I grew up, or rather gradually became older, in Essex, that English county most associated with pneumatically proportioned peroxide blondes, sun-hats with “kiss me quick” written on them and the consumption of jellied eels and whelks on Southend Sea front. By other people, of course. Bleurgh.

And fast Fords. For as long as records have been kept, my dear county has had a close relationship with Ford’s most pacey products. Some of them were even developed here, with Fords Technical Research centre being based in Dunton, and their motorsports facility (birthplace of the RS200) having had its home in Boreham. The Ford Capri, though not actually British built, had a particular appeal as a kind of blue-collar supercar, at least in its most powerful guises.

All of which makes this example, seen at a local car show every Essex boy’s dream.

This car would have started life as a 2.8i Special, with the venerable Cologne V6. A Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection system would have fed pressurised fuel into the combustion chambers, pistons would reciprocate and 160hp would have been delivered at the flywheel. These hp would then have been pumped through a propshaft to a live rear axle, suspended from the underbody by way of a pair of semi-elliptic springs.  The result would have been 7.9 seconds to sixty, a 130mph top end, and a propensity for rear-wheel-drive drifty, slidey histrionics at the drop of a hat. Sideways was the 2.8i’s natural trajectory.

And that was with 160hp. If you were either an expert and had mastered the correct driving technique for quick Capris, you could ask the very nice men at Turbo Technics to up the power a little, by way of strapping a turbocharger to that lazy, lusty old six-pot.

Truth is, a number of the folk who had these conversions carried out actually weren’t experts at all. Some of them were complete idiots, and worst still were those folk who bought the car second hand with the conversion work having been commissioned by a past owner. An exchange of money would occur, followed by a rapid visit to the emergency ward and then the donation of vital organs before being remembered through musty-eyed memories to the tune of “I did it my way” at a local Church.

This particular widow-maker probably hasn’t. It lives today to tell a tale of brutal straight-line performance, albeit not as crazed as some examples possessed; this one has the “mild” 200hp package. It’s odds on that there has been tinkering performed in all the right places to translate some of that prowess into the corners, too. There are myriad suspension modifications available to tame the Capri, an it’s mouthwatering to contemplate which of these mods might be lurking underneath this one.

 

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Turbo-Technics would, and still will, dredge up extra power from any old six-cylinder Ford lump you care to offer them, providing you produce a commensurately sized bag of coins.  Notable applications include the Ford Sierra Ghia 2.9 4×4 Estate, numerous examples of which were twin-turbocharged to make for absolutely ridiculous levels of stealth-power. Of course, many of these were later painted in Fords’ “Look at me!” Citrine Yellow, and then any sense of understatedness immediately disappears.

Personally, I’d like a twin-turbo Cosworth BOB powered Scorpio, so I can make people throw up when they see my cars acute ugliness in their rear view mirror, before overtaking them very quickly and causing them to throw up again as my sheer speed causes their cerebral cortex to break down entirely.

(All images taken by the author, copyright reserved Hooniverse/Chris Haining)