TEAM ADVENTURE

Summer HOLIDAY '82

Family cars on summer holidays… Team PC heads back 40 years in the new cars that took us to the seaside

It’s the summer of 1982 and the roads of Britain are packed as families head off to the coast for some rest and relaxation. England have just tumbled out of the World Cup in Spain, Ron Greenwood has retired and HMS Hermes has returned home to Portsmouth, after the Falklands are retaken by British forces. Despite soaring unemployment, over 12 per cent, support for Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Government is high as the summer sun shines.

And the lack of air-conditioning means the kids are complaining as you sit in a traffic jam on the M10 because the final sections of the M25 are still four years from completion. The roads of Britain were different back in the Eighties and there was still plenty of single carriageway traffic jammery to negotiate before you could hit the beach. No matter though, when you were in one of these fine chariots.

We’ve gathered five functional family cars that were launched 40 years ago and taken them away for some nostalgic reassessment. This isn’t a straightforward test though; we’ve chosen cars that we remember from our own holiday travels. Time for a few anecdotes as we head back to the summer of Fame and Come on Eileen.

FORD SIERRA

C/D £3250 1 £2200 2 £1100 3 £550

The Ford Sierra had a difficult birth, but in many ways it’s one of the most important cars ever designed. The ‘salesman’s spaceship’ or ‘jelly mould’ was controversial from the outset. Styled by French visionary Patrick Le Quément under the tutelage of Ford’s long-standing design chief, Uwe Bahnsen, it looked like nothing else on the road.

Looking at today’s example, it feels familiar, a bona fide classic, but back in ’82, fleet managers baulked. There was no four-door and the styling was weird. Britain was still in love with the Cortina so change wasn’t welcome and the Sierra was too avantgarde; not what was expected from Ford.

In Germany, though, the Sierra was an instant hit. Consumers loved the imaginative styling and driver-focused cabin and it quickly became Ford’s best-ever seller over there. Two years later, it took the same mantle in the UK. Ford’s marketeers had worked their magic, Early concerns over crosswind stability had been answered with some minor tweaks and the sleek and stylish Ford finally knocked the Cavalier MkII off the top of the fleet sales charts.

Besides, beneath that ultra-modern exterior the Sierra was actually a fairly basic machine. V6 and diesel aside, it was Pinto-powered meaning 30-minute cambelt changes and ridiculously simple maintenance (music to a fleet manager’s ears) while it was also rear-wheel drive.

Driving today’s example provides everything you would expect from a proletarian Ford… it’s intuitive