WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Each year we gasp at the decayed Barn Find displays and marvel at the enthusiasm of their owners. But once the re-build commences and horrors are exposed, how many are restored to their former glory? CCW catches up with their owners...
PETER CROMPTON LANCASHIRE
‘Barn Find?’ laughs Peter Crompton, the proud restorer and owner of this fine Cortina GXL. ‘This car didn’t even have the luxury of a barn to protect it. It lay abandoned and hidden in a load of brambles and was only spotted by a passing lorry driver high up in his cab!
‘I heard about it through the Mk3 Cortina Owners’ Club and knew right away that I was going to buy it, particularly because it is a very rare two-door version of Ford’s GXL. and therefore just too special to miss. Unfortunately the farmer who owned the field refused to release the car and it took me two years before I managed to do a deal in 2019.’
Peter was able to take stock of the enormity of the task that lay ahead when he got the car back to his workshop: ‘I was soon able to confirm that this was going to be a total restoration so I set about completely dismantling the car and uploading updates to my YouTube channel where kind Patreon supporters generously helped to fund some of my costs.’
Stripping all of the faded yellow paint off revealed the lovely original shade of Silver Fox beneath. ‘I made certain that every speck of rust was eradicated, which wasn’t an easy or quick job,’ remembers Pete. ‘The car received a new roof skin, inner and outer sills, a new floorpan, bulkhead, scuttle, boot floor, rear quarter panels and wings. I also needed to make some extensive chassis repairs.’
But this wasn’t a ‘throw away and replace everything re-build’: ‘I was determined to keep the maximum amount of original metal in place as possible, which made it an exhausting experience to be honest. But I’m so glad that I kept going and saved the car.’
Peter thought long and hard about the use that the car would receive as he approached completion of the restoration: ‘The Cortina – and the GXL in particular – would have provided fast, comfortable and luxurious transport over long distances for senior management as a company car when it was new,’ says Peter. ‘I wanted to bring the car up to a standard that allowed those original abilities but modified for the traffic conditions that now exist some 50 years later. I upgraded the car extensively but as discreetly as possible, so there’s a four-speed automatic gearbox f
