In America, the Federal Capris were only sold from 1970 to 1977, and it is of the opinion that Fords Lincoln-Mercury division didn’t really know what to do with the car. The reason it wasn’t sold in Ford dealerships was that Ford already had a compact car in the form of the Pinto, and selling the Capri alongside might have relegated this car to an also-ran. Like any other car in the America, the Capri had to cope with ever increasing emission regulations and bumper and side-impact mandates, all which reduced the cars performance. US models only ever got five engine options: a 1600cc Kent overhead valve four, a 2000cc Pinto later replaced by a 2300cc Lima overhead cam four, and a 2600cc Cologne V6 later enlarged to 2800cc.

I have been interested in Capris since around 1992 when my 1969 Mini Cooper sadly got stolen from a car park near where I worked. My father had two Capris, a 1971 Mk1 1300 and a 1976 Mk2 1.6S, so when a colleague at work said his friend was selling a white 1980 Mk3 3.0S, I bought it and this started my interest. The 3.0 V6 engine gave was to a 3.5 Rover V8, the interior was upgraded for half leather one from a later car, and then I sold it. My next Capri was a black 1981 Mk3 2.0S, which got modified a little with the interior from the one I sold, and some tuning parts to the engine. Both these cars have been featured in the CCI magazine, the V8 (CWL277V) in the July 1997 issue, and the 2.0S (PKR930W) in August 1998.

I wasn’t planning on getting another Capri, but I made the mistake of wearing a Capri Club sweatshirt to work one day in October 1997. A lady there said that her grandmother was selling her “old Capri” that she had from new, so I made a note of her address and went round to have a look after work that evening. When she drove it out the garage, I liked what I saw. Here was a Mark 1 Capri 1300GT XL, finished in white with a tan vinyl interior, and with only 55,000 miles on it from new. The lady, Kath, said that when they originally bought it, it was a metallic silver colour, but as with these paint finishes on a lot of Ford cars of that era, it peeled off, so they had it resprayed in white. They had bought the car from new back in July 1970, and had used it for family transport at first, and then started to keep it for weekend use hence the low mileage. Her husband had sadly passed away, and with her advancing age she decided to sell the car. I didn’t haggle too much over the asking price, and finally bought it for £1200.

I drove the car around exactly as I bought it for a few months, and then started to restore bits and pieces of it. A good second hand carpet from a later Capri was adapted to fit, the paintwork was given a good clean up, as was the interior. My only changes were some aluminium numberplates on the outside, and a wooden gearknob and Mountney wooden steering wheel on the inside. The dashboard was recovered with stick-on fake wooden veneer to cover up the fading original fake wooden veneer. The interior door trim panels had warped over the years due to rain coming in, so I made up some from scratch using thin hardboard and the old ones as templates, and covered them in tan vinyl. An MOT revealed a few small holes in the floorpan, so I had these welded up.

Fast-forward to March 1998, and the start of the car show season in England. As part of the Kent Capri Club, the car drew some admiring glances at the shows, around the Kent and South East London area, where I was born. At one particular show a Cortina 1600E caught my eye, more to the point the full chrome Rostyle wheels it had on it. So I scoured the country for a set and eventually picked up some down in deepest Sussex. Towards the end of the show season in 1998, the engine started to feel a little down on power, and when checked out I found it was only running on three cylinders. I did a compression test, and the compression was way down on one cylinder. Removing the cylinder head and pouring paraffin down the bores, that one cylinder emptied so much quicker than the others that I figured the piston rings had gone. This started the first major upheaval on the car, starting around November 1998.

