KEEPERS
Dean realised a schoolboy fantasy after 30 years by owning the Capri GXL that he drooled over in the SuperSpeed showroom in the 1970s
Like many others, I started off my motoring CV with a Mini 1000, which quickly became a 1275 before moving on to the many Fords that I’ve owned; a Daytona Yellow RS2000 MkI, V6 Capris and Granada Ghias, XR2s, XR3s, a very nice silver Escort RS1600i plus many Escort MkIII vans!
‘However, there was always one Ford that my heart had yearned for since Iwas 13 and that was a Capri that stood forlorn in a dealer’s showroom for almost five years. I regularly dropped by just to drool over it on my way to and from school. It wasn’t just any sold showroom, but the legendary Essex Ford specialist and tuner SuperSpeed and this was no ordinary GXL –it was powered by aMustang engine!
‘The story goes that a customer (purportedly a wealthy sheik) wanted a very special Capri made to his specifications some 50 years ago. Few would do it better than SuperSpeed, which had long had a reputation for making big-engined fast Fords. The project was completed in 1975 and delivered direct from the factory to brothers John and Mike Young but the customer never returned, and it wasn’t until 1979 that the car could be registered and sold.
‘I used to see it around a lot, even when it was passed on to a North London chip shop owner called Costas in the mid-1980s, by which time this unique Capri had appeared in StreetMachinemagazine because it was a regular drag racer at Santa Pod. By an amazing stroke of luck a friend with whom I shared a workshop acquired the beast shortly after; by then it needed restoring and he made a start but it sat neglected again for many years until 2011 when he suggested that I took it over. My dream had come true!
‘It had deteriorated quite a lot since it left the SuperSpeed showroom and, despite being an automatic, rear axle failure had been a frequent problem. I tracked down Ford expert Andy Powis at Andy’s Auto Body in Kent who came up with some modern solutions, which led to me handing the entire car over to him to restore. He did afine job of it and everything was faithfully replicated to showroom spec, including new door cards and a headlining sourced from Aldridge. Specialised Engines in Essex re-built the Cleveland 351ci engine and it now kicks out 400bhp – 20bhp more than when it was new.
‘The car was back on the road in 2013 and while I wanted to keep the Capri true to the original brief, I updated the running gear where it mattered. It originally had afour-speed manual gearbox however automatic transmission was fitted during the 1990s. I soon swapped it back and Specialised Engines has since fitted amodern Tremec fiv-espeed manual. Andy Powis devised a trick coil spring rear suspension setup to go with the racing ‘Atlas’ axle, similar to Capri racers, but
