heavier piston meant that the British engines always felt coarser than their approximate equivalent cubic capacity counterparts from Germany, though we should also remember that the British range was comprised entirely of inline units until it reached 2-litres. The British V4 was not related to the German designs, but was a design cousin to the Essex V6, which came only in 3-litre guise for Capri, though a 2.5-litre was manufactured for other Fords for many years also. Options on the German cars were much the same as in Britain, the most functional

Capri German

specification

always included a_ cloth option for the seats. This is

a 1969 GT with the six-dial instrumentation, effective ‘eyeball’ ventilation and heavily padded three-spoke wheel that served all

original sports Capris. The gearlever gaiter only stayed that tidy for the pictures, mostly it was a dusty old remnant amidst a sea of fake wood trim. Rallyecoded chrome map-reading lamp can just be seen on

passenger side. Few cases are recorded of it being used for its proper purpose, but it was certainly a useful

accessory

...

being the five-inch-rim sports road-wheels with appropriate radial ply wider section tyres. The way in which all the German engines are related, the sixes being extensions of the four to six-cylinders is something BMW and Datsun also favoured (but with inline designs) in the simplest way possible. One other general point about the German engine range, particularly to be noted at larger capacities, a description of which follows, is that their smoothness can encourage over-enthusiasm with the throttle. A cast iron crank resting on four main bearings (three for V4s) has a definite strength and rotational limit! When more powerful versions of the V6 were produced, even the company ran into trouble, so extra engine tuning is a subject best approached with care. From 1.3-litre upward an automatic choke was a standard feature throughout the range.

Perhaps a plain base model was best looking ...?

German background The German Capri was announced with a four-speed gearbox or automatic option on every model from 1488cc upward. Ratios for the four-speed at announcement time were soon changed. Here are the two sets offered, the later set identified as 1970:

First: 3.424(1969), 3.65(1970) Second: 1.97(1969&70) Third: 1.37(1969&70) Fourth: 1.00(1969&70) Reverse: 3.79(1969), 3.66(1970) The ratios were shared throughout the range in these pre-2.6-litre days. The automatic also offered common ratios, but the final drive gearing was changed between models to provide from 4.11:1 for the 1300 to the 3.22:1 that was to remain the tallest Capri rear end ratio until 1971; after which 3.09:1 was offered on bigger engined models. Ratios for the final drive at the top and bottom end of the range were identical to those emanating from Britain. The braking capabilities were very similar to those provided in Britain. Naturally the servo-assisted mixture of drums and discs stayed the same, but there were marginal differences like the provision of 244.3mm/9.5in. front discs for all models upward of 1700GT and 241mm/9.4in. discs up front for smaller capacity models. The suspension was the same; though for continental use the stiff damping and spring rates provided a distinctly joggly ride over not uncommon surfaces like cobblestones or pave. During development the Germans also managed to persuade the British to alter the

Original

1969

base

model

interior from Germany. Plain, but effective by the standards. contemporary Note that the wheel has a plastic rim an d spokes.

a

The USA was originally serviced by 1600 crossflow Kent engined models, a true blend of British and German effort. This 1970 twin headlamp model — _ the standard USA specification — should make _ that German lady on top smile. It brought work to the German plants while demand fell in Europe.

SAAASANASANANY,

SE

German background

of

heater so that it did not provide gales of cold air at high speed on the autobahn! The same kind of continuous high speed during development also produced the remarkably civilised noise levels that the Capri offered from the start. Prices? My German information included a rather coy method of describing cost on a DM to Kilogramme rate. Working on the figures supplied in the original press material this would mean

the range went

from Dm

7,562 to Dm

9,568, slightly more

expensive as a whole than the equivalent British range. About 10% up according to calculations based on the £/Dm rate at the time. However, as with the British launch, the bigger engined models, even those originally announced at the launch, did not get into production for up to half a year after the fours. Thus it was May 1969 before Ford were telling the press about the 108bhp/2300GT as a reality at below Dm 9,000, the cheapest V6, of 85bhp, the 2000, then retailed at Dm 8,297. Production in Cologne by then was 550 a day with another 100 Capris a day scheduled for August 1969. In May 1969 the whole German range had a fuel tank capacity boost to 62-litres (13.64-gallons)

rather

than

58-litres,

but the real news

came

when

Summer

was

a

memory and Autumn’s Frankfurt Show gates wide open. There Ford could proudly announce the fastest car they had so far made for the German market, the 125bhp version of the 2.3-litre V6 engine, taken from the successful 2OMRS saloon. A power to weight ratio of 8.32kg/18.35Ilb per horsepower was something to get a little more excited about. Acceleration from rest to 62mph was now claimed to be less than 10 seconds with a top speed of 118mpha rather more unlikely target: just over 110 would seem more in line with what the British achieved with what later turned out to be 128bhp. The 2300GT came with harder suspension and wide wheels of course, but quite where they got all that extra power from was more difficult to spot. Compression was still 9:1, but a full length dual exhaust system had been fitted and a sports camshaft,

a recent Ford development for the Taunus 23MR and Capri 2300GT. The 32mm choke Solex was retained. The power peak moved up 500rpm, the result of a new camshaft profile developed in the sporting RS saloon, while peak torque was 18.7mkg/135lb. ft. at 3500rpm. By then 75,000 Capris had been made in Cologne, but total production had reached over a quarter-million (275,000+ in fact) by the time Capri made its debut at the New York Motor Show on April 4, 1970. A limited production version, approved by Ford South Africa and made with the help of a local tuner, also started manufacture with a V8 engine at this time, but that was not a significant landmark ... Unfortunately, as V8 Capris offered the speed of their American big-engine counterparts,

without the bulk. The New York showing was important to Ford Germany. By the time the show was over they had three million dollars worth of orders. As we said before, the business was originally split between Britain and Germany, but by far the bulk of the cars came complete from Germany. This was important business as the initial sales penetration of Capri fell off on the fashion-conscious German market, for sales on the home market then began to droop a little and the USA deal was fine compensation, adding literally hundreds of thousands to Capri production figures in Cologne through the seventies. At first the 1600 ohv GB-engined model was imported, but it was soon superseded by bigger-engined versions like the 2000 OHC Pinto-engined Capri (the engine wasn’t seen in Ford Europe vehicles until the Cortina/Taunus line of 1971) and

the 2.6/2.8-litre V6s. September

1970 marked the introduction of the largest engine yet to the German

Capri

60

range, this taken from the large Taunus 26M saloon. As with many V6-engined stroke versions we’ve discussed so far the engine had a 90mm bore, an extra 6.7 mm on bhp same the much gave 2520cc of total The more. 246cc giving (66.8 versus 60.1mm) Now up. naturally was torque but 125bhp, at unit, top as the 2300GT’s 20.5Mkg/148lb.ft at 3000rpm was the offer from your local Ford dealer in Deutschland. Performance was little altered, acceleration at 9.6s to 100km/h

(62mph) was frac-

tionally quicker, but top speed remained much the same until you hit an uphill section. Then, while the 2.6 tended to give away a bit to the British 3-litre V6, it showed the worth of its extra cc over the identically rated 2300. Simultaneously the Capri range was rationalised on the Cologne lines. The 8S5bhp version of the 2000 V6 was dropped and so was the 125bhp version of the 2300 engine, though the 108bhp motor remained. The 1500 got another 5bhp (total 65 now at a

ee

Anes

The

1970,

briefly

range-

topping, 2600GT retains the

under-bumper driving lights that were favoured in Germany. Full length dummy louvres were back!

5000rpm) with a 9:lcr instead of the old 8:1. Thus the line up for the 1971 model year, announced September 1970, comprised plain 1300 and 1500, GT labels attached to the 1700, 2000, 2300 and the new 2600GT. They also rationalised their packs (which do not seem to have been so profusely used as in Britain) to X, XL or XLR. The 2600GT sat atop the German Capri range for less than a month. “Plastikbombe’’ had become a reality! The most exciting version of Capri yet deserves its own chapter, and that is what I have set aside, so we just acknowledge here that the author has omitted one Capri variant for later discussion, a variant shown in March 1970 and produced from October of that year. Back at the subject of the German MkI range in September 1970, we find Cologne celebrating 250,000 Capris produced after 21 months: 380,000 if you add in Britain. Production was then running at 700 a day, approximately 125 of them going to the USA. In 1971 the second Ford works at Saarlouis began making 100 Capris daily. It is interesting for me to note that the German press department were happy to call the car a Mini-Mustang, something that was frowned upon elsewhere inside Ford. Opponents of such nicknames felt that the American image of soft suspension, wasteful engines and wilting brakes, were not connotations needed for Capri! The half-million and million points were jointly celebrated with Britain, but particularly important to Cologne were the sale of 50,000 plus Capris in the first 12 months trade with the USA.

German background

61

All Change The 1973 range was presented in Autumn 1972 and was quite a big change, taking in the general softening of suspension and increase in standard equipment we have noted in Britain. However the news was that they had tossed out all the V4s. A singleoverhead-camshaft appeared on a 1.3-litre four that simply served to replace the 1300 V4 model. Replacing the confusion of 1500, 1700GT and the 2000 Vee models, were two stages of tune upon the more familiar 1600 overhead-camshaft four, then serving since 1971 in Taunus/Cortina. There was an 11bhp difference between the two 1600s, accounted for by the use of a twin choke Weber carburettor, tubular exhaust manifolding and modified valves on the high performance version. Millionth Capri, a_ late model RS2600, is driven by leader”’ Hans off the line at Saarlouis. Bulk of production was in the Niehl plant at Cologne. It was 4 years, 6 months and 5 days since the Capri’s introduction as a speciality coupe ...

Compared with the previous V4 1.3, the inline 1973-season four offered another Sbhp, slightly less DIN torque, with both peaks another 500rpm up the scale. At both 3-litre GXL level, now introduced to the German plant too and marking the new high point in the range for most purchasers, and the 1600 level, the planners had succeeded in bringing the British and German output together on the engine front. The option scheme confusions were also removed, as noted in the previous chapter. The general softening of suspension rates, improvement in interiors and revised front and rear lamps were also common in Britain and Germany. The last major shuffle on the German MkKI front, left the engine line-up looking

like this: C/R

Carburettor

Model

Cyl

CCs

Bore x Stroke

1300L

In-line 4

1293 OHC

79x66mm

8:1

1600XL

In-line 4

1592 OHC

87.67x66mm

Oal

Ford 1-choke

87.67x66mm

Oral

Weber 2-choke

2293

90x60.1mm

OI

Solex 2-choke

9:1

Solex 2-choke

1600GT

1592 OHC

In-line 4 me

2300GT

V6

2600GT

V6

2550

90x66.8mm

3000GXL

V6

2994

93.67x72.42mm

8.9:1

Ford 1|-choke

Weber

2-choke

Capri

62

Oe a0

Lal

or 2g) -

A two-spoke wheel was a feature of the first Capri styling changes that included larger front and rear lamps. This dashboard layout (for GXL) was basically

unaltered into the eighties. This automatic model proudly displays the high specification clock and built-in radio.

Performance (Ford figures): Model

BHP

& RPM

Max. torque

Top speed

Accel.

(Ib.ft./Mkg @ rpm)

(mph/km/h)

0-62mph

(100km/h) 1300L

55 @ 5500

1600XL

72 @ 5500

1600GT

88 @ 5700

2300GT

108 @ 5100

2600GT 3000GXL

66.5/9.2 @ 3000

88/141

20.9

87/12.0 @ 2700

98/158

Sa

92/12.7 @ 4000

106/170

12.6

134/18.5 @ 3000

111/178

10.8

125 @ 5300

148/20.5 @ 3100

118/190

9.6

140 @ 5300

173.5/24 @ 3000

123/198

8.5

It must be emphasised that all the figures given are from Ford at the time. Although the 3-litre V6 of the eighties is outwardly the same as that of the 1973 season, output is marginally down (2bhp) this through either honesty or emission causes. In general government pressures have tightened up the figures manufacturers quote today, and they are more realistic than those even of just ten years or so ago. With a 3-litre Capri at the top of the range, a thriving federal business and a much better image in general for Ford in Germany overseas, you might have thought there was little to worry the Cologne company. Not so. Volumes slipped to a surprising degree after that initial impact on the © German home market. By 1972 Germany was taking about 31,000 Capris a year

German background compared to 42,000 in Britain, the respective market shares being 2.6% in Britain and 1.5% in Germany. The trend continued in 1973, the German market a much harder nut to crack because of intense coupe competition, where in Britain Ford’s rivals either weren’t taken seriously (Vauxhall Firenza/Marina Coupe) or were too expensive. Like the pretty Opel Manta, which gave Ford Germany such a hard time on the home market, beating Capri’s performance narrowly in 1972/73. The demands grew for a new Capri, but first Ford had a glorious fling at touring car racing with Plastikbombe!

63

Engineering Fords first injected saloon ‘*Jochen Neerpasch had identified a need for a sporting Capri to support his sporting programme. We had already looked at the British 3-litre, but the 2600cc plus capacity was what Jochen wanted, based on the engines that he had been using in the sport. We didn’t need fuel-injection for the competition department, but we felt we did need it for usable road power.’’ Bob Howe, now with Ford technical service at Warley in the eighties, was the head of engineering and product planning, and one of the first employees in the embryo Ford Advanced Vehicle Operation plant at South Ockendon, Essex. This in the early seventies and late sixties, when the RS 2600 version of the Capri

was born.

Injection

revolution!

I

would be years before Ford

introduced _ fuel-injectior for Granada 2.8 but thi: mechanical Kugelfisher 2.¢ V6 installation provided ; taste of the future, thougt it got off to.a troubled star in 1970’s RS2600.

Classic Capri RS I went along to see key members of that Capri RS2600 (and later RS3100) engineering team, almost exactly ten years after the project got off the ground. They were engaged in the creation of another fuel-injected Capri for the eighties, again building up a team and a Capri with that something extra, initially for the German market. My interviews took place at Dunton, that collection of massive grey sixties office blocks that crouch unobtrusively amongst the man-made gentle contours of green. Inside the primary office block is the garish clash of red panels and the enormous silver X-described by the crossover of up and down escalators. A very different atmosphere to the one in which the original RS2600 Capri was created. Here you can see the sheer manpower and machinery Ford call on to keep up with the complex motoring requirements of the late twentieth century. When that small team created Ford’s first fuel-injection production car, it was literally engineering on the move to keep pace with the frenetic competitions world. One member of the team remembers drawing parts and watching them being made at the same time for installation! To get the full story I went back to a man who raced Ford products with great success whilst engineering them, Rod Mansfield. It was an ability he held with another key member of the team (engineering at Toyota Cologne when I did Capri research),

Allan Wilkinson. From an office overlooking the morass of visitors’ cars competing unsuccessfully for a scratch-free parking spot, Mansfield and Harry Worrall recalled for me the days when they were Supervisor of Engineering and Project Engineer respectively on the Capri RS2600 project.

Bumperless_

original

with

crass matt black paint was a rarity. Note indicators mounted in body, and

slightly flared wheel arches.

65

66

Capri The cast of characters included Richard Martin Hurst, who did all the liaison on the project, linking the British engineering to German production via Wilkinson, who was actually on the spot at Ford’s Niehl plant to complete that liaison. Reg Chapman got the complexity of the fuel system to sort out (he was on to nuclear reactor prototypes when this was written!) while student Graham Parker turned out to be ‘a tower of strength who did all the work with Kugelfischer at Stuttgart’, Mansfield remembers. Also on the strength by the time RS2600 was a genuine production vehicle, and responsible for the rare major work on a facelift version in October 1971 was Mike

Cadby. His persistent work on a number of special Ford vehicles is now sadly missed, as he died of a brain tumour not long after FAVO ceased production in Britain in the mid-seventies. Trying to control these strong characters was initially the overall task of Ray Horrocks (yes, the Leyland number 2 by the eighties) and engineering chief Howe, John Hinds looking after the product planning aspect in discussions. Mansfield was the fifth FAVO employee and remembers getting involved with the 4-wheel-drive Capri production project before the RS2600 came along. Howe recalled, ‘we got the go-ahead for FAVO itself in October 1969. By November the green light for the RS Capri project came.’ Worrall’s diary shows the tight schedule they produced the Capri special to. ‘By December we were hard at it on the first two prototypes, which were completed in January. We were then set the task of building an RS2600 suitable for showing at Geneva (March 12, 1970), but that proved quite a job.’ It did indeed, but they made it as Mansfield laughingly remembered by ‘applying duty free Scotch.to company red tape!’ The show Capri was finished with a metallic mock-up of the fuel-injected engine. Even getting to the Swiss Motor Show was a major drama. There was snow at Boulogne and Richard Martin Hurst used considerable initiative to hire a plane, for which he had absolutely no authority. I think you have to be at least a Vice-President to think about such a move at Ford! The aircraft safely flew the precious dubutante to her date with the motoring press and public. Meanwhile Competitions needed some Capris for homologation purposes, but fast. Worrall recalled, ‘April 17, 1970, we finished the order to have 50 lightweight Capris built on the line at Niehl, having started in March. They didn’t have the injection, but they did have the long throw crank engine to give them over 2.6-litres, as required for competition.’ These were extraordinary cars, machines that could only be built because of the equally extraordinary co-operation of Pilot Plant (the department that builds and checks-out pre-production cars and other prototypes) at Niehl. Albert Caspars controlled that plant, and later a lot more Ford European factories. The object of the exercise was to get down to 900kg/1984.5lb for racing, and that involved some sacrifices of normal Capri comforts. The cars had no heaters, no carpets and perspex sliding side panes for windows. Mansfield recalled, ‘the glassfibre doors, bonnet and boot, were made up by BBS: even then Martin Braungart had an interest in this company, but it was tiny in those days. Not surprisingly, in view of the hurry, we had dreadful problems of fit. Ford Quality Control often would not pass the cars for sale! ‘Those damn side windows rattled in their runners and we even had thin, lightweight glass. For the German traffic authority, the people who have the yea or nay on whether your car is legal for use in Germany, we decided to install electric rear windscreens to get over the demisting problems without a heater, but the car was never legal for sale in Germany on a number of counts.’’

