Readers' Photos # 17: Mk I Cortina Sedan
This delightful Mk I Cortina was photographed by our East Coast correspondent but the image appears to have been captured closer to Tasmania's capital city of Hobart. It was in great nick, especially when one considers that the car's roughly fifty-five years old. It's a little known fact that early Australian-built Cortinas, like the one shown here, differed from their British-made cousins in that they featured extra internal cabin bracing off the rear wheel arches to cope with this country's rougher roads. This is not dissimilar to early Aussie Ford Falcons ; the first model, the XK, was based on a North American vehicle and therefore lacked the rugged suspension that local conditions demanded and that was fitted to subsequent iterations. The Cortina was very popular in Australia from the early 1960s until the mid 1980s, when it was dropped from the Ford line-up. There were five different models, designated the ...