The 1300cc OHV Kent engine was removed, and replaced with a 2100cc OHC Pinto engine, purchased as a short block from Vulcan engineering. The cylinder head (also from Vulcan) was fitted with bigger inlet and exhaust valves, a 285 degree camshaft, twin Dellorto carburettors on an alloy inlet manifold, and a tubular exhaust manifold. While the 1300cc lump was out, I cleaned up under the engine bay as best I could, including stripping off the old paint and respraying where it was bad. The wiring loom was removed from the engine bay, the original tape removed, the wires cleaned and repaired where necessary, and then I re-wrapped it with insulation tape. At this time, I also modified the loom to use an alternator instead of the original dynamo, supplementing the wires in the loom with a piece of thick cable from the alternator straight back to the battery. The brake system was overhauled with a new master cylinder, copper brake lines, flexible hoses, rebuilt callipers on the front and new wheel cylinders on the back. A five speed gearbox from a Sierra was fitted, which involved me having a new propshaft made up. Once the car was back on the road, it felt like a rocket compared to how it was before, almost as fast as my V8 Capri. The original 4.125:1 ratio rear axle helping acceleration, at the expense of top speed.

Around January 1999, I met the woman who would later become my wife, Toni. Her living in New Jersey, USA was obviously going to be a problem with me living in South East London, England. Over the next year and into the new Millennium, we saw each other quite a lot, she very kindly visiting me more than I did her on account of I don’t like flying. We started to think about one of us relocating, and I thought I’d like to try living in America (like the James Brown song). Thoughts turned of what to do with my Capris if I moved. I had my daily driver 1981 Mk3, which by now had its seats re-trimmed in black and yellow leather, a sound system installed, and a Rover V8 under the bonnet. I had got quite good at these V8 conversions, this one being my second. Then there was my Mk1, and I figured this would be the one to bring with me, since it is easier bringing cars into the US that are over 25 years old. If you register them as historic, it means no MOT or “inspection” as it’s called here.

Having decided on the Mk1, I then had some restoration work done to it. Although in good condition for a 30 year old car, there were some rust spots coming through the bodywork in places. In addition, I believe it was resprayed white over the original silver paintwork, which had a peeling problem. It was quite easy to peel off the paint right down to the primer simply by sticking insulation tape on it and pulling it off. With these problems in mind, I entrusted the work to my local Capri specialists Tickover (0208 298 1995). I gutted the interior, and drove the car up there with nothing but a drivers seat and steering wheel inside. They stripped the car back to bare metal, and went to work. The front wings were removed and found to be in good overall condition, requiring only some light patching. The front panel, a common rust area on the Capri, was held together with underseal, so the guys at Tickover sourced a good used one for the car. Both the original doors were rusty along the bottom edge, so again a good set of second-hand doors were used. The headlamp surrounds were rotten, as were the front edges of the sills (rocker panels) where they went under the front wings, so repair sections were welded in. Finally, the car was resprayed, I did toy with the idea of having the car done in its original colour of Silver Fox, but I preferred it in white so that’s the colour I left it.

Once the bodywork was finished, the interior of the car started to look a bit sorry for itself. The headlining had been sagging since I bought the car, and the dashboard had been baked in the sun and had cracked. The straw that broke the camel’s back happened when I was cleaning inside the rear window, I leant on the top of the back seat, and both seats cracked right across the top where they too had been baked. That was it, I had to get the interior re-trimmed. Fortunately, I already knew of an excellent coachtrimming place that had done the seats in my Mk3. Royston Design and Development (01702 525747 or 525080) were located in Essex, and their credentials were sound, having done prototype work for both Ford and the Lear Corporation. Walking around their workshops, there were some interesting cars there : an old Ferrari, a Mercedes E-class, a couple of single seat racing cars, and the bodyshell of a very rare new AC, possibly a Series One. After the guy Dave showed me some samples, I decided on a blue interior since blue and white are Fords racing colours. The seats would be two tone blue leather, with dark surrounds and lighter centres, the carpet would be dark blue Wilton pile, and the headlining would be a light blue suede effect material. Since the seats would be re-trimmed anyway, I sourced a pair of Recaros from a later Capri, as these are more comfortable than the standard Mk1 front seats. It took them a while to do, but the car looked a million quid once it was finished. There were some slight problems with the seat mounts, that I eventually had to fix myself, but I would still recommend this company’s work any day.

