The Grand Tour

Hello.

-Hello. -Hello, everybody.

Hello.

Hello.

Thank you.

And - thank you - and coming up

in this never-to-be-forgotten show...

...Richard operates a bat...

...James sits in a car humming...

...and I park outside a cathedral.

Thank you so much.

Exciting stuff.

Now, this is...

this is a bit of a Ford-based show.

Because we were staggered to hear the other day,

that they're thinking of pulling the plug

on the Mondeo.

Now this is enormous news.

In Britain, losing the Mondeo is a bit like...

Well, losing the Royal Family.

And if that happens, someone would make a documentary about them.

Quite. Which is why we decided this week

The Grand Tour should make a documentary

about the passing of Ford's medium-sized family saloon.

It's exciting stuff.

The Mondeo story actually begins way back

when the world was black and white,

with this -

the Ford Cortina.

This is Genesis, the first chapter

in easily the most important book

in British motoring history.

It came along in 1962

and apart from the CND rear lights,

it was nothing special.

It wasn't revolutionary like the Mini.

It was just an ordinary family saloon.

Ford therefore decided that to put it on the map

they'd mount an assault on the world's racetracks.

Which meant creating a high-performance version.

The world's first ever fast Ford.

And this is what they came up with.

Life doesn't get much better than this.

Cadwell Park, sunny day...

Mark One Lotus Cortina.

This thing is a riot.

It had a revolutionary twin-cam 1.6 litre engine.

Which sounds like

a murder of mad bees.

It revved like hell.

All the way to 8,000 RPM.

And produced 105 horsepower.

Ha-ha, ha-ha!

Oh, wow!

The result was some spectacular performance.

The road cars would do 108 mph.

And in race trim that shot up to 145.

That was the stuff of spaceships back then.

And best of all...

if you were really on it,

it would lift the front wheel in the corners.

On the downside it didn't stop properly...

...and there was very little grip.

So it was an over-steer mentalist.

It was also astonishingly brittle.

Autocar magazine ran one for a year.

29,000 miles.

And in that time, it needed six rear axles

and three sets of rear suspension.

And probably a whole load of new half-shafts as well,

because they were made from chocolate.

But it didn't matter.

Because the Lotus Cortina wasn't designed to last a lifetime.

It was designed to last about 40 minutes.

Because that is how long a race lasted.

Back in the early '60s, saloon-car racing in Britain

was just about the most exciting motor sport

the world had ever seen.

The massive American Fords would roar down the straights

and then in the corners the army of Minis

would be right back at them.

It was beautiful, snarling chaos.

But when the dust settled, it was the Lotus Cortina

that was doing the winning.

- It actually won the Championship in 1964... -

...and it didn't only shine on the tracks.

In 1966, it won the RAC Rally of Britain.

They even drove one down the bobsleigh run in the Italian resort

after which the Cortina had been named.

Here's what the famed bobsled run looks like

from the driver's seat of the world-famous Cortina.

At this point in history, rationing had only just

given way to The Rolling Stones.

Hemlines were going up

and all kinds of groovy stuff was going down.

And the glamorous Cortina

caught the mood of the moment perfectly.

It was exciting. The first car ever that made

the ordinary family man feel special.

Like he wasn't just a downtrodden cog.

And it was the same story with the Mark II Cortina.

And the Mark III.

The result was spectacular.

One car in every three sold in the UK was a Ford.

And one in ten was a Cortina.

Everyone I've spoken to while I've been preparing this film has said the same thing.

"Oh, yeah, my dad used to have one of those."

I mean, on the crew here, whose dad had a Cortina?

Ha! Look at that. It's everyone.

Apart from the director, obviously, who has a double-barrelled name,

so his dad had a Range Rover. But anyway...

the point is, these were the best-selling cars

Britain had ever seen... by miles.

Of course it wasn't all rampant sexism

and hilarious handling that Ford used to make a name for its family saloon.

There was some important business stuff too.

Back in late-1960s Britain, if you earned £3,000 a year

the government would take 41% of it away in tax.

So, to get round this problem, a lot of companies

paid their staff a bit less,

but then to make up the difference

they gave them...a car.

And that...

wasn't subject to any tax at all.

Ford cottoned on to that.

And came up with a variety of trim levels

to suit the typical management structure.

There was a base model for the sales rep.

And the L for the sales manager.

Then you had the XL with a clock and a locking glove compartment

for the sales director.

And the powerful GT for the managing director.

Ford's badging policy quite literally changed the class system in Britain.

Because we used to judge people on how they held their knife and fork,

or whether they said toilet or lavatory.

But after the Cortina came along,

it was all based on what it said on your boot lid.

Our dads understood what these badges meant.

And boy, oh, boy, so did we.

You join me in Doncaster outside my old school.

And I remember very clearly

coming out of that door one afternoon in 1969,

skipping along here, coming round this gatepost here,

and I noticed that parked over there

was a 1600E - an E - in amber gold.

Just like that one.

And in it...was my dad.

And that was impossible.

The E was the absolute king of the hill.

It had four dials set into its wooden dash.

It had a leather and aluminium steering wheel.

And on the outside there were Rostyle wheels

and front fog lamps.

It was beautiful and wondrous

and exciting beyond words.

I can still remember now, vividly, how I felt.

My knees actually buckled.

I mean...

The hairs on the back of my neck are rising now

in exactly the same way as they did on that autumn day 50 years ago.

I can also remember the enormity of the hug I gave my dad,

cos I was just so proud of him.

I mean, he had an E! An E stood for Executive.

My dad had a 1600E.

I mean, that meant he was better than the Duke of Edinburgh.

A few years later in South Wales,

another young boy called James May

went through the exact same thing.

I was at my mate Andrew Jones's house, just up the road from ours,

when his dad came in and said that my dad

had just arrived home and he had a new car.

So, I went outside...

and there parked next to the kerb,

was a brand-new Cortina GXL.

And I thought, "Well, that can't be my dad's new car."

But it was.

This was the all-new Mark III Cortina.

And, because it was the GXL model,

it had chrome strips on the grille,

and a vinyl roof.

And four auxiliary dials that were angled towards the driver.

It also had something called a rev counter,

and I'd never seen one of those before.

But when I looked at it,

I suddenly became aware that my body could produce semen.

Unfortunately, not all children in Britain

were as fortunate as James and me.

Because some of them were born in Birmingham.

And you couldn't really have a Ford here

because this was the home of British Leyland.

I grew up here on this street.

And I remember the day my dad came home with our new car.

I prayed it would be a Cortina. Literally prayed.

But it wasn't.

What it was... was a shoulder-sagging

bag of disappointment

called the Austin Allegro Estate.

It doesn't even have four doors.

What was my father thinking?

Why did he do that to us?