Classic Capri RS

The first RS Capris were photographed on Minilite wheels, and minus bumpers. A form in which they might have reached the official racing weight, especially without the fuelinjection equipment!

Rod recounted how even the paint process could account for 15kg body weight, so they cut the process to ‘three thin layers, and, of course, there were no bumpers at all. To get number plate illumination at the rear we used a pair of Halford lights, which occupied much of our drawing time!’ Mansfield continued, ‘we had bonnet pins to hold the hoods down, which tended to crack after a brisk run! Quality Control were pretty unhappy about that lightweight

CApItaas.

Part of the reason so many RS Capris were sold! The interior was very comfortable with bucket front seats and_ sports steering wheel. This is an

original 1970 RS2600 Capri with

220km/h

speedo,

no

radio or centre console, and

rpm limit officially redlined

just short of 6000rpm.

67

Capri

68 Obvious

clues to genuine lightweights included Minilite magnesium

and deep, fixed-back,

roadwheels

bucket seats.

RS2600 lightweight did its job. Ford Competitions got their 900kg racing weight. Ironically I can find no record of the works cars getting closer than 940kg in RS racing trim, though the less sophisticated 2300GT models had been under 900kg. Even the lightweight had the basic 2.2mm boost in stroke compared to 2600GT. This made the dimensions 90mm bore by 69mm stroke for 2673cc. The 69mm stroke had to be kept under the Group 2 International saloon car racing regulations, the category in which the Capri competed throughout its RS2600 factory racing career. Various bore dimensions would be built upon that stroke, culminating in 96mm by its last 1973 season - that was enough to provide 2995cc and over 320bhp. Consider that the basic engine in fuel-injection form started at 150bhp, with a safe limit around 6500rpm, and that the competition engines ended up running close to 8000rpm and over double that base horsepower. This shows the kind of intense development engineering that saloon car racing can generate. The Capri was homologated in its lightweight Group 2 competition trim ready for the 1970 season. Group 2 rules stated that production must be 1000 vehicles a year and allowed a degree of modification that increased over Capri’s racing life. Finally the rules permitted such freedom that the RS2600’s racing and production life was ended, for a new four-valve per cylinder engine was allowed under a 100-off options rule, and Ford then switched, for the 1974 season, to an Essex 3-litre based engine, again oversize, which we talk about in a later chapter, where the RS3100 successor to RS2600 is revealed in detail. The lightweights were duly built and examined by a representative from the Commission Sportive Internationale in Paris, the sporting authority that represented the Federation Internationale Association, FIA. These were the titles used by the supreme motor sporting body of world clubs in the seventies. Then FAVO engineers could get on with making a reasonable road car. This they did to such effect that nearly 4000 were eventually made, nearly qualifying what was originally a limited production homologation special for the mass production racing classes. It was an instant classic, but not without moments of pre-production anguish!

mnt

Oval separated tailpipes were part of the mystique. Those number plate lamps took up a disproportionate

amount of drawing time. Halfords was the answer!

Classic Capri RS

It would need New

69

Wings ...

Approval of the sheet metal body in white, basically a front spoiler job and the installation of Federal twin headlamp cavities to take Cibie biode lamps, was completed and signed off (approved) July 17, 1970. By August 24 of that year engineering approval had been given and the first production Capri (weighing more like 1060kg/2337Ib) was off the Niehl lines on September 14, 1970. That remains a very fast schedule, but was an immediate snag as Mansfield told me. ‘‘Because of the revised crossmember and 6 inch wide wheels, we were horrified to find that the first two produced had the front

wheels fouling the arches!’’ That sort of trouble would have led to total panic on a real mass production item. In those days the Niehl factory could accommodate the miscalculation as Rod related, *“‘the Capri needed a re-strike of the front fender to clear the tyres. Normally that job would take 6-8 months. Pilot Plant did us a suitable tool for a small volume in a week, or so!”’ What went into the original Capri RS2600 for sale to the public was basically anything they could get off the shelf, particularly from existing production or the Competitions Department. Harry Worrall took me through the bulk of the 1970/early 71 specification. **The suspension was pretty straightforward. There was a new hole to drill in the crossmember at either end to move the bottom suspension arm slightly outward for some negative camber. Those original cars were pretty low, riding on a competition front coil spring that really was stiff. ‘**The single leaf back spring (from Hirsch) was a competition item that they had been using too!’’ Mansfield felt that the single rear leaf was a ‘‘slightly innovative thing to do and obviously saved some weight... the makers were obviously keen that we use them too. We did use Bilstein shockers from the start and I remember doing three days with that company to finally approve the ride and handling, but some testing had already gone into it by that stage. ‘‘It was so low that I remember we were a bit concerned over clearance for the exhaust system and the small alloy front spoiler. So we used to check it out by seeing if it would clear our own driveways at home! I could say that the squared off exhaust ends came from that, but really it was just to be different.”’ The original roadwheels were Richard Grant 6 inch rim alloys with grey instead of silver finish. Pirelli CN 36 185HR 13 radial ply tyres were common. The brakes were taken from the 3-litre/2600GT range of the time, equipped with the traditional anti-fade linings and pads from Ferodo as originally engineered. ‘‘The Germans still had the smaller seven inch servo booster which wasn’t as good as the later eight inch one we got in Britain’’, Worrall said, adding that he also had to change the clutch linkage to mate the cable clutch pedal to an hydraulically-activated clutch slave cylinder. This was achieved by means of a crank, at the gearbox end, connecting cable

to slave cylinder pushrod. The four-speed gearbox was taken originally from the Taunus V6 range, but all the German Capris by this stage shared the same ratios, variations coming through a wide choice in final drive ratios. The Capri RS had the 3.22:1 ratio that was the highest mph per 1000rpm option on Capri for a distressingly long period, allowing about 20mph per 1000rpm and leading to some spectacular blow-ups on the RS model when hard drivers just left them flat-out on the Autobahn at 120mph for hours. From the start the interior was upgraded. A pair of black cord finished Scheel seats with reclining backrests did a great deal to emphasise sport and provide comfort,

Capri

Interior changes during the RS

run

slightly seats,

instead

included

these

smoother-finished a flat steering wheel

of

the

original

dished affair. To the author the flat three spoke wheel and the ribbed seats seemed the best combination, but

that’s just being awkward! Back seats were trimmed with inserts’ to match in both cases.

Classic Capri RS despite the lumpy competition-based suspension. The seats stayed throughout the RS2600’s production life, but the Springall steering wheel, the deeply dished design so strongly favoured by Ford Competitions in Britain, eventually made way for the Ford kind of three-spoke wheel. Now you see it in an amazing variety of late seventies and early eighties Fords, though it was originally simply developed as an FAVO sporting wheel, offering the highest possible safety standards. ‘‘The original RS2600 steering wheel chipped a bit out of a brand new dummy in a crash test here at Dunton,”’’ Worrall recalled... ‘‘and they were not happy about that, as you can imagine!’’ The biggest changes to the RS2600 came in October 1971 and this was when Mike Cadby got heavily involved. Worral recollected, ‘‘we started using the FAVO cruciform type alloy roadwheel instead of the Richard Grant/MAG Accessories type. In turn this gave us the opportunity to adapt the Cortina 3-litre disc brake conversion we had been engineering on to Capri. This was a unique ventilated front disc and unique hub with an ordinary production M16J disc caliper, for then-new Granada. ‘*At the same time the facelift operation allowed us to fit quarter front bumpers with flasher lamps inset and a rear bumper. We took on the later Consul/Granada type of gearbox, just as the 3-litre Capri did in Britain. Suspension was totally revised. We raised the ride height, took on some production front coil springs and reset the dampers.’’ The racer had become far more of a road car, selling all over Europe, but not in Britain. It was especially popular in Belgium and France, besides Germany.

more decalling Inevitably came to the RS, and tailpipes were squared off, Pirelli CN36 tyres were common.

The 150bhp

V6

engine Mansfield emphasised the majority role Weslake played in putting the RS2600

into a production possibility. As I understand it Brian Lovell and Mike Daniels did the l drawing and detail design work on the installation of Kugelfischer’s mechanica engine. V6 injection system to the longer stroke German Anyone who has looked under an RS2600 bonnet will know that the engine bay

71

Bumpers and an_ early version of blue and whit corporate livery charac terise this 1972 RS2600 wit! the later FAVO ) alloy wheels. Note the absence 0 dummy louvres, extraneou

badges and driving lamps The quad-lamp RS neede none of that decoration.

Top left can be seen tl extra toothed belt dri needed for the _ injectic system

150bhp,

on

the

stretche

version

of the 2

engine. It powered RS26( and served as a base for t racing units from 1971-7:

Classic Capri RS is dominated by a large alloy box in the middle of the engine vee. This is Allen-screwed onto a central plenum chamber, like the rest of the construction in cast aluminium. Right in the vee sits the comparatively short intake manifold. The injection pump itself was mounted to the right (looking from the driver’s compartment) on the right-hand cylinder bank and was driven via a cogged belt from the nose of the crankshaft damper. That involved quite a bit of drawing and manufacture, then there was the detail of throttle linkages and the fuel supply system from a standard tank at constant pressure to engineer. At first there was not even a cold start injector arrangement, but this was sorted before production commenced. Some of the early cars went out with the pumps activated to squirt the injection at 180 degrees opposite the correct time, but the engines still ran and were sorted out soon after launch. Another production injection ‘fix’ was to change the injection camshaft’s fundamental shape and sensitivity. ‘‘Instead of a two dimensional cam, which could only read throttle opening and engine speed, we installed what we call a three-dimensional cam - just like a little Pyramid in appearance - that took account of those factors, plus the vacuum in the intake manifold. This made a great deal of difference to the engine. It was a lot more economical and progressive to drive.’’ The engine itself was modified too. First there was the longer throw crank. Then they also installed high compression pistons to offer a 10:1 cr, a completely unique exhaust system from top to bottom in tubular steel, having only two top manifold pipes (siamese cylinders) leading down onto a single pipe. That ran under the Capri and carried two seperate silencer boxes per side before being dressed up with those square final tail sections: no balance pipe was fitted. The sump was also different, a modified version of that on 2300, but the block

was not modded in the light of that long throw crankshaft. New high compression pistons were shorter and prevented the seemingly inevitable collisions. The camshaft was the sporting one from the hotter 2300GT. The same profile that helped that smaller engine from 108bhp to 125bhp, while the company were waiting to introduce largerengined derivatives earlier in Capri’s life. The result was a useful 165lb. ft. torque at 3500rpm, a fairly flat torque and power curve producing very satisfactory progress, virtually regardless of gear ratio engaged when equipped with the original 3.22:1 final drive. Maximum of 150bhp DIN was Later decalling at the front, allied with matt black bum-

pers on this 1973/74 model.

73

74

Capri delivered at 5800rpm, but again the smoothness of the injected engine masked the sporting profile of the camshaft and it was not a difficult car to drive quickly. Performance figures from the factory were 8.2s to 60mph; 8.6s to 100km/h and a 124mph/200km/h maximum. The original lightweights were not really the subject of much in the way of performance claims. Their job was to get parts like the single rear leaf spring, the 900kg weight and the 2.6-litre plus engine recognised. However, John Fitzpatrick had one such Capri RS, complete with sliding windows (but an injection engine) and I did time that RS at Silverstone once while laying out a quarter-mile for his 1971 Broadspeed UK racing Escort. On the watch we got under 15 1/2 seconds for the standing quarter mile with John driving, and that was quick for the time. At that rate this lightweight Capri would have gobbled 0-60mph in about the 7.7 seconds the factory first claimed for RS Capri. Price? When I drove a road car of the original type in 1971 it retailed at £1600 base in Germany, nearly £2000 with all extras like the push button radio and so on installed, and taxes paid. Some impressions of that Capri, and others I have driven, comprise the last chapter of the book, together with appendices that show the RS2600 specification. The RS2600 in any form was a classic. Later models were easier to live with, but

any one of them is the car to own for the real Capri enthusiast. It also made a tremendous contribution to the Ford record in European Touring Car Racing, paralleling the achievements once more of Mustang which (in Boss 302 guise) was emerging as the pony car to beat in the multi-million dollar Trans Am saloon car races of that period. Like father like son...

Last

models

had

this

flat

steering wheel and updated dash. Note that even a clock and

centre

console

have

crept in, but our intrepid demonstrator still does without a radio!

Chapter 5

“It was killed by complexity in the end, but we got a long way through the programme to develop a 4-wheel-drive Capri for the road.’’ Former Ford Advanced Vehicle Operations supervisory engineer Rod Mansfield remembers the reasons why the Capri, even as a limited edition specialist car from FAVO in Britain, never made it to the showroom. “‘I suppose it really was the wrong image for Capri. In most potential customers’ minds 4-WD was just something you put in for off-road use. There would be few who would pay the premium for the extra safety such a system gives on the road. ““We even had special 4-WD rollers put in at FAVO so that we could measure the Output each Capri was giving before it was delivered, but they were never needed by a production vehicle. From a manufacturing point of view the number of changes needed to the floorpan were probably the biggest argument against the system’’, Mansfield revealed. Altogether 17 prototype Ferguson 4-WD Capris were built, but not all of them were for evaluation as probable production vehicles. At least five were used in competition, one with automatic transmission, but none with the planned anti-skid braking device that Ferguson were also promoting at the time. Then Ford Boreham Rally Engineer Bill Meade explained to me how the Capri 4-WD programme got rolling. ‘‘Our competition manager in those days, Henry Taylor, used to move in the social circles that included people like the directors of GKN and so on. As a former racer himself, Henry knew all about the Moss victory at Aintree with the system. I think it made as big an impression on him as it did on me.”’ When Ford had an immediate requirement for their new Colt-coded Capri to go out and win a TV event as part of the initial launch, those 4-WD thoughts were obviously revived. The Escort had gone straight out at Croft in Northern England and won its first event in front of the cameras almost exactly a year before. Now it was time

Capri

Rare shot of all three works Capri 4-wheel-drives together. Usually it was diffi-

»

er ¥ pours -

ae

a

“st :

*

=

#

cult enough to get one running reliably, but here they

8

are in much the 1-2-3- order

that conquered the Castrolbacked 1971 winter series at

ee

the tight Lincolnshire race +

circuit. Roger Clark leads in the fuel-injected oversize example (Daily Express) pursued by Rod Chapman in the Cars and Car Conversions 3-litre, and Stan Clark

in the Daily Telegraph supported Ford. An awesome sight in a Mini’s mirror as they made up the 4-wd standing start penalty!

CH MC ,

\

aa

A decade before Quattro set the rally world buzzing,

Ford were ploughing up a ‘

televised field in Britain with these Fergusonequipped 4-wd Capris. Here Stan (businessman brother

of Roger) Clark compaigns a 3-litre at Cadwell Park. Once they started exhibiting this much understeer the driver might as well have walked!

to win with Capri in front of the ITV World of Sport cameras. The question was how? The Escort was a pretty obvious winner over loose going from the start, for the Twin Cam engine was part of the programme. On the engine side of the British Capri there were a few handbuilt prototypes with Cosworth BDA 1600 engines, as we have discussed, but when competitions tried them it was obvious that the big-bodied Capri was not the car for this detuned Formula 2 engine. The 3-litre V6 was the only way to go for Capri in Britain.

Four-wheel-drive

John Griffiths, an engineer at Ford Boreham, who includes in his wide competition experience spell at both Weslake Engineering and at Lola (he deserves some credit for RS2600 but is too modest to claim it), told me ‘‘Ford and Weslake had been looking at the V6 engine anyway. That initial work we did was actually the basis of the kits Jeff Uren later distributed under labels like 190 and so on for sale to the public.’ It was clear from the start that the German racing effort would make use of the engines produced in that country, mainly because the block was a more suitable basis to build high power outputs upon. In fact, like the Essex engine when it came to have much higher power extracted, the cylinder blocks were distressed and appropriate strengthening steps had to be taken. In those early days though it was only a case of using mildly ported cylinder heads and re-profiled camshaft from Weslake to allow 160bhp upon the 3-litre Capri’s sporting debut.

Capri’s success

first in

competition

February

1969

with this 4-wd wonder for Roger Clark at Croft. The project was mothballed afterwards while Ford got on with winning the 1970 World Cup Rally with Escort.

engine a So getting power, about the same as a fully modified rally Twin Cam nearly from expect would couple of seasons earlier, but with a lot more torque, as you that ground, the to it double the cubic capacity, was no problem at all. Transmitting and engine front was the traditional Ford drawback. On slippery surfaces a powerful is motion forward a comparatively light back end asked to translate that power into not a good recipe.

