Rusty But Trusty

As long as people have been driving old cars, they’ve been updating them to match contemporary trends. That’s how you get 1950s sports cars in beautiful brown with shag carpet and vinyl seats. And it seems that, love it or hate it, the recent interest in “patina”, even if that means worn around the edges, we’ve started realizing that in the long run, putting shag and brown paint on your car is not worth the effort. So it’s weird when you see WRX blue on a classic car, even if it does kind of work on some of the 1970s designs. Find our car in eastern Oregon for $900.

That said, given this car already has what it’s got, I’d say go all out and find some 1970s wheels… gold mesh wheels so you’re going with that blue/gold theme, but keeping it period. The Rostyle wheels are actually pretty cool on this car, but once you’ve updated the paint, keeping the other stuff the same is not the greatest option. The good news is, the bolt pattern cross references to old Alfas and probably other Fords, so you’ve got a ready choice of good wheels if you can’t find one from another old Capri.

The car looks pretty straight overall, and from having seen what one of my garage mates has done, a bit of lowering makes Capris look pretty aggressive. Being the earlier Capri makes it easier to smog, and performance parts should be readily available from England and Germany, where these were really popular.

Here’s the engine – it’s a 2.6 liter V6 with a 4-speed manual transmission, the best imaginable setup for that year. Interestingly, the 4-liter engine in the Ford Ranger is still a Cologne V6 – what are the odds that someone hasn’t already tried plopping that under the hood of a Capri? Looks like the original color is definitely not blue… more like baby-vomit green or something.

Left rear is clean too. For $900, with a good running engine, this might not be a bad deal. Take care of the brakes and alternator, tweak the stance and wheels, and you could have a fun tourer to run around the hills.

Tags: british, Feature, ford, german, under $2000

This entry was posted on January 2, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.