END OF THE FORD FIESTA
FIESTA'S FOND FAREWELL
Clubs will pay tribute to the UK’s favourite car at the Classic Motor Show after it was axed earlier this year. We look back on how it became a household name for generations of families
Ford Fiesta production drew to a close earlier this year after more than 22 million examples had been sold across seven generations. Its place in history has been assured for some time but it will be remembered first and foremost as Britain’s best-selling supermini, a term coined by Ford of Britain's chief, Terry Beckett, in 1976 to herald the arrival of the Blue Oval’s crisp-edged and futuristic-feeling baby hatch in what was a new market for Ford at the time. As has already been acknowledged, though, it is a market that the Fiesta would soon come to dominate.
FRONT-WHEEL-DRIVE DEBUTS
It had to happen; even Ford's Detroit bosses had realised that a transverse engine with FWD was fast becoming the must-have layout for a well-packaged small car. Fiat's 127 and Volkswagen's Polo had raised the game with their gearboxes on the end of the engine instead of in the sump like in a Mini or a Peugeot 104 and the path was set.
What began as Project Bobcat first went public with styling proposals from Detroit and the Italian Ghia studio, both with stubby tails but neither with a hatchback. They were shown in a styling clinic at Lausanne in 1972 and Tom Tjaarda’s Ghia design found more favour. The findings were fed back to Ford studios in Detroit, Dunton in the UK, Merkenich in Germany and, of course, Ghia. Their next full-size models came together at another customer clinic a year later.
The Dunton model looked like a Vauxhall, the Merkenich model looked like a blander version of the final car and Ghia’s went the other side of the line. Ford's design chief for Europe, Uwe Bahnsen, then melded together the best bits of each, including the Italian proposal’s dipped, curving waistline and crisp side sculpting and the the German proposal’s nose. Then he added the aerofoil-section slats for the grille that would soon spread across the Ford range.
So, what would fit under the bonnet of the second European Ford to feature front-wheel-drive(the first was the German Taunus 12M and its derivatives, powered by a V4 engine later used by Saab)? The answer was a new, smaller-capacity unit, similar to the existing pushrod Kent engine but with conventional pistons and wedge-shaped combustion chambers instead of a flat head and chambers in the pistons, plus a reversion to the three-bearing crankshaft of these engines' Anglia-related ancestors.