I’d just like to say a quick word at this point about originality. Prior to the work described above, I remember going to one show, and a guy was telling me how I should restore the car. If not, he said he would consider buying it from me, when I asked how much, he offered some pitiful sum of money. Anyone who has ever driven a 1300 Capri will know the performance is not up to much, and even daily driving the little engine is hard pushed to move the relatively heavy body around. Likewise, vinyl seats are not too much fun in the British summertime, in the New Jersey heat they would get too hot and sticky. To me, the only people who were fit to compliment or criticize what I had done to my Capri were the previous owners. I took it round their house one day after a car show, while it was still all clean and polished, and let them see it. The lady who originally told me about it, who was in her mid-twenties, looked like she was going to cry as she couldn’t believe how nice it looked. Her mother, and her aunt, were also very pleased with the way it looked, and starting recalling stories of when they all went away on vacation in it. The grandmother liked it too, so much so that she went inside and got her camera, and started taking pictures of it.

Round about the middle of 2000, we had set a date of October 10^th for my emigration to America. I had to think about selling off what I wasn’t taking with me, and packing up the rest of my things. My daily driver Mk3 had since failed it’s MOT on rust around three of the four rear spring mounting points, and I didn’t want to spend any money fixing it, since I wouldn’t get that much for it anyway. However, a friend was interested in the engine and gearbox for his Capri, so he bought the whole car off me for a good price. I had been building a replica Lotus 7 since before buying the Mk1 Capri, this had got as far as a rolling chassis, but sadly this had to go as well.

Having now sold my daily driver, I needed some transport to get to work. Thankfully, being the Webmaster for the Kent Capri Club home page on the Internet threw me a lifeline. A guy had his Capri up for sale since February, and it hadn’t sold by May. Rather than pay another £150 for the road tax which was about to expire, he sent me an e-mail saying he would give it away to anyone that was interested. I was, so a friend drove me down to his house, and I picked up this late 1981 Mk3 2.0S Capri for nothing. I made my friends in the Club laugh when I turned up to one of our monthly meetings in it, as I told them that not only was it the newest car I’d even owned, it was also one of the few that had four tires of the same make, Firestone. I did a swap of the wheels before long though, fitting some pepperpots along with the tires from my old daily driver. The wheels that were on this, plus the wheels from my new “freebie” Capri, I took to a wheel refurbishment place and had them done, planning to bring them to America to sell. Mistakenly, they refitted the Firestone tires back on the rims, but unbeknown this would help me out once I got Stateside (keep reading). Shortly before I emigrated, I sold the car to a friend for £200. He knew I got it for free but didn’t mind paying because he wanted the alloy wheels and the parcel shelf for his Capri, which also cost him nothing and was obtained through an e-mail much like mine was.

October 2000 arrived, and I rented a van to take my belongings, now safely in boxes, along to the shipping company. I drove the Capri down there the next day, and a lady paid me a nice compliment saying it was the nicest car there, despite their warehouse being full of Mercedes, BMW and Lexus cars. October 10^th came and I was spirited off to Heathrow airport in a Cadillac Limousine, which was a complete surprise to me, arranged by my mother. After arriving in New Jersey, Toni and I got married on November 4^th, the best day of my life. Soon after, November 11^th to be exact, Toni drove with a U-haul trailer attached to our Dodge Ramcharger, me following in a rented Mitsubishi van to pick up the Capri and my belongings. The Capri was sitting in the warehouse looking all dusty, with a small dent in the right hand front wing. I tried to find out what to do about it, and the guy in charge there said I would need to contact my insurance company. I started the car and let it warm up for a while, but I couldn’t contain my excitement about having my Capri in the US, so I went tearing up the road and back in it. As I was driving back, the guy was out standing next to my wife. Apparently, he came running out after me when I took off up the road, saying, “where’s he going? He ain’t going nowhere ‘til I get my money”. We got the car back home safely, but while I was backing it off the trailer, the exhaust pipe caught on something and it pulled off the pipe that goes from the manifold to the centre box, bending it out of shape. Since there was no space in the garage yet, the car sat outside for the night. The following morning, for whatever reason the rear screen had shattered, but fortunately none of the broken glass had fallen into the car, and it was in the garage the next day.

