Ford Cortina: 50 years ago today…

Ford are celebrating 50 years since the first Ford Cortina was launched and changed the car landscape forever.

The Ford Cortina went on to sell an impressive 4.3 million during its twenty year life, eventually turning in to the Ford Sierra and then in to the Ford family car of today – the 2013 Ford Mondeo (which, interestingly, can be had with the 1.0 litre EcoBoost engine – smaller even than the 1200cc of that first Cortina).

That first Cortina was the start of Ford’s dominance of the UK car market, leading to an unbroken run of 35 years as the best selling car brand with most of the Cortinas, almost 3 million of them, built at Dagenham – in the days Ford actually built cars here.

But the Cortina wasn’t just a family car, it became a huge fleet car, with companies supplying Cortinas to reps and managers alike from the basic models up to the luxury ‘E’, GXL and Ghia models.

The Cortina also took family cars in to Motorsport with the race-prepared MK I Cortina GT followed by the still very desirable Lotus Cortina with its 1558cc twin-cam engine mopping up race wins around the world in the hands of teams like Jim Clark’s Team Lotus and Sir John Whitmore’s Alan Mann Racing.

The Cortina went out of production in 1982 and inspired (then) anarchic comic Alexi Sayle to front a BBC Arena documentary on ‘The Private Life of the Ford Cortina’, which even included an interview with bank robber John McVicar who praised the Cortina as a great getaway car.

Now, thirty years on from his Arena documentary, Alexi Sayle is revisiting the Cortina once more on tonight’s BBC’s One Show with Chris Evans to celebrate 50 years of the Ford Cortina, which has given us the excuse to put up a gallery of Ford Cortina photos to celebrate.

Happy 50th birthday, Ford Cortina.

By Cars UK