Air horns, anyone?

I think I can beat that - in the early '80s in Bangor, NI, there was a
Ford Cortina done up in Starsky-and-Hutch style, with a red paint job
with the big white tick along both sides.

 

Oh ****, yes. The W.of Scotland was replete with those.

 

Didn't they do some sporty version? I have a vague memory of something
orange and black. Like darsy after a punishment beating.

 

Some window licking shitbag still drives around in a Transit van hand
painted black with red A team markings, the fucking idiot has even put GMC
on the front!!

 

Avenger Tiger.

<http://www.simoncars.co.uk/hillman/slides/Hillman Avenger Tiger M
kII%20front.jpg>

My dad had a GLS - essentially a Tiger but in 'executive' trim. (ie.
Rostyle wheels, vinyl roof, no wing, black velour interior and 6-gauge
instrument pack)

 

That's the thing! Hillman's attempt at a Ford Escort Mexico. Doesn't
look too bad, actually.

Fast?

 

For an Avenger - I think.

But he had it from new in 1975-ish and traded it for a brand new MkI
Honda Accord 'Hondamatic' in 1979, so I was far too young to make any
comparisons. Sadly he's no longer around to ask. I do recall him saying
it was better than his Cortina - but I doubt a MkIII 1.3 Cortina was a
ball of fire.

 

John Cage's 4'33"?

 

No, but it's probably the best thing for it.

 

Not as fast as it went with either a BDA or the later Lotus lump out of
the Sunbeam, as was done to a few of them. In fact the bloke I know who
put the BDA lump in was an Escort man but he reckoned the Avenger had
the edge once it was fully rally-prepped and that BDA in it, innit.

 

Just looked into this.

The GLS was a 4-door GT, with the 1.5l twin-carb engine, so not quite up
to Tiger spec.

The Tiger was pretty rapid for its day - 0-60 in under 9 seconds, which
was faster than an Escort Mexico.

Allegedly, the Avenger had better handling than the Escort, too.

 

A real cross-country missile, then ;-)

 

Some sad bastard round here had a Chrysler 180 painted up as the Mad
Max Interceptor. I ended up working for him at the bike shop recently.

--
Lozzo
Versys 650 Inter-Continental Hyperbolistic Missile , CBR600F-W racebike
in the making, TS250C, RD400F (somewhere)
BMW E46 318iSE (it's a car, not one of those 2-wheeled pieces of shite
they churn out)

 

Devastatingly so...

 

Going back a generation of Rootes/Chrysler cars to the 60s, my father
once took on a salesman who proved to be useless and was sacked. So Dad
was suddenly long of a Singer Vogue Estate. He didn't want to take the
savage depreciation hit of a nearly-new car, so he sent it back for a
Stage 2 Alexander tune. I were nobbut a lad at the time and it was a
glorious Q car, looking dull in its uninspiring two-tone green but going
like ordure off a gardening tool. I recall it making the most
wonderfully menacing exhaust note, too.

 

I used to really like them - if ever a car cried out for a big engine,
that one did. A fecking 1.8 or 2.0L four-banger was a travesty.
I see it was originally to have a V6 as an option...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_180

 

Back in my formative years, a close friend had one of them. He wasn't
renowned for his taste in cars, but being on a tight budget as we all
were then, he took what he could get, but took it to extremes. He
replaced a perfectly good Triumph 2000 with the 180 as he thought the
180 would be more economical and comfortable. It turned out to be
quicker, but that was it. It was horrendously unreliable as well as
thirsty (never bettered 25mpg) and a pig to start on anything other
than warm, dry days.

That was the car with which I discovered ballast resistors, come to
think of it (thread swerve to the coil thread) as replacing the 6V coil
with a plain 12V item didn't help the starting problems. Tracing the
loom (to remove the fucked resistor) was given up as a bad job, and
stripping the ignition switch resulted in hotwiring it for a week
before we got our act together and did it properly. The starting
improved then, but the overall reliability didn't.

Changing the plugs on a hot engine (because it had flooded /again/) was
a nightmare - I've prolly still got the scars on my wrists from the
damned hot exhaust heat shield that ran below the plugs and wilfully
obstructed access to the rear plugs. Number four in particular
required a universal jointed plug spanner and a universal jointed wrist
to boot.

To sum up, it went OK, but wallowed like a pig in shit and drank fuel
like a pig in cider. Having said that, other mates had things like
MKIII Cortinas that were no better and at least the 180 had comfy seats
(which is just as well, 'cos we spent a lot of time sitting in them
when it broke down - again).

Years later, I got to know a bloke with a 200 auto: no quicker, even
thirstier and just as unreliable - but at least it had comfy seats.

 

The Avenger was underestimated and overlooked, due to Ford's dominance
in motorsport. The Avenger was the superior vehicle - lighter than the
MKI Escort, stiffer than the MKII. It handled as well as the MKII,
which is to say better than the MKI, but it suffered in the engine
department as the 1500 was wheezy and thirsty in comparison to the Kent
1600 and the 1725 put it up a class, against 2-litre cars, to its
obvious disbenefit.

One of the lads in a Devon motor club had a fast road prepped Avenger
and was scratching for more power. Following a brainstorming evening
in a pub, we pooled resources and slipped a 2-litre Pinto into it, just
to see if it could be done. The Kent 1600 would go in it, but nobody
had one lying about - they were all in Escorts ;-)

I'm struggling to remember what the snags were, but they were various:
had to bash the bulkhead a lot, even more than persuading a Pinto into
a MKI Escort; had to fiddle a lot with the crossmember as the Pinto
sump well was at the wrong end and fiddle even more with engine mounts
as the Pinto block was so tall. There was a lot of midnight
metal-bashing went into that installation.

Did it in the end and that was a fast car, for its time - superior to
comparable Escorts, for sure. Midnight drag races with RS2000s up the
brand new, unopened dual carriageway ascertained that. Not as severely
nose-centred as the RS 2000, either. He ended up with a proper-built
all-steel 2.1 in that, as we saw him doing stage rallies in it and he
did all right, too.

 

I had a mate who had the Triumph 2000 with fuel injection.
(Maybe they all had it?)

He would often spend a weekend with his head under the bonnet looking
for 10 mpg that had gone missing.

 

Agreed on all points, but then again, I was driving them as new cars
(working in Chrysler dealership) and found the handling to be just like
a larger Avenger. It was fairly planted, when hustling along. Time and
wear takes it toll, of course.
Istr the tappets had to be set hot, which was an uncomfortable and
unpleasant job.