77

Capri

78

So a Capri, one of the original press fleet launch vehicles, was sent away to Harry Ferguson Research Ltd at Toll Bar Eng, Coventry to be converted to the Ferguson system. Ford paperwork leads me to suppose that two semi-competition Capris had already had some vigorous running at Bramcote for a rallycross demonstration to Ford main dealers. Demonstrations were also planned to Ford management through the October 1968 Motor Show period. I assume this because of a Ford order to Fergusons dated 18.2.69 asking for a third Capri 1600GT (reg no DEV 542G) to 4-WD with a 3-litre V6 engine, and for the two earlier Capris to be prepared and repaired following those demonstrations. Also on the 18th of February 1969 a formal order was placed for these 4-WD competition Capris. One I have no chassis number for, but the other two were BBEGHS 13871 and BBEGHT 82716. The latter vehicle was the light green Capri that finally appeared during the intervening quiet period in Capri’s 4-WD competition life in the hands of Barry Lee. It had the automatic transmission and anti-skid braking (a feature Clark asked to be removed straight away!)and was road registered as CVX 720G. I remember the car appearing at Lydden Hill, but its performance was disappointing and it seemed unlikely to be sorted out that Summer, especially by an outsider. Roger Clark’s debut of Capri, and its first win, were scored on February 8 1969 at Croft. After that first win the Capri project went into mothballs for a while. Since the Capri did not get its 3-litre engine until later in the year there was some marketing sense in this. The real cause was that Competitions were working absolutely flat out on the World Cup Rally of 1970, which they duly won, and which brought forth the Mexico name for the Escort mainstay of the new FAVO operation. Rallycross wasn’t exactly a summer happening from a TV view point anyway, so when Ford did come to attack the project again it was in readiness for the 1970/71 winter series. This was a prime target, for ITV would be televising the Castrolsponsored series at Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire. The BBC had outbid ITV for the Lydden Hill rights in Kent. Both courses were centred upon a car race track and used as much mud and gradient as possible, with frequent changes of surface a feature of laps in the one mile, or less, region. The cars would be asked to complete three or so flying laps, the 4-WD models starting on a penalty of 10 seconds or so, depending on the organiser.

Boreham

staff man

shows

off the original Capri at the company test track, which used to be a race circuit immediately after WW II.

Four-wheel-drive

What

79

went inside?

The first Capri conversions were done by Ferguson. Then when it came to preparing three

Capris

for

the

1970/71

assault,

Boreham

workshop

foreman

Mick

Jones,

renowned for repartee that would make a Cockney market stall salesman sound like a tongue-tied nun, had put together his own jig to make the necessary front subframes and complete a Capri 4-WD. Working on other projects, as always, it was some time before all three planned cars emerged. The awe-inspiring trio of Roger Clark, brother Stan and the heroic Rod Chapman did see some action together in the New Year. Rod Chapman’s was the last to arrive in Cars and Conversions colours, the others carrying allegiance to the Sunday Express and Sunday Telegraph. And what a sight they made! Three thundering V6 Capris pushing out muck faster than a Thames sewage barge as they lumbered from bump to bump. They terrorised Mini drivers, swaying from their handicap positions to frequently win through splatters of mud from the earlier-starting conventional competitors. Components used in the Ferguson conversion comprised a new front differential and sump assembly in cast aluminium. The front differential was mounted on one side of the sump and the driveshaft passed through the deepest section of the sump. A bellhousing to mate V6 engine and ZF five speed gearbox was naturally needed, but the extraordinary thing was the Ferguson centre differential bolted to the rear of the ZF, a

drive

shaft

taking

power

forward

to

that

front

differential,

while

the

front

differential generally carried a higher numerical final drive than the rear, in this case usually 4.7:1 versus 4.63:1. Ferguson reckoned the weight penalty of these differentials, new sump, tailshaft housing, additional shafts amounted to 1711b. Not bad, but there were other modifications needed for competition Capri too. Incidentally Capri prototype 4-WD machine DEV 542G was weighed and totalled 26041b/1181kg. Most of the work was just to fit the 4-WD in. The front scuttle and floorpan had to be attacked in order to accommodate that centre differential and ZF gearbox. Then 1 1/2 inch bore (12 gauge) steel tubing was made up by Jones and company to act as a replacement front subframe. That also held the rack and pinion steering and the inner end of the track control arms. The chassis front side rails had to be cut away to allow for the new front driveshafts, while the mounting points for the front struts were relocated some | 3/4 in. further upward, the uprights were actually taken from the front-drive Ford Taunus range, Ford’s only front-drive car of the period. New engine mounts were also necessary to fit in with those front shafts. Ferguson had completed nearly 30 prototype Ford Zodiac V6 cars (mainly for the police) by the end of their programme and these were normally set up with the engine torque split 37% front, 63% rear. Very much the same bias was found best in rallycross, but the factory Ford mechanics could alter the bias by adjusting the torque settings on the front differential. Otherwise it was a centre differential job at Ferguson. Suspension centred on the use of Bilstein damping and an additional leaf spring on each side of the usual Capri 3-litre axle. Harder bushes were used for the production axle location rods. Minilite wheels of 13in diameter were used, rim width normally six inches for wet use with Dunlop SP44 knobbly tyres. Or 7 inches wide for dryer conditions with a more race-like cover installed, also from Dunlop, as that was one of the first contracts Stuart Turner negotiated when he arrived as Ford competition

manager for the 1970 season. The brakes were production disc/drum just uprated via harder linings and pads from Mr. Ferodo. Although acceleration was naturally pretty good with over 200bhp now available, top speed in such events was unlikely to be much more than 90mph.

Capri

80

This combined with such short running times meant the braking requirements were not that excessive, though both tracks did feature hairpin corners as part of the menu. A Varley 12 volt lightweight racing battery was fitted for the manful task of turning tuned V6 engines over at very frequent intervals. A rallycross day would normally feature two practice and three main event runs, at least. An ingenious feature which reeks of Bill Meade’s love of boats was the use of a bilge pump to supply anything from 1 1/2 gallons to 5 1/2 gallons per minute of water. This was vital with the Capris starting behind their opponents as a general rule. The water exited at a slower rate either through a multi-jetted tube below the front screen or a jet on the windscreen wiper arm. For absolute panic no-vision situations, a weir atop the screen could be brought into play and a large plastic Jerry can emptied very rapidly through the system to restore vision!

More

V6 Modifications

For part of Roger Clark’s season, and for all the running that brother Stan did with Rod Chapman, the standard 3-litre V6 cubic capacity was adopted. Modifications came from Weslake and were normally built up at Boreham by Terry Hoyle (later he went out on his own as a rally engine builder) and Brian Reeves. The reciprocating components were all balanced and the engines built along blueprint ideal clearance lines. Power increases to a reported 210-220bhp were obtained by using Tecalemit Jackson continuous port injection, larger inlet and exhaust valves and a 300-degree camshaft working in association with an 11.2:1 cr. Days before Christmas 1970 Roger Clark debuted a new demon twist to the modified V6 engine theme. John Griffiths recalled that, whereas some half dozen or so cylinder head sets of normal modified cast iron heads were made up for the rallycross programme, Weslake had their work cut out to make one set of Len Bailey (an English designer on the Ford USA payroll for many years) aluminium heads perform on the V6. These heads really were like the Gurney-Weslake ones for the Ford V8, but naturally needed some work

to adapt them to a rallycross V6 unit! The heads were fed by absolutely straight tube Lucas mechanical fuel-injection. ‘‘The only real difference between the two injection systems from our point of view was that one was a high pressure feed and the other low pressure’, opined Mick Jones. The assembled engine measured 3.1-litres, having the same .60 thou oversize bore as was later used in RS3100. It looked very impressive in the Capri, complete with Can-Am style fuel-injection trumpets that demanded a small house with open back wall be constructed on the Capri’s bonnet! Even bigger valves and the porting allowed by constructing a purpose-built head, put power up to a then impressive 252bhp at 6100rpm. ‘‘In 1980 our Group 1 single carburettor engines give more than that’’, I was caustically reminded at Boreham, but that’s just ten years progress ... Then the Capris were by far the most powerful versions of the 3-litre we had seen, and the German efforts with the racers didn’t yield any more from that kind of literage until the 1970/71 winter development programme in association with Peter Ashcroft/Weslake and Ford Cologne had been completed, as

we see in a separate chapter.

;

81

Four-wheel-drive

Results There was a TV audience of millions to impress at the time. BBC Grandstand could boast figures over 5 million, and that was a big deal for a motor manufacturer. So three of them pitched in and fought it out in front of the cameras, Chrysler relying on the rear drive Imp while Leyland did have very effective 4-WD Minis and an earlier 4-WD Triumph to call on, though the ordinary competition Mini was probably the most effective winner of them all. The six-round Castrol series at Cadwell Park went the way of these strange Capri monsters. At that venue they started on equal footing with the conventional cars most of the time and finished up 1-2-3 in the points standings, despite a very high driveshaft joint failure rate and the habit the engine (particularly Clark’s) had of lapsing onto five cylinders, usually overheating with mud blocking the normal radiator, even though it was supplemented by a second ‘radiator’, and improvised heater core. At Lydden Hill they did start with a larger time penalty, and were to be mostly seen wallowing through liquid mud waves, trying to get on terms with their opponents before a driveshaft failed or the driver was permanently unsighted! Efforts to restrict front wheel movement helped the driveshaft problem but as Mick Jones told me: ‘‘The problem is almost exactly the same as we had in the Fiesta. To try and keep the shaft operating reasonably straight: go outside a limited arc of movement and you’re in dead trouble mate!’’ The handling was difficult. Roger Clark said at the time, ‘‘you don’t go for the same apex as you would with a two wheel drive car. It’s vital to get the car into the right attitude way before a corner. If you can get that right it’s perfect, but more often it’ll be wrong and you’d just wind up with more and more understeer lock. A great car with a lot of traction, but not the easiest drive I’ve had...” The sight of Roger Clark wrestling with these problems a good ten years before Audi announced their Quattro for road and rally use was an arresting one. Whatever happened Roger would fling the bellowing beast at the next corner, playing with the steering and stabbing the throttle in order to try and get some sort of sense out of it. A much more difficult task than he ever really let on at the time ... a fact we could see when Stan subsequently tried to run one privately before passing the remains on to Rod Chapman. He attempted to run a mongrel one based on the remains of all three team cars, that first mount of Chapman’s being converted from Lee’s automatic

version. Now let’s see what sensible people did away from the mud, running the Capri in classic European road races...

ies

Testing Roger Clark’s oversize

3-litre at Boreham, before the covers were fitted

to shroud the Lucas injection from the muddy

and dusty

rallycross elements.

& =O cSOD= O~

“‘They’re not German Capris, they’re European cars that happen to be produced in Germany.’’ Time and again harrassed Ford PR people would emphasise this company line, and it could be racing or production that they were talking about. The British wanted to avoid implying that German-built meant extra quality (the newspapers in Britain were gleefully trying to prove it did!) while the Germans saw the chance of giving the car a serious competition and engineering image, one that its non-RS2600 cousins could bask in, within the technically sophisticated mind of the German customer. The RS2600 gave Ford the weapon they needed to pursue a policy of gaining sporting achievement for a car sold more on a sporty use basis in Europe than in Britain, where the family price/individual styling counted for more. The RS2600 certainly was not the beginning of Cologne-prepared Capris in competition though and nor was touring car racing. The Capri was to feature in rallies before it went racing, partially because the company could see what a fabulous job that branch of the sport had done for Escort ... and partly because Ford of Germany’s initial forays into rallying, particularly the London-Sydney Marathon had convinced them (wrongly as it turned out) that they could be more successful in this branch of motor sport. Perhaps the remark through the years that annoyed Ford of Europe Public Relations Director (later Vice President) Walter Hayes most was the common press label of Cologne Capris, or German-built Capris. At the time the Capri was made in both countries and in competition it really was an Anglo-German effort. Over a period of time the Germans naturally used more and more German-sourced parts in competition, but from start to finish the factory racing Capris carried power units completely designed and originally built in Britain. Maintenance might well be carried out in the German competition department, a small section within the main factory complex at

European competition

March 1969 debut for Capri 2300GT in competition. The event? Internationale Rallye Lyon-Charbonnieres. In Capri number 2 were Dieter Glemser/Klaus Kaiser and they finished fourth overall in the Capri, which still competed as a prototype at that stage.

Koln-Niehl plant. Modifications to the basic idea would be expressed and carried out by the German engineers - like fitting Kugelfischer fuel-injection instead of Lucas to both the Weslake Engineering two valve V6 racing engines, and the last 3.4-litre, fourvalve per cylinder, motors from Cosworth in Northampton. So Hayes was right in spirit. It was a European operation, Anglo-German in reality, but with the Germans playing all the leading roles of management, driving, car preparation and housing the complete operation. Thus the tag of ‘Cologne Capris’ tended to stick, particularly as the Germans needed, from an image point of view, to strike a sympathetic chord in the hearts of the German public. This was almost impossible when BMW came in, just by the very nature of the ownership implied by the Ford name. The roots of the Capri programme can be traced back to January 7, 1968. It was then that Germany got a counterpart to the separate Boreham, Essex, competition department the British had operated since 1963. Picking the headman for the Ford operation proved quite a headache and Jochen Neerpasch, though not the first choice, turned out to be an excellent policy and concept manager. Former Porsche team manager Rico Steinmann, the ADAC motoring/motor sport club leading light Jochen Springer and BMW saloon/Formula 2 driver Hubert Hahne (more recently involved in trying to rescue Lamborghini) were amongst the candidates approached. Present Competitions Director Ford of Europe Michael Kranefuss remembers, “‘I think they went to von Hanstein, well known at Porsche of course. Neerpasch said no to Ford at first, but I think things like the Mitter death at Nurburgring, Scarfiotti being killed and Jochen’s own big accident at Spa, these things changed Jochen’s mind. Also there were the facts that his wife didn’t like racing and - from a Ford point of view making him a really good choice - Jochen’s father had a Ford dealership at Krefeld, not far from Cologne.”’ Neerpasch himself told me that he thought Le Mans, held on September 28 in 1968, owing to the volatile French political situation that year, was the most ironic race he had entered. ‘‘I had in my pocket a Ford contract to manage this new department. On the grid I had my works Porsche sports car, capable of beating Ford at Le Mans, the most important race for publicity in the calendar!’’ Jochen was in his 28th year, fractionally older than Stuart Turner was when he got an equivalent post managing

83

Capri

84

BMC cars in the early sixties ... Neerpasch actually finished third in a troubled ride shared with Rolf Stommelen, so any embarrassment with his future employers was spared at the 1968 edition of Le Mans. Though Neerpasch’s father was in the motor trade with Ford it was not with parental blessing, or a Ford, that Jochen began his sporting career. Neerpasch, secretly, started racing with a Lloyd saloon. His cover was blown when Borgward gave Neerpasch junior a cup for his success in the car! ‘‘My father was furious’’, Neerpasch recalled. Father retaliated by confiscating the car! Nothing daunted the young Neerpasch carried on and, by 1964, he had attracted sufficient recognition of his growing ability to run a Porsche Carrera in long distance events. The 1965 season brough a bigger effort, running his own team in association with Karl von Wendt. They had two Lotus 35 Formula three cars (‘‘I never felt happy being able to see the front wheels’’, Jochen commented), a Shelby Mustang V8 and a sports racing Lotus Elan. It was in this period that Kranefuss and Neerpasch began to get to know each other better, Kranefuss going on to run an aborted racing circuit venture for German aristocrat von Wendt. The 1966-68 seasons included more potent machinery for Neerpasch, including outings in the Essex Wire GT40s (then managed by John Wyer) and the Porsche Systems Engineering factory sports cars. Altogether he did 24 races for Porsche, finishing in all but three races, and winning Daytona when paired with Vic Elford early in 1968. By 1980 Vic Elford was a manager in motorsport for VW-Audi and he remembered Neerpasch’s driving concisely for me in the Brands Hatch Paddock, ‘‘he was pretty good and getting better. I enjoyed driving with Jochen: he was neat and quick, but I think that accident at Spa altered him. I don’t remember sharing with him much after Sebring’s 12 hours.”’ Neerpasch and Elford finished second at Sebring in the 2.2-litre Porsche, so it looked as though it would be a good year for Neerpasch. In late May he was reunited with Elford as a partner in the eight-cylinder Porsche 908 for the World Championship Spa 1000kms. In pouring rain on the 34th lap, Neerpasch was trying to hold off the advancing Gulf Ford GT40s, his Porsche then fourth overall. ‘‘At the Malmedy junction the Porsche suddenly snapped sideways and went into a lurid spin, bouncing off banks and markers and injuring poor Neerpasch quite badly ...’’ in the words of MOTOR SPORT’s race reporter Denis Jenkinson. He was still in pain when he raced at Le Mans in September, but ahead lay a new career which would take touring car racing into a very sophisticated new era.

In at the Start Mike Kranefuss joined Jochen’s invitation to be his deputy but perhaps the key man, looking back objectively, was Martin Braungart. An engineering graduate from Stuttgart, Braungart’s motor sport keenness had taken him from a safe engineering job at Mercedes-Benz into the role of helping Neerpasch establish the new Ford competitions department. With a typical broad grin displayed beneath the Braungart trademark of tinted spectacles he told me once, ‘‘yes I could have been a respectable engineer at Mercedes! But even when I was studying, I was a co-driver in their factory team at Mercedes, so it was easy to see the way I would go ...”’ Braungart would concentrate initially on the car itself, leaving engine development to Weslake at Rye in Sussex, who were involved right from the start of Capri

European competition

85

development (the Escort was developed in much the same way, but this time the engine engineering came from Cosworth, or other tuners using their parts). However, things got so tough in the early days of Capri competition life that Martin was frequently to be seen lending a hand on engines, troubled engines, before they got things right ... Otto Stulle was the official engine man in the department. Looking back on the respected Otto’s role in 1980 Kranefuss said: ‘‘Stulle was a fantastic engine man, with all the right qualifications. He would do the job right, and had come to us from BMW, where he was a man with a terrific reputation for doing things properly. Unfortunately he never did get on with Weslake. Finally we had to do something about it.”’

