In the past, I have spent many happy hours watching the founding editors of the excellent EVO magazine test all sorts of exotic machinery around my old stomping ground: Blyton Park in Lincolnshire. John Barker, Road Tester Extraordinaire, was very instrumental in the design layout of Blyton Park, and we have known one another a very long time. I was therefore pleased to get a phone call from him earlier in the year about a sequence of articles that EVO magazine would publish in the summer, charting super cars through the decades. He and fellow editor, Richard Meaden, thought it would add depth to the series if they devoted a couple of pages in each edition to the ‘Dad’s Car of the decade’ which he thought would also be put through its paces at some suitable locations.
And so it was that at the end of April, I found myself at the wheel of our trust Mk3 Cortina, heading for a supercar rendezvous in the wild moorland of North Yorkshire. It has to be said that due to an obscure and incurable carburettor issue, the Cortina (which is only a 1300 anyway) was perhaps not producing all of the claimed 54bhp. Steadily, undramatically and comfortably, it chugged northward quite happily in search of glamorous new ’70’s’ friends which included a purple Lamborghini, a yellow Ferrari and a blue Aston Martin.
As was to be the case on later shoots, the Lambo was chosen to be the Cortina’s supercar nemesis and the result was two wonderful photos by Aston Parrott of the menace behind and the fast disappearing V12 monster. The younger members of the EVO team genuinely enjoyed the chance to sample a car built way before they were born and the result was a great article by James Taylor in the July edition of EVO (issue 347).
The journey home was as languid and uneventful as the outbound trip: still a bit low on power but a charming reminder of more simple times.
