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Man Maths: Ford Capri 2.8i

5 months ago

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Writer:

Andrew Frankel | Ti co-founder

Date:

13 July 2024

How many of you remember Willie Green? Willie is 81 now and stopped racing after a particularly nasty accident at Goodwood in 2005, but before he did he reckoned he’d done at least 1500 races and won around 600 of them. Quick in modern cars, devastating in historics, his car control was otherworldly.

I know this because one of the joys of his life was to turn up at track days everywhere from Donington to the Nürburgring in a scruffy old Ford Capri, and make all the hot shots in their GT3 Porsches look absolutely ridiculous. And he was kind enough to invite me to sit in his passenger seat while he did so on many occasions. His technique, particularly at the ’Ring, was to drive at the kind of speed you might expect an elderly Capri to be driven, wait for some poor sap in their bewinged monster to come howling past, let them get a few seconds up the road, then reel them in as if they were parked.

Willie adored those Capris and while, to be fair, he did replace their 2.8-litre Cologne engines with 24-valve units sourced from Ford Scorpios, the rest of the car he left pretty standard. He liked it that way, and with a live rear axle he spent most of any given lap grinning like a loon out of one or other of the side windows. I’ve wanted one ever since.

The run-out 280 was agricultural but fun, says Frankel

Actually, scratch that. I’ve wanted one ever since that series of The Professionals when Bodie upgraded to a MkIII 3-litre S, leaving poor old Doyle scrabbling around in its exhaust fumes in his old 2-litre RS2000. Not even my evil almost-stepfather’s automatic 3-litre Ghia put me off.

Not even I am quite old enough to have tested Capris in period, but I do remember borrowing one of the last 2.8i models, the run-out 280 complete with limited-slip diff and seven spoke alloys and finding it, as had Willie, remarkably good fun to drive, albeit in a slightly agricultural way.

But now the Capri name has returned, attached to the back of an EV crossover, I miraculously find my interest in the original piqued all over again. So I toddled over to the PistonHeads classifieds and got the fright of my life. I thought you might be looking at £10-12k for a 2.8i, maybe as much as £20k for a really good 280. How wrong I was. The cheapest 280 listed with 50k miles on the clock is up for £34,995! The most expensive? There’s a 2.8i Special listed with 585 miles for £71,195.

Expect to pay at least £35,000 for a 280 today

Lesser Capris are cheaper for a reason...

Look elsewhere and even 100k mile 2.8is are knocking on the door of twenty grand. And while there are plenty of cheaper Capris, they’ve all got either automatic gearboxes, the lumpen old Essex V6, or a four-cylinder motor of 2-litres or below. You could buy a 1.3 if you’re interested. Me neither.

It’s a shame because having not really thought about Capris for years, now the idea really appeals. The problem is the list of other cars for the same money that probably appeal even more. Sometimes it seems, not even Man Maths can blind you to the truth.

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