The First Steps What they did we shall see later, meanwhile back to the first outings of the fledgling department. Ford Germany records start at September 1968 with Stommelen the only survivor of four Ford Escorts powered by engines as various as the FVC, Twin Cam Lotus and Broadspeed 1300. That was for the ADAC 500kms and Stommelen brought the little Escort home ninth overall in a field that included sports racing cars. The Ford was second in class in this tough Nurburgring thrash. The department did not enter Alfred Burckhardt/Heinz Zertani in a 20M RS saloon for the International Tour d’Europe, but they prepared the car, which had the 2300 V6 motor installed and were rewarded with an outright victory. That was in September 1968 too; less than two months later they would be setting out in the most publicised long distance event of them all, the London-Sydney Marathon. They entered three 20M RS Taunus saloons, Martin Braungart joining Dieter Glemser (later Capri regular and rose grower when not racing), who had also driven for Mercedes in rallies. Simo Lampinen/Gilbert Staepelaere were in another of the 150bhp saloons, which featured Weslake cylinder head modifications and modified breathing, inspired by the same source. Kranefuss remembered how inexperienced he and the team were. ‘‘I was meant to be the organisational bloke and Jochen the politician. The London-Sydney was a nightmare for me. I had no idea how the Ford systems worked and yet I must put tons and tons of equipment all over the World to support our three cars: I had no idea how to even order the stuff! Bill Barnet at Boreham spent a lot of time helping me out, but I would have quit right there if I had known what was involved ...!”’ Although the event finished with Hillman Hunter winning, the German team did get their share of glory: Lampinen the Finn and, many times Belgian National Champion, Staepelaere holding second place to Roger Clark/Ove Andersson’s Cortina Twin Cam across Europe, Ford Cologne lost the lead to drop into 16th place after two crashes in Australia. The team’s third car - for Kleint (father of 1979 European Champion Jochi) and Klapproth - was seventh. Ambitious plans were laid and materialised in 1969. There would be Escort Twin Cams in the German National Championship; the Taunus 20M RS would go to Africa to try and win the Safari. ‘‘We knew this new Capri, called ‘Colt’ before the launch,

would have a competition programme,’’ Kranefuss confirmed. They were not really too sure what they would do with Capri at Britain had got out on TV straight after the launch and won a rallycross version. In Cologne their thoughts were on trying the car in racing and the start, with rallying the priority, albeit tarmac rallying. For that season the 2300GT Capri would be the base and two

first. Ford in with a 4-WD rallying from K-HX

series

Capri

Another cessful

:

Pe

one

with Glemser swinging the fat-wheeled Capri along in

é

fine style. Today these rim widths are found on ordi-

co

——

view of that sucEuropean debut

a we wm

nary road-going Capris. Note pronounced flare given to wheel arches.

registered Fords were ready for the Internationale Rallye Lyon/Charbonnieres Stuttgart/Solitude on March 14/15, 1969. Even while these Capris were being prepared a little testing was going on so that the Taunus 20M RS could be used on the Safari that year, two such cars being entered in 1969. Jochen Neerpasch had always been a Francophile, a leaning that saw him, in later life, attempt managing a French GP outfit, and it seemed his bias was good for the Capri. Unhomologated it started the Lyons-Charbonnieres as a prototype against far quicker machinery, yet the two Capris came to the finish in fourth and seventh places. Autosport in England greeted the news with a short summary that included the words ... ‘Dieter Glemser giving the German version of the Capri an auspicious debut ...’’ Glemser was partnered by Klaus Kaiser on the Capri’s international debut, the French crew of Jean Francois Piot/Jean Todt taking the seventh place. The 2293cc Capris had the Weslake modifications that had first been proved in the Taunus, but with better fuel than was available on the London-Sydney, horsepower was up to a claimed 170, peaking at 6500rpm, which was quite high up the rpm-range for that engine. A battery of three twin-choke Solex-Zenith downdraught carburettors nestled in the engine vee and compression ratio of 10:1 was specified. The classic modifications were pretty simple. Most obvious was a gentle flaring of the standard body panels to accommodate 7-inch wide Minilite wheels at the rear, and similar flares at the front to accommodate a 6in. version of the magnesium alloy road wheels. Dampers were the gas-filled Bilstein from the start and Cibie supplied the four lamps that were hung around the bumperless (that really made it a prototype!) Ford. Finished in silver and grey and carrying small Castrol stickers, the Capri weighed about 900kg/1985lb and should have been capable of close to 130mph, given the right

European competition

Dieter Glemser/Tim Schenken and Jean Francois Piot had

little

joy

from

the

works 2300GT in August 1969’s Marathon de la Route, a head gasket failure leading to retirement. Still, a little knowledge of Nurburgring was gained.

gearing. Acceleration would probably have been in the 7 seconds bracket to sprint from rest to 60mph. While Escorts (one ironically driven by Hubert Hahne) continued to notch up points in the German championship, it was only a month or so later the German department faced another severe, and very public, examination of their abilities. For the 1969 East African Safari Rally they had Robin Hillyar/Jock Aird filling the role of experienced locals (until 1972 the event was not won by an overseas crew) with Bengt Soderstrom/Gunnar Palm the Swedish flyers. The Swedish crew led and generally played their role as hares extremely well, but a speedy rear end suspension/axle repair left the event to Hillyar/Aird. It was a terrific victory and hard to credit properly today. Amongst the rally cognoscenti ,the Safari was the test. Any manufacturer who won it was worthy of ultimate respect: one of the reasons why the Japanese have always taken it seriously, for the Safari does a lot for car reputation in the showroom. “We were really fortunate,’’ opined Kranefuss, continuing, “‘we had done very little practice, it was a tough test for Weslake and ourselves, using special pistons and things like that in those conditions. Sheer luck.’’ It led Ford to thinking how much better Capris would be for the job in 1970. It was August 1969 before the Capri was used again, Glemser and Piot sharing with up-and-coming Tim Schenken in the 84 hour Marathon de la Route.A survivor of the old Sofia Liege Rally turned into a cross between a race and a rally of endurance running around the Nurburgring, with a short road link back to the Belgian riverside town of Liege to revive memories of former glories. There was no glory for Ford. The Capri expired with head gasket failure.

87

Capri

88

For the Tour de France Neerpasch agreed whole-hearted support and sent three 2300GT

Capris along.

(904kg)

and

The

same

three drivers

as for the Marathon,

but the cars’

engines were uprated to 10.5:1 cr, had Lucas fuel-injection and the benefit of a Summer-long Weslake development programme to make the most of camshaft profile and an exhaust system suitable for this race circuit and hillclimb-based event. The result was a claimed 192bhp at 7200rpm. Competition Capris now weighed a little more had 7 inch rim widths,

though

the

13in. standard

diameter

of wheel

remained for a long time into the development programme.

Jean Francois Piot lifts a front wheel in September 1969’s Tour de France. Piot was paired with the ubiquious French co-driver Jean Todt. This 2300GT was a class winner overall.

and _ sixth

Only one of the Group 5 (still not homologated, development still underway) Capris made it to the finish of this 14th Internationale Tour de France. Piot was sixth overall, which wasn’t a bad performance at all in an event where sports racing cars were allowed to lash on a set of number plates and participate! You don’t believe me? One year the most beautifully noisy racers I can recall, the Matra V12 sports cars, were allowed to take part, and win, complete with co-drivers. Of the other two Capris Schenken went out with dirt jamming the fuel-injection of the car he shared with Klappworth, while Glemser/Kaiser went out after leaving the Chamrousse hillclimb the expensive way!

Twin,

road-legal,

exhausts

were featured on the 1969 Tour de France 2300GT driven by Piot. Car was prepared and supported by Cologne with a preview of the BP support that would help Ford France’s competition progress in later years, when they even managed to run the mid-

engined GT 70.

European competition

89

Another French-ruled rally, but this time on the rugged island of Corsica, was next on the itinerary for Capri development. For the first time the 2.6-litre engine was used, the car entered in the liberal Group 6 prototype class. The engine had been developed along much the same lines as the 2.3 V6, having a 10.5:1 cr and Lucas fuel-injecti on, but peak power was at ‘only’ 6000rpm, showing how much softer a camshaft profile could be made with even this small amount of extra capacity. Particularly important in Corsica, as the event is run at a murderous pace, whether linking section or actual competition. The terrain consists primarily of myriad slow corners. Low speed acceleration is therefore an essential. Considering how long the Capri had been under development the result was extremely encouraging. As they had done so well in the Tour de France, Piot/Todt were awarded the Corsican drive. They came back with third overall: as in the oui the overall winner was Gerard Larrousse. =

Rouen

les

Essarts

on

er

the

1969 Tour de France and the Piot Capri steals a march on some notable Porsche, and BMW Chevrolet opposition!

There had been a fair amount amount of fortune in the infant Ford Germany programme. In the 1969 season they were able to claim 21 wins from 23 starts, including that Safari victory. Dieter Glemser had won the German Racing Championship, with team-mate Gerhard Schuler Vice Champion, and that is where most of these wins came from, the total reflecting class victories as well. For the Capri steady progress had been made. The 2.6-litre engine was the obvious one to build on. Henry Taylor had left Ford at Boreham, the former GP driver turned Ford Competitions Manager setting up the embryo Ford Advanced Vehicle Operation, the division that would be responsible for selling the public high performance cars and

parts. Taylor visited Cologne several times in 1969 and was aware of their needs. Braungart knew Capri’s future, based on what he saw happening in saloon car racing and on what could be done by building a special series Capri for acceptance into international competition. They were all sure they could win in racing — and that a suitable Capri could be built for the Safari. Kranefuss recalled for me, ‘‘we bounced our ideas off Walter (Hayes — J.W.). It was not like the endless marketing discussion you have today. You simply said that you wanted to build a competition car and that was that, Walter just said, ‘you can have whatever you want’, and we got it.”’ What they wanted was an over 2'-litre car, partly because they would need that much muscle to win (the eventual target was a 3-litre V6 at this stage) and partly to

separate themselves from the class that contained the then-supreme 2-litre cars from outfits like Alfa Romeo

and BMW

(actually a turbo) and Porsche’s

famed 911.

Capri

90 Ambitious

1970

November 26 1969, and Jochen Neerpasch announced to a select audience in the Schneeferner Haus the 1969 results (referring to ‘‘Unsere K6dlner Escorts ...!’’) and that the team would be taking on all rounds of the 1970 European Touring Car Championship. In addition to the 11 rounds stretching from England in the West to Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain, the Cologne team would also tackle the East African Safari Rally, both efforts calling for three Capris to be fielded. For the Safari there was the additional need for practice cars. Quite a programme, and they were later to pick up an exciting new German driver to run in the hillclimb championship. Without that man the glory years would not have been quite so glorious and subsequent honourable defeats would have been disgraceful routs. A former merchant seaman who competed in his first event in 1968, Jochen Mass was then 21 years of age. The Munich-born (which was to be ironic) Mass performed so well in hillclimbs with Alfa Romeo and racing with Schnitzer BMW 2002s that Ford were pretty well forced to take him into account. The racing programme, again centred on the Capri 2300GT, which Neerpasch was able to boast had been testing at Zandvoort, Holland, for a week to find the best saloon car drivers. Significantly he started with the all-girl pairing of Hannelore Werner/Yvette Fontaine. Hannelore was to go into history as the first woman to win an international Formula 2 race (around the Nurburgring in a March) while Yvette was a very competent driver who had won the Belgian Championship and was a generally gritty racer. The real aces were Glemser, former Formula 3 star Manfred Mohr, the two Germans joined by Cologne’s Rolf Stommelen later in the season, though this wasn’t announced that November night. Finnish rally star Rauno Aaltonen was going through his saloon car racing period at the time and he was announced and performed as regular Capri racer and rallyist. In fact Aaltonen and Glemser would drive Capris in racing and rallying, both entered for the Safari and as part of another three-Capri assault on the Tour de France. So there it was, the Grand Plan. What went wrong?

‘*Anyway, 1970 was a complete disaster for us’’, Kranefuss summarised with brutal precision. ‘‘The Safari took up so much of our time. January, February, we spend it all testing these cars. The Press Department took 15 guys to Africa to watch us win . watch what went wrong unfortunately! “‘The problem was with the Kugelfischer injection. It was a mechanical system without compensation for altitude, no valving to do this job.’’ This was certainly an important contributory problem but the cars, complete with some lightweight panels, suffered from the kind of punishment that this kind of long distance African event can inflict. In 1970 the East African Safari attracted 91 starters and just 19 finished the course, Kenyan domiciled Bavarian Edgar Hermann taking Datsun’s first victory in the capital, but retaining Uganda’s Starting and finishing in Kampala, event. and is, a tough one to was, event The Kenya. administrative headquarters in Nairobi, service is carried out, rally Safari way follow without an aeroplane. That is exactly the aeroplanes to cover of fleets are there adding to the traditional estate car/van ‘barges’, from dusty thunder of whisper warning the varied terrain. Ground that can change at a speed tracks to a wet, red, morass. First Capri away was car 3 on the entry list for Rauno Aaltonen/Peter Huth. They went well on the early stages and showed that all that testing had not been a waste of time, but finally retired with the main bearings grumbling in the engine after an oil line had been damaged. Though they won in 1969, Robin Hillyar and Jock Aird started at 15 in the Ford Deutschland Capri 2300GT, and had a lot of troubles. Amongst them, a broken rear leaf spring’ and extensive valve gear failures, including a broken valve spring and cam follower. Finally mud got into the clutch housing and prevented the clutch from engaging. This was only discovered after an abortive gearbox change had

Capri

92

PTA yy

As close to a racing road Capri as the factory ever produced! The 2300GT at pre-1970 season play on the Hockenheim autodrome. Note the absence of wheel arch extensions and spoilers.

The 1970 season was an ambitious one! Here Glemser takes time off for some

publicity co-driving on Safari with the Capri registration that Piot used 1969 Tour de France.

failed to solve the lack of drive! Capri number 25 went to Glemser and Klaus Kaiser, but it brought them no better luck, for they finally had transmission failure too - a propellor shaft breaking before the gearbox. The lighter and faster Capri had been chosen over the 20M RS because of its speed in pre-Christmas testing, but unfortunately displayed nothing like the reliability of the °69 winner, despite the considerable engineering effort that went into these Fords, Power-wise they may have been a little too highly rated at the same 190 plus bhp trim

on

Rallying and Racing

Even prayer was not going to give Ford the 1970 Safari with Capri! In 1969 the company had won with

Taunus, but none of the Capris finished this edition of the demanding East African event.

used in Corsica, but Aaltonen showed that they certainly had the speed by leading the early stages before the rally reached Nairobi. Martin Braungart had been responsible for the preparation of the Capris, which now adopted the ZF five-speed gearbox that had proved so useful in the rallying Escort: heavy but strong. Since Braungart learnt his wide-ranging English vocabulary primarily by the time spent at Boreham building an Escort, where he had to ask the stores for each part in English, we can be sure that any lessons learnt in Britain were known in Germany ... **So the Safari took up much of our time’’, continued Kranefuss. ‘‘The trouble was we had little time to make the cars correct for the European Championship, our

Glemser/Kaiser in their proper, number 25, compe-

tition Capri for 1970 Safari. The team showed promise, but never went back to

Safari

again,

leaving

the

event for Ford of Britain to tackle with successful Escorts in the seventies.

first big effort at that race series.”’ That was painfully true, for the Capris had to make their debut on March 15 at Monza in Italy, just a few weeks before the Safari expedition. However, Braungart on the chassis side, and the uneasy alliance of Stulle in Cologne and Weslake in England, produced quite a convincing racing Capri. The silver body with contrasting blue bonnet and upper paintwork had a fair job covering new Limmer alloy roadwheels, the complex split rim jobs with nine inch tread width at the

93

Capri

Original racing wheels and arches of 1970 season.

front and eleven inches at the rear, where a small arch was constructed from just above that distinctive body crease. Tyres were usually Dunlop, throughout the Cologne factory Capri’s life, save when Goodyear-contracted Jackie Stewart drove, and for a couple of forays on Firestone. At the front the Capris started to grow their first spoilers, but they grew around two oil coolers in the centre for the first season. The suspension and braking were suitably uprated for a substantial increase in power was anticipated, and the races were all several hours long, at least.

Interesting period in Capri development as the early 1970 season car appears, still road-registered, but with pop-rivetted wheelarch

extensions

and _ vestigial

spoiler plates around the oil coolers.

Rallyi i allying and Racing

The engine shop at Ford Cologne with the V6s undergoing routine rebuilds. The only problem was that they were routine pre-1971 ...!

rarely

95

96

Capri By the time Ford started racing the 2300GT, the RS2600 was to make its debut at the Geneva salon. It would take time before Ford could even begin to put that into production and apply for the necessary homologation recognition of 1000 vehicles made. So the 2300GT motor was the recipient of some extra work. Weslake came up with some aluminium heads with the usual Harry Weslake-patented combustion chamber shape, based on principles that had been used with benefit by many motor manufacturers, including Ford when the Gurney-Weslake aluminium heads were designed for Mustang, and other machines that made use of the 4.7-litre Ford V8. The bore of the

2.3 was increased so that capacity grew from 2293cc to nearly 2.4-litres (2397cc). It is the author’s opinion that it was Otto Stulle at Cologne who specified that Kugelfischer fuel-injection be used, instead of the Lucas system. Claimed output was 230bhp, but ‘‘more like 200bhp on our test bed’’, was the remark attributed to one Cologne manager looking back on the 1970 season. One can see some basis for that remark. The Capris probably weighed in the region of 20721b/940kg with the European Championship rivals from Alfa Romeo in 2-litre guise tipping the scales at 2016/914kg. Yet the Alfas definitely had the legs of the Capri, partly through continuous development during the sixties, but also were embarrassingly quick in a straight line on ‘only’ a claimed 205 Italian bhp. Feel of the seventies opposition: the three Capris take off behind Brian Muir’s 5.0 Chevrolet Camaro Z-28 and

amongst

the works

Auto-

delta Alfas that won the 1970 ETC title. Also in the picture one of the earliest works Mazda rotaries and

Alpina BMW 2800CS (behind the slowest Capri!) and Gerry Viva GT.

Marshall’s

The Season A trio of Capris duly reported for duty at Monza, though somewhat reluctant to fire up for the 4 hour event, which was held on the Grand Prix road circuit as the banking was affected by late season snowfalls! In practice the Capris had been struggling to get on the pace. Pole position went to Spartaco Dini’s Autodelta factory Alfa GTAm with Im 49.5s, with Holland’s Alfa ace Toine Hezemans 0.3s adrift, two more Alfas, and then Glemser on 1m SRASe

sharing the third row of the starting grid with Alex Soler-Roig/Dr Helmut Marko’s Alpina BMW 2800 CS.

From the start the Alfas romped away, but gradually both the BMW and the Ford, driven as forcefully as ever by the under-rated Mohr, closed in. After just three laps we lost the third Capri, driven by Fontaine: official retirement reason was ignition

2.3

Rallying and Racing

97

problems, but the factory simply list it as a broken engine in their records! The same problem

sidelined Glemser

and

French

formula

car

racer

Francois

Mazet.

Mohr,

paired with Hannelore Werner, was moving up to fourth, behind three Alfas at the close of the first hour. The Alpina BMW was out and things looked better, but as Mohr and Facetti (Alfa) fought for positions at Lesmo, they touched and the Ford was dealt an almighty swipe in the door by Dini. Facetti kept his second place and the Ford resumed in third spot after a bit of quick rally-style door patching! Facetti then had trouble with the Alfa and the Mohr/Werner Capri moved up to second, staying there to the end, when it had covered 121 laps/432 miles averaging 97.7mph. They were a lap down on the winning Alfa of Toine Hezemans, the man destined to be champion driver in 1970, though Alfa lost the manufacturers’ title to Alpina BMW. In the European championship it was a disastrous year. The Capris won top marks for their presentation and Jochen Neerpasch impressed everyone as the smooth personification of the modern team manager cum corporate businessman. Few points were being gathered though. In the Austrian Championship round none of the three Capris finished.

Rolf Stommelen smiles at July 1970’s edition of Germany’s most prestigious saloon car race, the 6 hours

at Nurburgring. Despite the now full-width front spoiler plates and a maximum three-Capri effort from the factory, none of the silver and blue 2.4-litre GTs finished.

The next Championship round was Budapest and Glemser salvaged a second was place, but that was about it in terms of ‘honourable’ championship placings. There , a fifth for Glemser and Mohr at Brno, Czechoslovakia, and fifth again at Silverstone team German any for moment worst The sickness. motor contracted but the two Fords Then 6 comes at the heavily attended annual July thrash around the Nurburgring. a home of front in car unreliable an have you if is that Worst 4. hours, since reduced to 80,000. above crowd that can easily number

Capri

98

That’s just what happened to Ford that season. They turned out a full team of three Capris for Mohr/Aaltonen, Glemser/Stommelen and Werner/Fontaine. None finished ... beside their retirements was simply posted a cryptic note that the engines had broken. Not surprisingly they didn’t go to the seventh European Championship event. That would have been the Spa-Francorchamps 24 hour endurance race!

; GD

Stommelen again, but this time guiding the 2300GT around Club Corner, Silverstone, on the September 1970 debut of the factory Capris in Britain. Rolf didn’t finish but Glemser and Mohr were fifth in the only one of three works Fords to finish.

At Zandvoort in Holland for the penultimate Championship round Jochen Mass was entered for the first time in the series by Ford. His reward was for some outstanding performances in the European hillclimb Championship in another 2300GT

Capri, performances that netted him fourth overall in the title hunt and second in the touring car class. However, Zandvoort was not to see Mass start after practice trouble. Glemser drove a hero’s race in amongst the three leading Alfas for part of the distance, but it was noticeable that he was really throwing the car sideways at spots where the Alfas were trundling round, wheels on the ground and all traction and steering responses normal. Even more galling, the Alfas were such tatty looking cars, you couldn’t believe they would pass an MOT test, let alone thrash the smart Capris! Glemser managed seventh overall after unsurprising tyre troubles, Zanvoort’s surface being capable of catching anyone out. Though Mass had done well it was about the only bright spot in a very dismal season. Even on the Tour de France there was not a finish to record from the three Capris that started, nor did either of the two Capris in the final European round get to the finish. Something had to be done ...

Rallying and Racing

Back and side views of the works cars at Silverstone demonstrates

number

plates

used, and that tions, were still tively minor.

that

were

rear

still

modificacompara-

99

Formula jor success Something was already being done. The Capri RS2600 had progressed from a show car with a beautifully mocked-up engine to an homologated reality on October 1, 1970. That gave Competitions a 2637cc fuel-injected base to build upon. More important it gave them the right to use lightweight body panels and perspex side and rear glass, right down to an overall weight of 1984.5lb/900kg. Henry Taylor had asked Ford Competitions in Germany what kind of car they wanted built and Braungart with the rest of the team drew up the outline of the racing machine that would grow from it: 900kg, a potential to stretch to 3-litres and 110bhp per litre. The base was provided. By October 1970 the RS2600 was homologated, Ford put

It was all about people, and

motivating them. Suitwearing management, left to right in foreground are Michael Kranefuss, Jochen Neerpasch, Martin Braungart and Peter Ashcroft. Behind are two of the 1971 season RS2600s and the exBroadspeed Escort RS1600. Driver line up on the cars (L to R) Roig,

is: Glemser, SolerFitzpatrick, Mazet,

Mass and Marko. There are 18 other staff members in the picture. The support of Weslake in Britain on the engine side also needs to be taken into consideration!

1971/72 European Championship

101

together about 20 of the ultra-lightweight models: five at 880kg, the average for the remainder 900kg and the heaviest 920kg. So far as I know the ‘production’ RS2600 Capri was never able to actually get down to this weight: at its lightest, in 1971, it was still 88lb/40kg over the top! In November 1970 Peter Ashcroft arrived at Cologne. The Lancastrian with a hawk-like face and formidable frame was a no-nonsense engine builder. Best known in Britain for his reliable and nice to drive Lotus Ford Twin Cam engines, and subsequent Cosworth BDAs, all produced as part of his duties in charge of the Boreham engine assembly area. Peter’s staff at Boreham were David Wood and Terry Hoyle, who subsequently went on to make their own reputations in engineering, showing the kind of standard Ashcroft was reaching. Ashcroft’s six month spell at Cologne, and a subsequent trip at the end of 1971 to help with preparations for the 1972 season, were the stuff of which legends are created. He spoke not a word of German. He was English and meant to sort out the problems the Germans felt had been created by an English company in a German location. They could always tell where he was, cigarette smoke curling up past the Rauchen Verboten signs with cheerful impunity... .! a

arlboro

All that background

a ass se‘a

Marlboro

serena

Marlboro

Marlboro

_—

Marlboro

work

reached a peak at Jarama in

1972 putting this sextet in the first three places. Grinning in the rain (L to R) are: Heyer, Birrell, Soler-Roig, Larrousse, Mass and

Glemser. The Capri won the ETC Driver’s Championship for Mass and Glemser in 1971 and 1972 and lost few Championship rounds.

Despite the handicaps the troubleshooting exercise worked. seem Ashcroft remembered the period with affection, even in 1980, and the reason of position the in been straightforward enough: Martin Braungart. Martin had d understoo himself working in a foreign competitions department, trying to make competrer’s manufactu against the normal frantic atmosphere that characterises a top ition department at full stretch.

M

Capri

102

Now there was a big problem to sort out. How to make the jump toward 3-litres, improve on the dismal reliability record, and increase the power? Stulle knew his business back to front, and the correct theoretical way to do things, but stepped aside for this practical Englishman, who had really worked his way up from the shop floor the hard way.

Main

workshop

area

at

Cologne in 1971. It was still much the same nine years later, though not an official competition department.

Ashcroft recalled, ‘‘the whole thing had been a succession of disasters (actually there have been bigger ones in the annals of touring car racing since! - J.W.) and the engines were just breaking up inside. Jochen Neerpasch was ready to resign. He called up Turner, (Stuart, then Ford Competition Manager in Britain) and Turner called me out of the engine shop at Boreham. ‘Catch the next plane’, or words to that effect was what I was told, and that’s exactly what I did, living in a company flat for the next six months or so. ‘“‘When I got there they were running the engine at about 2.7-litres with a wet sump. There were blocks with holes in ’em and heads, heads! You name it and there was trouble with it! ‘*T had met up with Martin Braungart when he came out to UK to build that Escort and I immediately found that I got on well with him. We had to produce a race winner capable of holding its pace over 4 hours by the following March, when Monza opened the series again. ‘‘T looked at the engine. Steel rods, dry sump and a new steel crankshaft were needed for reliability, I reckoned.’’ Most important of Peter’s discoveries was that the bottom end of the engine was flexing, a far more solid cast iron cylinder block was needed. Filling a sample block with plasticine he was able to show how the casting should be done. Subsequently that basic cylinder block design became part of production technology and is the basis of the Arizona 2.8-litre V6 fitted at first to Federal Capris and Mustangs, before it gained wide acceptance as a power unit for the Granada. So racing certainly has helped the breed enormously in this case! Where Ashcroft first earned admiration and respect was when he dared to question an absolute fundamental of the V6 engine. Not because he questioned it, that obviously ruffled a few feathers, but because he was not too proud to ask another

engineer what the solution was. Kranefuss looked back wistfully at the period, ‘‘I can still see Peter talking on the

1971/72 European Championship telephone to Keith Duckworth at Cosworth on how to balance a six cylinder crankshaft. That was the difference between engineers from Germany and those from Britain to me. When an English engineer is in the shit, he talks to somebody to get help: that’s not so common here.”’ Ashcroft takes up the story, ‘‘the crankshaft design was simply wrong. The rocking couple, the way the crankshaft throws were arranged was totally out, so that the engine was literally shaking itself apart. I wanted to be sure, so I called Keith and talked the whole thing out. In conjunction with Weslake a new steel crank was manufactured that got over this rocking couple problem. The four main bearings were tied down with the stronger caps too, though there was some argument over whether they should be in the same materials as the crankshaft. *“We did a number of other modifications to increase power and engine response. The flywheel in steel was lighter than before. The enlarged valves let the motor, in conjunction with some further cam development and re-calibrated injection, reach 7500rpm. We started off around 260bhp for the season and ran a variety of Mahle piston compression ratios, maybe down to 10.5:1 for a long race like Spa, but 11:1 and more by the time we were searching for the target of over 300bhp.”’ The 69mm short stroke stayed constant throughout the Capri’s racing life with the German V6 engine, but the bore size was increased even in 1971. The engine started the year at 94mm bore and grew another millimetre to produce 2940cc instead of 2873cc. Thus both units could be referred to as 2.9 litres, a final stretch taking it almost exactly to 3-litres, but not until well after the 1971 season we are discussing. Power development started at ‘‘about 27S5bhp’’, in Peter Ashcroft’s words, ‘‘and there had been about 220bhp when we started the redevelopment programme, so we were all pretty pleased.’ There was even better cause to celebrate by the end of the year, for the slightly enlarged engines were offering 280/28Sbhp with a limit of 7500rpm and a peak around 7200/7300 revs: maximum torque was at 5400rpm and this, combined with the low weight, contributed to the acceleration that Jochen Mass displayed to Auto Motor und Sport readers at the close of the season. From rest to 60mph took fractionally under 5 seconds and the top speed was found to be close to 160mph. More important, theoretically, was that the engine should now stay together, though there was to be one little hiccup before that state of affairs arrived. Reliability was then accepted as a Capri right for the best part of two seasons.

Body Beautiful, Chassis Effective Braungart, apart from being ‘he man to maintain morale during that difficult winter, had been busy improving the Capri’s other abilities. A lot of lessons from the racing Escorts were applied to its big V6 cousin. The body was stretched over ever-wider wheels with beautifully blended-in arches: a small front spoiler applied. The suspension changed radically. Bilstein damping, of course, but the fundamental approach was altered. As a BMW tuner told me years later, ‘‘Braungart revolutionised our way of going touring car racing. Originally we would just modify a road car, even drive it to a circuit and then change over to racing wheels and tyres. We were doing that with BMWs until very late in the sixties. Now the idea was to make a racing car, fabricating suspension parts and making formula car brakes do the work. It was a new sport for us, and Ford

took their chance to lead at this time.”’

103

Capri

UNIROVAL REIFEN ABP UNIRDVAL pe)

/

1 SS

TOA:

Pitwork at Nurburgring 6 hours with Braungart and Neerpasch looking on as the high-rigged storage tank dumps fuel into the widenecked racing tank orifice. Note smooth incorporation of

wheelarches

season; plates badge — are

names.

So the front MacPherson strut principle stayed, as it had to by regulations, but there were aluminium hubs carrying big ventilated front disc brakes, the strut located by a lower compression strut that prevented the whole unit ‘walking’ under fierce braking. At the rear a single leaf spring paid homage to the regulations, but the work was done by a vertical telescopic shock absorber and coil spring mounted on top of the axle. New hubs were necessary here too, for the axle carried rear disc brakes in place of the road car’s rear drums. The axle was competently located by four parallel torque reaction arms and a Watts linkage, all of tubular aluminium and fabricated in Cologne. So too were the dry sump oil tanks. Peter Ashcroft explained, ‘‘Martin had most of the fabrication done by an outfit called Zonner in Cologne to his designs. We originally put the oil tank under the front wing with a Weaver external pump and single scavenge action. I made up my own sump in steel with the same kind of baffling arrangements as we used in the BDA Escort with a central trough, centre pick up and a great big filter.’’ The oil tank soon found its way to the rear of the car in the interests of better weight distribution, even though that inevitably meant running long oil lines front to back. Another fundamental change that anyone with sharp eyes could see was that the engine was lowered within the engine bay and moved rearward. This practice, particularly valid in taking advantage of dry sump lubrication’s shallower sump, shifts the engine’s not inconsiderable mass into a position more favourable for good handling, lowering the centre of gravity and changing the nose-heavy bias that a front engine, rear drive car like the Capri must inevitably possess. .

by

1971

above RS mechanics’

1971/72 European Championship

105 OO

Coullometat Con meow hel Cantiveniat Cutlecntal

m . :

In 1971 this was the story!

Stommelen outdrags the winning Capri at the July Nurburgring 6 hours, supported by the Fitzpatrick/ Mass Escort RS and an enormous supporting field.

It was time for all that work to be tested. Drivers for 1971 included Gerry Birrell, the Scotsman also driving a 1970 2.9-litre engined Capri in the British championship, and John Fitzpatrick from England, but Fitzpatrick spent his season sharing with Jochen Mass in the originally Broadspeed-prepared Escort RS. A car designed to finish off Alfa Romeo hopes in the 2-litre class, while the Capris counted up the points pulverising privateers in BMWs, and even a Mercedes on a couple of occasions. Bulk of the Capri driving fell to the team-men who lined up for that first Monza round in March 1971: Glemser with Spanish sometime sports car driver Alex SolerRoig and Francois Mazet paired with Austrian GP hope (for BRM) Dr Helmut Marko. Helmut had spent the previous season racking up points that brought BMW and Alpina a manufacturer’s title. Rolk Stommelen apppeared accasionally during the year, Mass got a Capri for the German Championship, and one-off appearances were also recorded by the competent Kurt Ahrens, later Renault Fl ace, Jean Pierre Jabouille, Graham Hill and John Surtees. In the days leading up to that Monza anniversary of the Capri’s racing debut in the European series, Braungart and Ashcroft worked flat out alongside the mechanics, whose morale still was not high following 1970’s results. Ashcroft reported, ‘‘the very flexible attitude of Braungart helped enormously and I could see this, even if I couldn’t understand how he was trying to persuade somebody that our course of action was right. Some of the staff were a bit arrogant, the engine shop was run just like a military operation, but there are times when you have to get your coat off and get stuck in. We were in pretty well constant panic going into Monza. The night before we were due to leave we were piping up sumps, me doing the piping and Braungart actually installing them! The mechanics could see that we were prepared to roll our sleeves up and get our hands dirty.”’ Unfortunately that kind of unstinting work was not enough by itself as Ashcroft related, ‘‘though we had modified the heads to assist the water cooling passage flow rates, it wasn’t enough. We actually had a head gasket starting to fail: we thought it was an ignition or cooling system problem. So Neerpasch and I had the Capri loaded up (two were entered, this was the Glemser/Soler-Roig Ford) and took it off to a local section of autostrada in the small hours! After we’d checked out the racer, we loaded it back on the transporter, but obviously not very well. ‘‘On the way back the Capri fell off the back and damaged a sill. To this day I

106

Capri don’t think anyone except ourselves knew the real reason for the damage!”’ In Britain the news was greeted with more interest than usual. Autosport devoted two pages to the opening ETC round, which was won by Hezemans in the Alfa again. The heading was ‘‘Alfa wins, but Ford are moral victors.’’ Motoring News were very aggressive and simply said ‘‘Ford trounced in Monza 4-hours.”’ The story was not without glory. Cologne took four cars to that opening round. An 1800 BDA Escort for Mass/Fitzpatrick, a spare 2.9 Capri and two race-entered Capris for Glemser/Soler-Roig and Mazet/Marko. Practice had gone well in terms of time for Glemser, who set pole position in 1m 43.6s (compare that with 1970!) in the morning session before the trouble Ashcroft related interfered. Next quickest was Mazet on 1m 46.4s initially, but then Fitzpatrick drove the Escort to a fine Im 46.2s to sit on the outside front of the 2x2 grid. In an interview late in 1979 for MOTOR SPORT, that I recorded, John Fitzpatrick told me frankly that the Escort was quicker than the Capris at the beginning of the season, but that the car was never developed from the form in which it was delivered. All effort was devoted into making Capri a winner, the Escort becoming rather more unreliable than you would expect simply through comparative neglect. Perhaps this was a contributory factor in an important end of season row that was to see Fitzpatrick out of the team. Another factor in the disparity in qualifying and race speeds was that Ford actually used Firestone tyres for the silvery grey and blue Glemser Capri and Fitzpatrick Escort. Mazet’s similarly painted Capri kept to the contracted Dunlops, which had been at a disadvantage in pre-race Paul Ricard testing: where else would a Francophile like Neerpasch have all the testing done? In the race Glemser showed the Capri was now a potential race winner, leading away and setting a new class lap record. Marko was in engine bothers straightaway, a valve spring breaking according to company records. They were eventually classified tenth, seven laps behind the leaders. Glemser continued to lead with the Escort in second place, but after 22 hours, Soler-Roig handed over to Glemser and the Capri was hard to start. This was no surprise as the cylinder head gasket had gone in a big way and the car soon had to be retired. That left the Escort in the lead, and as Auwtosport’s later GP writer Jeff Hutchinson pointed out “‘... two Capri RS2600s and an Escort RS1600 were making their racing debut [for that team and season - J.W.] between them they held the lead for all but the last 20 mins of racing ...’’ A flat tyre in the last 20 minutes robbed the Escort of victory. Ashcroft and company were determined there would be no mistakes in the second Championship rounds at Salzburgring, Austria in April. ‘‘We put Lechler sealing rings inside the mains gasket, sunk into the block face’’, Ashcroft commented. This modification proved to be the answer. From now on there would be little to do but record the times Capri didn’t win! In the next two seasons it was beaten only three times, and once that was by an Escort from Cologne. There was a much-needed victory in that second 1971 Austrian race, a 1-2-3 for Glemser pursued by Marko and Soler-Roig, Fitz fourth in the Escort, and a lap record into the bargain! The Capris won five of seven remaining European Championship rounds. In 1972, basically the same engine but uprated closer to that 300bhp level, did even better, a credit to the work of Weslake in co-operation with Ashcroft and later engine man Schutzbach. The V6 Capris competed and won against their touring car rivals in 24 hour events (Spa-Francorchamps, Le Mans), 12 hour races like the one at the end of 1971 at Paul Ricard, and a plethora of other events all over the World. They were just

1971/72 European Championship

107

nyin

Second

round

of the 1971

series. Salzburgring’s Austria Trophy, brought the Capri its first European Championship victory. Dieter Glemser’s win was a foretaste of many more. Here Marko’s second place

Capri is shadowed by an exworks 1970 2300GT. New spirit of works preparation is evident from the polished finish of Marko’s RS!

as successful in short sprint events like those counting toward the national championships in Germany and Britain, though in the latter country the Capri was always up against the cubic inches used by Championship regulars in 5-litre plus Mustangs and Chevrolet Camaros. Altogether in that two-season reign of supremacy Capri would win 13 of 16 European Touring Car Champion races held from the time that gasket problem was finally solved. The titles would flow in from the first year too, the German national Championship going to Mass and his sprint racing works RS. Jochen’s record: eight out of eight class victories, most of those overall victories as well! Glemser won the 1971 driver’s title in the European series in a dramatic finale at Jarama, but the overall manufacturer’s title escaped Ford because of Alfa Romeo’s perfect record in the 1300 category. With a nostalgia rare in his normal manner Peter Ashcroft looks back on his time at Cologne as, ‘‘the thing I enjoyed most before they made me competition manager in 1972. I stayed on with them for two or three races that first year. By the end of that time the mechanics would have died for us if Martin or I had ordered them to! They were simply the best bunch of blokes I have ever worked with ...’’ a contemplative pause ... ‘‘well, you better say outside Englishmen, or I'll get drummed out of the Brownies! When we told one of the engine men after Salzburgring that his engines had finished 1-2-3 at Salzburgring he was a changed man. From thinking he wasn’t good enough for the job, because the engines kept failing for a number of design reasons, he became proud and determined to do even better. ‘‘My special memories will be of the look on my wife Joan’s face when she saw the hotel bill that was presented to me at Monza. The German mechanics had obviously

Capri

108 ae, a

ra

Also at the ’ring in 1971. Stommelen displays Capri’s under-door exhausts and a neater front spoiler that grew throughout 1971. Sharing with Soler-Roig, Stommelen set a new lap record of 8m 52.0s before elimination by a crash!

heard from their English counterparts that you put all drinks on the Ashcroft bill! ‘‘Then there’s Braungart. What can I say about him? It was always Neerpasch you heard about, but Braungart was incredibly organised and so self-disciplined. Even if he was late for a show to take his wife out on a well-deserved evening off, he would sit down at the works for half an hour and work out a solution to a tricky problem right to the last detail. Nothing would be left to chance. “Tater on, when Martin had to face the decision about leaving Ford for BMW he talked to me about it. Technical matters decided him, BMW were simply going to do things we didn’t. For me, the evenings when I could go round to Martin’s and relax after work were a very pleasant contrast to the very difficult task we had taken on. “I think the main achievement of the period was not so much what we did technically, though obviously without that we would not have finished and therefore won races, but a kind of moulding of attitudes. Once the mechanics saw management prepared to work their heart out, things got a lot easier. Jochen wasn’t the kind of bloke to get pally with mechanics, but when they had been convinced, there was no finer team. There’s an old saying that, if the Germans had had an Englishman in charge instead of Hitler, they would have won the war! Now I see why that remark was made: magnificent workmen, right down to the way in which each car was presented ready to win a concours competition,’’ Ashcroft concluded.

1971 Record ‘‘We all had to learn,’’ was Kranefuss’ simple verdict on the early days of the Cologne Capri team. They studied throroughly and 1971 brought them wins in Austria, Czechoslovakia, their home event at Nurburgring, the Belgian 24 hour race at Spa-Francorchamps and the two 6-hour, star-studded races at Paul Ricard in France. In the latter case they were 1-2-4 with the Boreham-maintained 1970 Capri prised from the hands of regular British championship pilot Gerry Birrell and given to GP aces Hill and Surtees to roll its softly sprung way to fourth overall. All those race wins were recorded by Glemser, usually with Soler-Roig, as at Spa, where they defeated the AMG Mercedes 6.3-litre V8 in front of 80,000 plus spectators. Helmut Marko also partnered Glemser during the year, so there was no question of the two men sharing the title.

1971/72 European Championship

109

| CHAMPION se

The start and finish of two good Spa 24 hour races for Capri. The start shot is from 1971 and shows Glemser already leading Ivo Grauls’ Camaro 7-litre and Heyer’s 6.3 Mercedes, the factory Escort leading a Steinmetz Opel Commodore GS, and Alpina BMW 2800 CS, and the striped Broadspeed

Escort. won,

Glemser/Soler-Roig Capri’s

first

24-hour

victory, at an average slightly over 113mph. The works Capris in line abreast are celebrating a

magnificent

1-2-3

in

the

1972 event. A season when they lost only one European Championship race! The Capris were divided up officially by the organisers into Stuck/Mass

(left) first; sec-

ond place for the BP-backed Capri (centre) of Birrell/Bourgoignie and third for the number 1

(right) Capri Glemser/Soler-Roig.

of

Capri

110

The team gathered many lap records during the year, but the proudest one would naturally be the time of 8m 58.0s at Nurburgring recorded by Stommelen. Just two months earlier their best time, recorded by Glemser, had been 9m 6s. Mind you, in practice then GP-standard Rolf Stommelen managed 8m 54.9s. The Zandvoort Trophy Championship round in August 71 was notable for the Capris turning out in the blue and white corporate colours that were to become so familiar. It also marked the first defeat they suffered since the opening round disappointment. Both Glemser and Marko fought hard against Dieter Quester’s very quick Schnitzer BMW coupe, Marko and Quester circulating literally nose to tail with no air between them. The best Ford could come home with was a*second for Glemser and third for Marko. Dieter’s engine was overheating (120°C) and would not rev over 7000rpm, while Marko unsurprisingly ran into tyre problems in the hectic pursuit over Zandvoort-by-the-dunes’ abrasive surface. Soler-Roig was entered as a privateer here, and finished fourth.

a= ee

Rare defeat for Capri came at Zandvoort in 1971 when Dieter Quester (Schnitzer BMW) beat fellow Austrian Helmut Marko after some frantic racing of the kind depicted here.

Jarama was an extraordinary race and there are many differing accounts of what happened here. I attended the race which was as hot as you would expect on an artificial motordome half an hour or so outside Madrid in October. It was an ill-tempered event. Alfa and Ford were close enough in the points standings to fight for the manufacturer’s title and Ford wanted to make absolutely sure that Glemser won the driver’s title. That meant a 1300GT Broadspeed Escort was brought along to try and disrupt Alfa’s domination of that class, while Fitzpatrick/Mass came under very real pressure from Neerpasch as Fitzpatrick recalled forme. ‘‘We were doing well at Jarama, and it was obvious we were going to win when Neerpasch suddenly ordered that I should be pulled out and replaced by Mass, who had been asked to go slower and let the Capris win. I was not at all happy about this, and I let Neerpasch know it.’’ John Fitzpatrick did not drive for Ford in 1972, but it’s certainly not the last we hear of him.! Michael Kranefuss remembered the incident too. ‘‘We were changing drivers all the time, looking for the best points we could get. We also had the problem that we were in Spain and there was Soler-Roig wanting to win his home race. Then we had a problem with a broken throttle linkage on the Glemser/Soler-Roig Capri. The other car for the Frenchmen, Mazet and Jabouille, that had to stop in the pits behind the first car to keep the situation right for the points! It was crazy ... crazy.

1971/72 European Championship ‘“‘Anyway at least we now had a fine car and the best team in touring car racing. Everyone would work very hard, during the week as well as on the track’’, Kranefuss concluded. That was by no means the limit of success for Capri in 1971 though. Now that they had a car capable of winning against any touring car, pretty well anywhere in the world, the Anglo-German hybrids appeared in all sorts of unlikely places. Road-registered,

albeit

on

export plates, the late 1971

factory Capris line up for the Tour de_ France. Glemser stands chatting to Piot, who finished seventh: Glemser retired.

They had another go at the Tour de France in September, but never did manage the original encouraging result of 1969. This time only one of three Capris finished, Jean Francois Piot paired with Roger Clark’s regular co-driver, Jim Porter, who spent a while sorting out the Ford of France competition effort at one point. They managed seventh after an accident on the Co/ de Minier. Glemser/Kaiser were eliminated by distributor trouble and Mazet/Todt also had an accident on the same pass as Piot. Things got a little more exotic for the works then. Glemser and Mass went off to South Africa to do the Kyalami 9 hours, finishing seventh overall and winning the touring car class. Neerpasch felt that Jochen could do with a little more trackcraft and racing knowledge under his belt, so he left him with a mechanic and the 2.9 Capri (with the engine by now reckoned to produce a regular 285bhp) to fend for himself in the Springbok Championship series of races. That took the curly headed young muscleman to the 3 hours at Capetown; a similar length event at Laurenco Marques, Mozambique and 3 hour events at Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and both Welkom and Pietermaritzburg in South Africa. At Capetown the gearbox broke. In Rhodesia the tyres overheated in the extraordinary temperatures, but in the three other events Jochen Mass notched up class wins and fifth place overall finishes in fields that included the quickest sports prototype

111

112

Capri racers. At the end of the series the points for drivers read: 1, John Love (Lola), 49; 2, Jochen Mass (Ford Capri), 36; 3, Mike Hailwood (Chevrolet) 35. In the manufacturer’s section Ford had beaten Mazda, so Jochen’s holiday, courtesy of Jochen N’s feeling that Mass would make a Grand Prix driver for Germany, was a great success. Mind you, Neerpasch himself had his own success with the factory Capri RS. At Hockenheim on the smaller club circuit he won a race organised for team managers and journalists by the staff of Auto Motor and Sport.Martin Braungart also had an outing that day and finished third. ‘‘It just proves what a very good car the Capri is’’, said Neerpasch a couple of weeks later in his best PR manner. The same month had also seen the long-standing link between Hong Kong businessman Bob Harper and Ford renewed when Dieter Glemser took a factory Capri out for the 18th Macau Grand Prix, a touring car event despite the title, and won, setting a new record as well.

Two views of the 1971-72 season Capri ’office’, show clear instrumentation with 7500rpm official rev limit and comprehensive pop-out fuse display on centre console. Note neat trim for fivespeed gearbox lever and gaiter.

1971/72 European Championship

Emergence of Gerry Birrell In 1971 Peter Ashcroft’s work in Cologne had definitely brought the two sides closer together. For the 1971/72 seasons the British were to see the Capri in action in the British Touring Car Championship, then an all Group 2 affair (1000 cars made annually), as was the European Touring Car Championship. For 1971 the effort was made possible by Coca-Cola sponsorship of a young Scottish driver who was well on the way to following the footsteps of Clark and Stewart: Gerry Birrell. The youngest of two Glaswegian racing and rallying brothers, Gerry had come up the hard way, acquiring a tremendous amount of car-sorting ability on the way up. This was to lead to closer and closer links with Ford in Britain, ’til he finally reached the point of testing production cars from Ford Advanced Vehicle Operations in order to help with suspension settings and the like. At this stage of his career Birrell was also heavily engaged in single seater racing, winning the European Formula 3 title and seeking top honours in both F/5000 and Formula 2 during his Ford saloon car racing period. The Capri the British acquired for Gerry was a very softly sprung 1970 model with the 1971 engine specification. It remained primarily in silver colours while campaigning in Britain, but appeared in white, black and red for Paul Richard when it was driven by the GP aces.

Le Mans 1972, and the scraped Birrell/Bourgoignie Capri that finished tenth overall is lapped by Francois Cevert in one of the Matra V12s that dominated Sarthe

that

year.

Another

factory Capri was eighth and the third retired.

Birrell’s British season was a tough one, principally trying to turn a long distance car with a disadvantage of over 2-litres into a winner in 20 lappers. It was really too much of a handicap, but Birrell (who was 28 in July 1971) collected two wins, a fourth and a second place by the end of the year. A win came his way when the opposing 5.7 Camaros were disqualified for using unhomologated parts, but the second victory was tremendously exciting. | remember Gerry at the finish of the final British round, October’s Motor Show 200 at Brands Hatch. He was almost speechless with surprise, quite an achievement for the voluble and witty little Scot! Eventually, grinning fit to burst, he was able to tell the story of that extraordinary last lap. Gerry, head down, had been hanging on grimly to the fiercest scrap seen all year between John Fitzpatrick’s incredibly agile Broadspeed 1700 Escort RS and Frank Gardner’s enormous SCA Freight 5.7 Camaro. ‘Fitz’ kept harrying the big Chevrolet until, in Gerry’s words, ‘‘they just started bangin’ inta each Frank!”’ other. I couldna believe my eyes ... John was actually trying to out-barge

113

Capri

114

There was no way that the tactic was going to work, but the Escort had apparently managed to deflate the Camaro’s back tyre. An astonished Birrell shot through as, “‘cars were cartwheelin’ everywhere. I didna know if I was the wrong way up, Or they were right, or the other way about!’’ Birrell said in convulsions of grateful laughter, for missing an accident that severely damaged both other cars had given the Capri a morale-boosting win. As far as I can trace Birrell made his debut in Europe with Capri at Spa in July. Sharing with Mass he failed to finish when the camshaft failed. Birrell’s second works European Capri drive came when he shared a Firestone-shod works Capri with Stommelen for the two six hour races — ‘‘races of the mechanics’? as Neerpasch dubbed them — at Paul Ricard in September 1971. They took pole position, 0.9s faster than the Glemser/Soler-Roig pairing could manage and that much quicker than

Corporate livery. From late 1971 (Zandvoort onward) to the end of 1972 Capris looked much the same in

racing guise.

Muir’s

Camaro,

then

shared

with

former

Lotus

GP

driver

John

Miles.

interesting to note.that even the Schnitzer brothers could not get the BMW

It was

CSi that

won Zandvoort within 3'2 seconds of the fastest Capri time, and that was using Gerard

Larrousse and Rauno Aaltonen as drivers. Gerry’s own car couldn’t be persuaded by Hill into anything better than 4.5 seconds slower. Graham Hill had a lot of touring car experience behind him, but was handicapped by about 112lb of TV camera strapped on board! Just how underdeveloped the BMWs then were was further emphasised by the dynamic combination of Jacky Ickx/Hans Joachim Stuck unable to better 2m 20.6s when Stommelen had managed 2m 14.5s in the factory Ford. Things had to change really, if the European Touring Car Championship was not to develop into simply another Ford promoted formulae.

1972 — More of the Same .. Basically things were unchanged

for 1972, there was just more of everything!

More

1971/72 European Championship

115

Another view of the general chassis preparation and assembly area for the

Cologne-based Capris at the height of their success.

power, more races, more drivers. However they did lose two key members of when Martin Braungart and Jochen Neerpasch left to go to BMW in the Spring, after the season had got underway! Kranefuss remembered that dramatic move for me: ‘‘Jochen Neerpasch getting frustrated. He actually wanted to go independent within the company — as he later achieved at BMW — but there was no way in a company the size of he was going to get away with that. They even talked about having Graham manage it as a figure-head: Neerpasch wanted to go to America and do races Daytona, do something different to just winning European Touring Car races.

Conditions like this are a frequent hazard in European Championship events. Believe it or not this is

Salzburgring

in

Spring,

scene of another 1972 victory for Glemser’s works Capri.

staff right

was just Ford Hill like

Capri

116

“When Jochen did go, it was right in the season and suddenly. I don’t think Walter could ever forgive him for that ... you gotta remember Walter’s enthusiasm was the thing that made it all happen in the first place. He was the one that did everything to get Ford into big-time motor sports and it was a terrible disappointment for him. ‘I just said, ‘no changes’ carry on as we are for that 1972 season, and that’s what we did. Gerd Knotzinger became my assistant, Otto Stulle moved over onto the AVO side of things and Schutzbach came into looking after the engines, after Ashcroft had been over on his second visit to make more power from the engines, together with Weslake.”’ ‘

Inside

story

1972-season racing Over 300bhp from the compact Weslake Ford V6 of 3-litres; four link and Watts linkage for long strut rear axle/suspension; _ properly located front MacPherson struts and four wheel ventilated disc brakes are some key features.

The hardcore of the driving talent stayed the same. Glemser and Soler-Roig, Kranefuss commenting of the comparatively unknown Spanish driver, ‘‘he was actually a very smooth driver. Never put any wear on the car.’’ Jochen Mass moved into the European Championship team on a regular basis to be partnered frequently by a new youngster whose very name attracted emotional support in Germany. Then he was just 20 years of age, Hans Joachim Stuck junior. Tall and thin with the air of a golden retriever that’s gambolling out of hand, ‘Striezel’’ Stuck was not just the son of the famour pre-war German hillclimb and race ace for Auto Union, but also a very, very rapid young saloon car pilot. He had been brought up on Alpina BMW and was a naturally popular figure with immense support in Bavaria, a factor that has proved significant throughout his subsequent career. In the case of both Mass and Stuck Neerpasch knew there was Grand Prix potential and he gave them every bit of help his considerable influence could muster. However, Mass’s early life with the Ford team owed a lot, lot, more to Kranefuss, for Jochen lived with the family when he first joined the team and the two were inseparable: as the Mass reputation grew the friendship waned. Other drivers during the year would include Gerard Larrousse, Hans Heyer (he had driven that unwieldy Mercedes so well at Spa and less successfully at Paul Ricard in 1971), Belgian quick man Claude Bourgoignie and some rather better known names that would forecast the way Ford went for talent subsequently. During the year one-off appearances in the Capris were recorded by Ronnie Peterson (Mantorp Park only and a win) plus Jackie Stewart and Francois Cevert, who shared a Goodyear-shod, Elf blue sprayed works car at Ricard in September. A controversial race we’ll hear more o Lateran ,

1971/72 European Championship

Street

racing

suited

Capri

too. Glemser heads for a win at the Czechoslovakian circuit of Brno in 1972.

Now the Capri used the 2933cc (95mm bore by 69mm stroke) version of the alloyheaded V6 with new camshaft profiling and regular use of 11.5:1 cr these were now expected to give 290bhp at 7500rpm the rather cautious official limit, though there had been cases where drivers hung nearly 1000rpm more than that on the short stroke motor and it survived. Peak torque was variously reported during the year, but 29-30mkg/210Ib.ft-217lb.ft seems pretty average for most engines at 5500rpm. The glass fibre wheelarches, doors, bonnet and bootlid continued for 1972 and had become so popular that a few enthusiasts were to be seen on the road with frontspoilered, wide-arched Capris. Though the effort to pay for these modifications in Germany might well have reduced the proud owner to a four-cylinder model that looked good, rather than buying the effective RS2600, which was now becoming quite a popular road car, far from its original homologation special intentions. The white and blue corporate colour scheme would stay throughout the rest of the Capri’s racing life, and that was by far the most popular colour for the road cars too. For the 1972 season most of the effort went into sophisticating the suspension further, improving the roll cage’s role in helping body stiffness and lightening the transmission components. For instance an alloy lightweight axle casing was developed by Braungart for use in the Capris, which saved 20lb. It really only proved its usefulness later on in Zakspeed Escorts, the Capri’s power and torque being too close to the borderline ... and out of the question when the 3.4 engine arrived a couple of seasons later. Both the limited slip differential and five-speed gearbox by ZF continued unaltered, ratios carying approximately 3:1 to a rally-style 5:1 + at the back end, which used modified production halfshafts. In fact Ford’s shafts (modified only to

117

Capri

118

Versatility!

Makinen

takes

the old Boreham rectangular lamp RS (a contradiction in road car terms as all RS 2600s had quad lights) to victory in the Finnish Ice Racing Championship, 1972.

take rear end ventilated disc brakes from Ate and Lockheed in subsequent experiments) were to last into the days of 400bhp plus and onwards to the 600bhp level with the Zakspeed turbos. That would be called over-engineering by the company accountants, doubtless!

Glemser broke the lap record at the opening 1972 Monza Championship race, but the engine failed 15 minutes from the finish. The 4 hour

event

was

won

by

Mass/Larrousse in the other factory Capri.

Borg and Beck twin plate clutches were used for the 1971/72 seasons. Incidentally, on the 3.22:1 final drive ratio used for Le Mans Ford claimed 260km/h, or 161mph, for the 1972 Capris. In 1979 Auto Motor und Sport tested a 1972 Capri RS that had

originally appeared in the colours of tuner Gerhard Grab of Siegen for Klaus Ludwig

1971/72 European Championship and Hans Heyer with a claimed 29S5bhp at 7400rpm, more like the power the factory were getting towards the mid-season. They recorded a time of 4.7s to reach

Se

¥ _ 7, Sh. oats hah wine enrvaal

Silverstone TT 1972 and Frank Gardner’s SCA

Freight Camaro V8 leaves the line with the winning Mass/Glemser behind.

RS2600

62mph/100km/h from rest and just 14.3s for the sprint from 0-100mph/160km/h. The main change that did make the difference to lap times for the Capri in 1972 was the adoption of 15 inch diameter wheels in place of the production 13 inch diameter. The wheels continued to be the beautiful spun aluminium rim jobs, now of a 10inch front width and 12 inch rear, a nominal half inch up on early years at the rear. This meant much more effective Dunlops could be used, lower profile, cooler running and allowing extra inner wheel space for bigger brakes. Now the works cars tended to stay with Dunlop, fine tuning the suspension rather than swopping the tyres around. Naturally there were a wide variety of front roll bars to choose from, and there was also the multi-hole top mount for the front MacPherson strut to play with but Kranefuss also remembered, ‘‘Martin Braungart might play with anything up to three suspension layouts at a time. He was always the perfectionist engineer. It’s expensive, too expensive for us to use later on, but you get results this way.”’

Stuck speeding to his German Championship title. At Diepholz Military aerodrome in 1972.

119

Capri

120

Now using 245/575 front tyres and 290/575 rear tyres, the Capris were putting on weight. Homologated still at 900kg, the factory cars actually weighed more like 980kg that season, some 176lb over the top. You could see why Neerpasch got restive in the 1972 season, for the Capris had a fabulous year. In the European Touring Car Championship they simply won all but one of nine qualifying rounds!

Stuck | style!

=

“ss

German

Winning

the

Championship

Eijfelrennen 1972.

Unfortunately that fine effort was rewarded only with the title of champion driver ~ (for Jochen Mass) as Alfa Romeo again took a perfect score in the little class ... it was eliminated from the 1973 series! Other titles that came Capri’s way in 1972 included the national series of Belgium (Claude Bourgoignie) and Germany (Hans Stuck) while Timo Makinen borrowed a previously Wiggins-Teape decalled version of the Capri RS lying around at Boreham (Birrell’s old car, I suspect) and won the Finnish ice racing championship with the thing! Capri also entered for the Le Mans and Nurburgring sports car classics that year, proving as fast as the privateer Porsches, setting precedent for touring car participation in classic long distance events that has since been widely copied. That Le Mans 24 hours marked the 80th Cologne official entry on an event and was rewarded by 10th and 11th overall, plus the inevitable class win: the third Capri, that of Hans Stuck/Jochen Mass, didn’t finish, breaking its engine in the hands of these two hotshoes after 124 hours. At the Nurburgring 1000kms sports car event the Capris had done even better, attracting a lot of favourable comment for their beautiful presentation. They finished 7th and 8th overall in the order Glemser/Mass, Stuck/Soler-Roig; racking up another class win of course. Perhaps they were a bit too impressive, for Denis Jenkinson of MOTOR SPORT commented, ‘‘ ... leaving Fitzpatrick and Kremer to win the GT

1971/72 European Championship category and be ninth overall, behind the two Cologne Ford Capris, which had given an impressive demonstration of speed and reliability to finish seventh and eighth overall. If these blue and white coupes are saloon cars, then a 911 Porsche must be a sports car! It would seem that Ford (Germany) are doing what Porsche did a few years ago when the 911 qualified as a saloon car, until the CSI reworded the rules. It would seem to be time to demand all saloon cars have four doors. Nonetheless the Capris were very impressive to watch.’’ This from a man to whom saloon car racing was hardly a consuming passion. The fifth European Championship round of the year was probably the highlight in the Capri’s career and certainly a testimonial to the effective work Weslake had carried out over the years. In the sixties the 24 hour race of Spa-Francorchamps, held on the world’s fastest public road circuit with its eight mile plus lap, had been turned from a sports car event into one for saloon cars. Alfa Romeo had always shown well there and other respected names like those of Mercedes and BMW had battled for the honour of winning Belgium’s answer to Le Mans.

Nearly there! The winning Capri at Spa 1972, exits La Source hairpin with travel stains seeping over primarily blue side panels. Spoiler on this car was red

to differentiate team Capris.

amongst

By 1972 the race had developed into a well-publicised and attended confrontation for manufacturers interested in saloon car racing. Situated in the Ardennes, only just into Belgian territory from Germany (the Nurburgring is almost literally the other side of the hill) the Spa races were previewed in both specialist and local press as the endurance test of a saloon car. Ford had won in 1971, with one surviving Capri, but in 1972 they went back and did the job properly! Despite being restrained as often as possible the Stuck/Mass combination eventually returned a 4m 4.2s practice time. That represented 207.862kph/129.082mph average speed! I remember this quite vividly as I was out stooging round in a Group 1 BMW: the blue and white Capri came past me on the straight, into the left right Masta Kink, travelling some 30-35mph faster. Into the corner it went, just nudging 160mph, and the front wheel rose from the ground, a halo of dust, just like the ricochet effect in cowboy films, and the Capri tilted right. By this time it was getting out of

my vision, but I could see there was at least one wheel airborne as the driver corrected the 160mph tailslide ... who was it? Stuck, who else! Fitzpatrick was on the centre front row, sharing the silver Schnitzer coupe with Hans Heyer again. Together with Stommelen a fortnight earlier they had inflicted what was to be Capri’s only defeat in the 1972 European series — and it was on home

121

122

Capri ground, at the Nurburgring 6 hours! There were two other Capris from the factory in the Spa event. Glemser and SolerRoig on the outside of the 3-2-3 grid that restrained itself with difficulty on the downhill start and finish. The third factory Capri was painted yellow in honour of BP Belgium who were backing this full factory car for Birrell/Bourgoignie: it made the second row. In the race the Capris made best use of their numbers and Fitzpatrick/Heyer were a couple of laps adrift in the BMW when the engine went bang around lam. Unsurprisingly the Fords drifted home in convoy. Refreshing my memory on the results of that race it is a surprise to note that the GP drivers to be, Stuck/Mass, were handsome

leaders, part of their advantage coming when Glemser’s Capri had trouble with the ignition coil. Ford factory results have the next two Capris exactly equal, but at the time the organisers differed as follows: 1, Stuck/Mass, 2793.529 miles averaging 116.394mph (4498.436kms/187.431km/h); 2, Birrell/Bourgoignie, 2749.740 miles at 114.570mph; 3, Glemser/Soler-Roig, 2749.736 miles at the same average speed! Certainly the picture-of the line abreast finish of the three Fords with the chequered flag fluttering, at 3pm on Sunday July 23 1972, was the photograph Ford seized upon gratefully after that surprise defeat at Nurburgring a couple of weeks earlier.

Long-haired and lanky, Hans Stuck shares 1972 Spa 24 hours victory rostrum with Jochen Mass.

That was the cream on the cake of a year with eight European wins and nine wins recorded by Stuck in eleven German Championship rounds. In Britain things had not been as good, ironically until the Capri Malcolm Gartlan’s mechanics, Ted Grace and Pat Salter, had originally prepared at Cologne came up against the works cars at Paul Ricard in September. The problem had been the old one of trying to beat cubic inches with a 3-litre Capri. The immaculate dark blue and yellow Wiggins Teape sponsored RS came to the line at Paul Ricard having won races in the wet in Britain, “‘especially one right at the beginning when suspension was all European soft. Later on we progressively hardened it up through the year’’, recalled the late Brian Muir. To this day Jackie Stewart is probably convinced, like Michael Kranefuss, that Cevert and JYS were prevented from winning by some demon tweak to the fuel system of the Muir/Miles Capri. Well, they were half right, but it was definitely not a question of cheating as memories submitted to me by Muir show. ;

1971/72 European Championship

Champion stance: Jackie Stewart in the Capri he shared with Cevert to finish second at Ricard in Autumn

1972.

Kranefuss felt, even when I interviewed him late in 1979, that there must have been some kind of extra fuel capacity in the Muir Capri, but there was no question of that. Muir’s secret lay in something Weslake had offered the German Capri team, but which had apparently been rejected. Muir tells the tale of that September Ricard 6 hours, a story that co-driver Miles alerted me to.

Front row at Ricard in 1972 shows how Capris dominated Europe by the close of 1972. Despite the wealth of talent here in the works Capris (front row left and behind) and in both the Stewart/Cevert Elf Capri (centre) and the Kentdecalled car for Birrell/

Heyer (front right), it was the British-based Capri of Muir/Miles that won.

‘“‘We were doing two races in Europe on the one trip, that’s myself and John Miles. We did Zandvoort, finished second. Really a question of an inherited second, but second nonetheless. While we were there we used the new engine we had intended to use at Ricard, so there was no question of us bringing a demon unit. Both were within two and three bhp of each other. So we took an older unit and exactly the same 120-litre tank as the works used: after all it had been done when the Capri was built to our specification at Cologne by our mechanics. ‘‘However, Weslakes had told us one more useful thing. The manifold used on the works cars was spraying fuel back on part throttle. This was basically because they used the same manifold on both banks of the vee. Weslake had tried out a manifold that prevented the spray back, but it was a time-consuming hand-job that would be hard to repeat on a number of engines. Really it didn’t make much difference at the top

123

Capri

124

end, but the fuel consumption was definitely better because of the more efficient fuel feed under part throttle conditions. You’d be surprised how often you are backing off in a six hour event, rather than just giving it all it’s got. ‘‘John and I did the testing at Ricard and got within tenths of each other, but with completely different chassis set-ups as neither liked each other’s set-up!’’ The Australian voice paused for a moment for a characteristic quiet chuckle before resuming the story, ‘“‘anyway we got all that sorted out and thought about how we were

going to win this race [first prize was F40,000 — J.W.]against the works. ‘‘We knew from early on that they were going to run the Ihr 30mins to lhr AOmins, meaning three stops for fuel while we reckoned we could get away with two, for that’s what we’d discovered in testing, this engine would give us two hours running. We hadn’t actually had time to check it out finally, but on the morning of the race Jackie Stewart was given some extra practice, and we all moaned until we were allowed half an hour too! ‘“So we just put John Miles out there and said, ‘‘run nice and smooth and straight just like we will in the race, and let’s see what she uses exactly,’’ John, bless him, did

just that, ran a competition time and we knew, just Knew we could run two hours if we stuck our necks out.”’ Significantly Muir/ Miles started the race from the third row (2m 15.3s) while the factory’s best was 2m 13.4s for Glemser and Mass. Birrell/Franck in the Firestoneshod Kent Capri were on 2m 17.7s, Cevert and Stewart recording 2m 14.3s to be on the outside of the front row: a third factory Capri, this one for Soler-Roig/Larrousse also did 2m 14.3s and was on the second row. Muir says he doen’t remember much about the race, save that they led very nearly evey lap ‘‘and sweated it out every time we got near a pit stop. ‘‘Oh yeah’’, he says casually, ‘‘and there was a bit of a dog fight goin’ on in the early laps. They were all getting in each other’s way, hopping over the kerbs and that kinda stuff, so I just went past them at the end of the straight. Just like that. No big effort, didn’t seem a problem at all at the time. I guess that must’ve been when we put the record lap in!”’ It was a sensation. Brian had just breezed past double World Champion Jackie Stewart, plus the best drivers and cars in European Championship racing! What’s more the sparkling dark blue Capri went on to establish a record lap of 2m 13.9s, 156.206km/h, just below 100mph average and faster than all but two cars could manage in practice. The average speed to the end was 151.78km/h, 94.25mph, which was a surprise because, as Muir said, ‘‘the brakes were absolutely finished at the end. Metal to metal! There was only one way we were going to win that race, and that was just to put petrol in the thing. Towards the end Cevert was catching us, but we won by just about what we expected, less than 30 seconds.’’ The organisation made it that Muir and Miles led a Capri 1-2-3 home by just 0.72 of a kilometre after six hours hard racing. It was an upset of form, but not one that was lightly accepted. Ted Grace found himself having to strip the engine down afterwards and there had been talk of a protest during the race. Kranefuss confirmed that some of those in the Elf Capri camp wanted the Muir/Miles Capri thrown out ...‘‘it must have a big fuel tank’’, was the logic. Kranefuss told me eight years later, ‘‘there could have been no way that I would have protested another Capri. It was still a Ford Capri winning, and one that used the same equipment as us, so far as I was concerned and we also had problems with Goodyears chunking. So that race stood but I still wonder about it .... That Weslake engine was definitely quicker than ours and they must have put fuel in every section of the

system!’’

1971/72 European Championship

125

Muir holds off a works Capri with the immaculate Wiggins Teape backed Capri he shared with John ‘later-a-journalist’ Miles. Their win was a real upset for the form book and a fit-

ting reward

for mechanics

Ted Grace and Pat Salter, who built the Capri up at

Cologne

using

factory

parts.

It wasn’t only Anglo-German politics that concerned the new team manager in Cologne that season. ‘‘At Zandvoort we had a problem. I had promised Mass the 1972 Championship. At one stage we had to stop Glemser and put Jochen in the car. It took Dieter half an hour to get over his emotions ... he was really shocked we should take him out of the car to let Jochen do at least one third of the race to make the right points for that title. “‘It was murder sometimes! And the race drivers were earning good money — we paid Hezemans

the normal

10,000Dm a race, 100,000Dm a year when we wanted him

in 1974. In the 1972/73 season you could say we allowed 25,000Dm per car per 6 hour race. The Capri itself would be worth about 112,000Dm and each engine cost 18,000Dm.”’ Ammerschlager recalled Ford were quite surprised that the new BMW European Champion, Hezemans, should have approached them to drive. Apparently the reason was a personality conflict at BMW. Certainly Hezemans spoke with great warmth of his period with Ford, especially on the testing and development side. Big sums

of money

would

be needed,

if the Capris were

to succeed in a much

tougher 1973 season. Ford would have to face up to a full factory fleet of BMW coupes in 1973, reputedly financed to the tune of five million Dm (over a million £ sterling). Ford Motor Company responded by holding the budget, effectively leaving Kranefuss 20 per cent short on driver retainers and 10 per cent for mechanics. And there was more bad news to come ....

Silverstone

1973,

a classic

Capri versus BMW CSL confrontation as Jochen Mass muscles the Ford ahead of Dieter Quester. Despite the lack of aerodynamic aids for Britain’s fastest .circuit, Mass was second overall and equalled

Stuck’s quickest BMW lap!

‘At the end of 1972 I went to Stuart Turner. I wanted an evolution Capri, an RS model with a rear wing. I knew we must have this piece of equipment if the Capri was to carry on winning. At Le Mans the rear end of the car was lifting so the drivers were getting wheelspin, that’s how we knew! I could not get my message through. Even at the beginning of 1973 it would have been possible, it would have meant no more than 250 cars on an evolution basis. ‘‘So we would face ithe new year with less money and no aerodynamic improvement for the back end, which badly needed it. There we were, the established Ford

winged

Racing 1973: BMW

versus Ford

team versus this fantastic new BMW team, which had tremend ous public sympathy. We were pissed off, I can tell you’’, Kranefuss admitted with amazing frankness. They had now approached Cosworth to start the 3.4-litre, 24 valve version of the British Essex V6, but that would not be eligible for competition before 1974. What to do now to be competitive against this new threat? Former NSU racer and 1986 BMW M3 development engineer Thomas Ammerschlager had arrived in Competitions. It was Ammerschlager’s task to fill the space left by Braungart when he and Neerpasch officially defected to BMW. Those two starting May 1, 1972 at BMW. An unenviable task. A little bit of testing with a ducktail on the Capri boot had shown ‘‘it was worth about 10 seconds a lap, almost exactly the amount we would have needed to stay ahead of BMW’’, in Ammerschlager’s wistful words.

Squared

off wheelarches

in

glassfibre with intake and outlet air scoops/vents were a feature of the 1973 Capris.

However the cheerful, bespectacled figure of the Ford engineer wasn’t going to be sent back whimpering to his old routine production tasks. He decided to look at the Capri again, almost from scratch, particularly at the aerodynamics. ‘‘When I arrived the race car had a drag factor of about 0.45 with the 12 inch wide rear wheels. We worked particularly on the wheelarches and improving the spoiler at the front, looking to find the correct balance between handling and aerodynamic drag. I think it was the beginning of serious wind-tunnel work for the car. Before it was just a question of making a wheel fit inside the body, now we must pay attention to the overall effect. **At the beginning of the year, with our new, squarer arches and spoiler wrapping around a little, we were down a little above 0.4. Effectively this gave us the equivalent of a few horsepower more on its own.”’ Ammerschlager really did go to town on the body aerodynamics even putting in

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Racing 1973: BMW

versus Ford

129

ventilation slots ahead and behind the rear wheel arches which served to ‘‘give a slight aerodynamics advantages when the wheels were on full bump. They used to compress the air under the arches and impair the airflow. It also reduced the tyre temperatures a little, maybe 5-10%. ‘On the tyres our needs were different to those of BMW. They wanted round edges to go with the independent rear end: we got a flatter pattern for the Capri and were able to run a softer compound much of the time for qualifying and so on.’’ The aerodynamic work did not stop outside the car. Underbonnet there was a labyrinth of glassfibre ducting to keep the induction system fed with as much cool air as was practical. The radiator was raked forward and the ducting occupied the vacant area, air exiting rearwards from the standard bulge, which was slotted at the back, like the front wheel arches. Estimates at the time were that this allowed as much as 20 extra installed horsepower, for under extreme conditions the V6 was suffering underbonnet excess heat problems. Just like those which prevent the best use being made of incoming air on drag racer saloons. They discovered on their V8-engined muscle cars, even over a quarter mile, a measurable improvement could be made by admitting cold air in backto-back tests. So it was no wonder that the Capris benefited from such a move. By the end of 1972 the talk in Britain was that Weslake camshaft profiling and cylinder head work, including longer valves, had further progressed to the point where 320bhp was no longer a dream. Certainly combined with the new cold air system a peak of 325bhp was being claimed for the 1973 racers and a safe maximum of 7800rpm. Peak power was now at 7600rpm, and that original target of 110bhp a little closer, as was 3-litres. A further millimetre in the bore brought capacity up to 2995cc (96mm bore by 69mm stroke.)

A very tidy and compact en-

gine. The Weslake and Co. Ltd version of Ford’s German V6 was Officially reckoned to give 110bhp per litre by the end of its racing life in 1973. Note array of throttle return springs.

,

aaa i

Bi iow

130

Capri For most of the season 16 inch diameter BBS wheels would be used experimentally rather than as a matter of course. Their first appearance at Salzburgring in April was disastrous, an unsealed rim allowing a Dunlop to deflate on Gerry Birrell’s factory car

in Austria. It skidded along a crash barrier at the very fast Austrian track, beginning its accident at some 160 plus mph. ‘“‘Gerry stepped out with some bruised ribs and moaned that he had lost his watch!’’? reported Ammerschlager proudly.

Inside the 1973 race Capri. It has progressed to more comprehensive seatbelts. fire-retardent trim for seats, stronger steering wheel. front roll cage extensions tc the floor and across the passenger side, and now has

a simplified fascia (the centre console is missing). The redline is set just unde! 8000rpm and the 10,000rpm tachometer is flanked by 0-19kg cm, oil pressure anc 0-120°C water temperature

dials. The steering columr two-speed wiper/wash: er/intermittent

control

which would also flash th headlamps, looks more like

a Mercedes item than some thing from Ford stores!

That Birrell was able to escape such an accident was largely due to a completely new approach to the interior cage problem. Taking a leaf from the book of the Americans, where outfits like Roger Penske had used cages designed with the aid of a computer, analysing the stress loads within a bodyshell undergoing hard cornering, the 1973 Capri cage did some additional work. It picked up on the rear suspension loads where the back dampers fed into the shell (those dampers were alloy-cased by the close of the season) and ran forward to take some of the front suspension inputs and end up near the front radiator. The front suspension was redesigned in geometry to lighten steering loads and make use Of some titanium components, but heavy steering was always one of the bug-bears of these now very wide wheeled machines. At the front they now used 12 inch rims, at the rear 14 inch. This gave rise to problems too. Envisage the wider wheels creeping ever inward: the manufacturers were not allowed more than a set extension per side wheelarch. This led to some pressing problems for Ammerschlager. Suspending a comparatively tall saloon with more power and weight than a formula 2 car, but less rubber and track must inevitably lead to compromises. The springs and dampers on the live axle were a particular problem. As the wheels got wider and the interior arch intruded further, the

Racing 1973: BMW

versus Ford

clearance between damper/sping unit and tyre was diminishing. On the one hand they wanted the Capri stiff to resist saloon-car body roll generated by those big tyre widths

and powerful engines, but on the other hand too much stiffness led to an increase in

Capri’s already embarrassing habit of lifting wheels. A puzzle that I think it’s fair to say was not solved in 1973.

Gerry Birrell poses at Hockenheim: the Capri’s revised aerodynamics clearly visible in wheelarch extensions and wrap-round

front

spoiler

1972-1973

during

winter

the

pre-seas-

on tests.

They did experiment with rising rate suspension but Ammerschlager confessed, ‘we tried it in 1972 and again afterwards, but I think the only place it worked properly was tracks with banked corners like Zandvoort and Kyalami. It’s the effect of the live rear axle as the car settles into a corner, it just tends to roll too much on the initial

settling into the corner.’’ Basically the spring rates just got harder and harder, especially in 1974 when the comparative balance of 55% front and 45% rear would be abandoned with the heavier Cosworth V6 arriving. Safety was a persistent theme on these Capris. The brakes were much improved by a thoughtful programme from Ate, which eventually culminated in some production benefits, though not for Ford! From a racing viewpoint the Cologne cars were now equipped exclusively with Ate (Girling had been used occasionally in 1972 and were to return) and stronger aluminium calipers were fitted. Both BMW and Ford shared technology here, as they tended to with wheels, and to a lesser extent tyres and shock absorbers with the common suppliers of Bilstein and Dunlop. As we’ve seen the fundamental layout of the 980/985kg live axle Capri and 1062kg BMW CLSs led to detail differences, but the broad principles tended to be the same. Trying to keep a powerful, nose-heavy and large (by racing standards) car on the road at speeds well over 160mph was a headache.

131

132

Capri

Even bigger ventilated front discs appeared for 1973

season.

Against the lighter (by an average 80kg/176kg) and aerodynamically cleaner Capri the BMWs had one simple trump card. Power — at least 40bhp more was the common figure bandied about at the time. Checking with Paul Rosche at BMW I found a spread from 341 to 370bhp as he and his team rapidly developed BMW’s inline six in the heat of the battle. It literally grew too, from a starting point of 3.2-litres halfway through the season to 3.5 litres. By contrast the Capri engine was all used up on the development side. It had grown as big as it was going to go and was now in its third factory racing season with Weslake. They had done what could be done with the Group 2 regulations with a production engine as a base. They had reached their targets virtually on bhp per litre by the end (being kind we’d put the power spread at 320-330bhp), but in Peter Ashcroft’s opinion they were also being asked to do something they were not geared for, ‘‘building repeatable racing engines. Only one company had really succeeded at that game in recent years’’, felt Ashcroft, ‘‘ and that had been Cosworth, a fact we all acknowledge.’’ The Capris were to have one helluva season, five of them severely damaged during a season where two to three works cars usually turned out to face a pair of factory BMWs supported by the cars of private tuners Alpina and Schnitzer. In fact Alpina remind journalists that BMW would not have won in 1973 if it had not been for the points accrued by their orange Jagermeister coupes and the white example run by Malcolm Gartlan for Brian Muir in Britain. Where Muir had departed, Broadspeed stepped in, running a single Capri of ingenious linked suspension design that Ammerschlager admired for its efforts to try and get around the ever narrower spring base problem posed by wide tyres. ‘‘Ralph was right putting the springs outside their

Racing 1973: BMW

versus Ford

normal position and linking the action back to the axle, but it went wrong because the linkage led back to the standard mounting points. We tried it ourselves in 1975 with a live axle, but abandoned it after some tests. It would have cost too much money to develop, to get the theoretical advantage’’, he said. The Broadspeed Capri was not very successful in England, in fact it was a disaster, but with a sister car built for a Belgian programme, better results did start coming in. Dave Matthews finally wrote off one car for good (the original one) in an enormous and famous accident at the British GP, Silverstone, 1973, effectively ending his worksbacked career.

The Drivers There’s no getting round the fact that Ford must have spent a fortune on driver retainers for 1973. They went right down the famous-is-best route and came up with Jackie Stewart on a surprisingly regular basis (a reciprocal for favours for Tyrrell in Formula 1?); Emerson Fittipaldi — who seems to have been mainly horrified by the Capri: convinced it was going to turn turtle on him at any moment. Then Ford also hired 1979 World Champion Jody Scheckter, who was a regular saloon car ace in South Africa and Britain before he hit the big time. Glemser stayed on for this tough year but Stuck hurtled off back down to Bavaria as soon as Neerpasch offered him a contract. Mass stayed on and John Fitzpatrick returned to the fold, having once again proved his point. Gerry Birrell was intended to be a regular team member, but Le Mans was his last outing for Ford, the effervescent Scot losing his life in a senseless accident, compounded by loose crash barriers at Rouen’s annual Formula 2 Championship round in June 1973. He was sorely missed and never effectively replaced. During the season Hans Heyer and his inevitable hat became a more familiar sight, but we only saw the talented Austrian Helmuth Koinigg at the Spa 24 hour race and Le Mans: he later lost his life in a Grand Prix Surtees at Watkins Glen. Jean Vinatier, the French rallyman, appeared at Le Mans only and Klaus Fritzinger for a works car to share with Heyer in the 24 hour grind around the Nurburgring, Gerard Larrousse appeared a couple more times, while the end of the season saw Australian-based Canadian Alan Moffat, a Ford supporter bred on

A fighting _ relationship: Mass lived with Kranefuss and family initially, and the two were the key personnel in the duel against BMW in

1973.

133

Capri

134

Trans Am Mustangs, out for one event in a factory Capri that he later purchased and took down under. Hezemans also did a couple of races at the end of the year, Ford having spent a great deal of money to hire him, as by then he was the 1973 European

Touring Car Champion.

What Happened? The eagerly anticipated fight between Ford and BMW was more than just a struggle for the European Touring Car Championship. Neerpasch had arrived at BMW with a blueprint of how to run a successful touring car effort and attract the maximum publicity. To get the best from such a programme you had to also contest Le Mans 24 hours, and the touring car class within the other sports car 1000kms events at SpaFrancorchamps and Nurburgring. The sports car season then was a very concentrated affair, the majority of the events in the first five months of the season. That meant that some of the European Championship rounds were not the saloon car BMW versus Ford battlefields that one might have imagined from the pre-event publicity. For Ford the opening shots in the battle spoke of an evenly matched year-long contest, rather than a rout.

Monza in March opened up the series. There were 25 cars on the grid, 14 of them Fords and nine BMWs. All that mattered was the placings of eight cars though: three works Capris versus two factory BMWs and the factory supported trio of BMW coupes provided by Schnitzer (one) and Alpina.

Opening European Championship, 1973. Things don’t look too bad as non-" winged BMWs are led by Stewart, sandwiching Brambilla’s BMW, with Mass comfortably ahead of the first works BMW. Alpina BMW won ....

“Jackie Stewart really worked with the Capris and with the mechanics,’ commented Michael Kranefuss of 1973’s star driver. It showed at Monza. Stewart was really the only GP star to get to grips with the Capri all season and even he found it very hard to translate the Ford saloon’s behaviour to progress the chassis. Anyway the then double World Champion, who was in the process of adding his third championship to the tally in that final retirement year, did all that could possibly have been asked of him at Monza. Sharing with Glemser they stole pole position, just two tenths of a second faster than the quickest BMW, which was not the factory’s version of the coupe but the silver Schnitzer machine for later Porsche exponent Bob Wollek paired with ex-GP driver Henri Pescarolo.

Racing 1973: BMW

versus Ford

After that the order was really tight. Mass/Jody Scheckter just 0.6s off pole time and third fastest (Im 38.8s); Stuck/Chris Amon’s works BMW on Im 39.4s; Birrell/Fitzpatrick, 1m 39.6s; Hezemans/Quester, 1m 39.9s; Niki Lauda/Brian Muir (Alpina BMW), 1m 40.4s, the fastest eight rounded off by Ernesto Brambilla/ Walter Brun in the other Alpina BMW some seconds off the pace. What a prospect! The white BMW’s with their stripey new war paint, supported by the orange coupes from Alpina and the silver BMW from Schnitzer. Pitted against them three blue and white Capris, the simple legend FORD stamped across the top of the screens. Inside the best driving talent money could buy, particularly in the Ford cause. Ahead 4 hours around Monza without chicanes.

Larrousse/Fitzpatrick 1973 Capri displays Texaco fuel allegiance and squared vented arch.

off,

Predictably the pace was so hot the winner came not from the fleet practice pacesetters, but from the back of that group. It was close thing though. Stewart and Glemser led convincingly for much of the distance, but a broken camshaft in the Ford sidelined them. By that stage Mass/Scheckter had been badly delayed with the fan belt becoming twisted and damaged (over-revved?) and could catch up to no better than second place behind the winning Lauda/Muir Alpina BMW. Birrell and Fitzpatrick were sidelined by engine failure, though not quite so prematurely as the Schnitzer BMW coupe in which the enthusiastic Vittorio Brambilla managed to pull the gear lever out by the roots after just five laps! Some compensation came from a new fastest lap for Stewart and Brambilla, who shared a remarkable Im 38.3s (130.69mph/208km/h). The race average, even for that slower BMW Alpina coupe was over 126mph. We could reckon that the leading battles

135

Capri

136

were being fought at speeds up to 170mph by these new super saloons of the European series. The next appearance of the Cologne-based Capris was at Le Mans for the 4 hour race, but Heyer and Birrell had motor trouble there and retired. Heyer got involved with Harald Menzel’s factory BMW in a German national thrash at the ’ring and so the