Our Honeymoon was spent in Las Vegas, we didn’t win any money, but I got to drive eight laps around the Speedway in Richard Petty School NASCAR as my wedding present, lapping at over 130mph. Upon returning, the Capri was lurching over at a funny angle, caused by a flat front tyre. I had always had problems with the wide 205/60 tires I used seating on the narrow 5.5" Rostyle wheels, and it seemed the problem had come back to haunt me. But help was at hand, courtesy of the wheels I was telling you about earlier that had the tires mistakenly fitted on them. Though from a later Capri, these polished alloy wheels matched the chrome on the car just as well as the Rostyle wheels did.

I managed to source a rear screen from a company in Ohio called Team Blitz (001-614-443-5051), a guy called Norm there sent me out a good used replacement screen at a good price. All credit to my wife Toni, she helped me change the screen in the bitter New Jersey winter having just undergone knee surgery. The exhaust system would have to wait until later on when the car was insured and registered, but I treated my new neighbours to a few laps of the development in a Capri on an open exhaust every few weeks, just to keep the battery charged.

The headlamps were a harder problem to fix, but one that was so simple in the end. Federal Capris all had twin round headlamps with sealed beam units in, whereas the only British Capris to use twin round headlamps were the Mk1 GXL models (1973-74) and the Mk3s (1978-87). All others used mostly rectangular sealed beam, tungsten or halogen lights. Searching on the Internet one day, I found a Jaguar page that discussed why all cars sold in the US used sealed beam lights. To my astonishment, it was to actually reduce the light outputs, not to try and make the headlamps work as well as possible. Cars sold in America either had to use 5¾" or 7" round units, or 4x6" or 6x8" rectangular units, no exceptions. European cars, such as Mercedes and Jaguars, had to have special mounting bezels to fit one of these standard light sizes. Right up until the mid-1980s, cars sold here had to use sealed beam units because of some weird Government ruling. It seems that all governments do crazy things, right?

The Lucas headlamp fitted to my Capri was slightly smaller than the US 6x8" rectangular unit, and slightly larger and more rounded than the US 4x6" rectangular unit. I thought I would have to go over to a set of Federal twin round headlamps, which would also mean relocating my indicators from the outside of the headlamps to inside the front grille. In addition, Federal Capris used a bonnet with wider light apertures and a bonnet bulge, which we only got on the later facelift Mk1 Capris introduced in 1973. My car being a pre-facelift had smaller light apertures, and also the cute (and rare) flat bonnet. The Federal lights would still fit, but it would look odd. After thinking about trying US spec 6x8" lights in a modified headlamp surround, an idea dawned on me one day while I was sitting with the Lucas light in my hand. Fortunately, soon after I’d got the car, I had replaced the Lucas sealed beams with Lucas units that took a standard H4 twin-filament bulb. The low beam filament on this bulb has a metal shield to aim the beam downwards, and the mounting in the headlamp was tilted to throw the beam onto the left hand side of the road. What if I turned the bulb around so it tilted the other way? I carefully cut some new bulb mounting slots in the headlamp using a Dremel, and upon replacing the headlamp it works fine.

Getting the car street legal proved an arduous paper trail involving the customs broker I used to get my stuff into the country, and New Jersey Motor Vehicle Services. Motor Vehicles required a bill of laiding from the broker, an EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) document, and my British log book. Processing seemed to move at a snail’s pace and phone calls to the Special Titles Unit in Trenton left more questions than they resolved.

A New Jersey title (like our log book) eventually did come, which then meant I could get insurance, and then registration. I thought about what type of registration to get for the car, regular or historic. The official word is that historic registrations are only for use driving to car shows or other educational events. I asked around at a few car shows, and the general opinion for my part of South Jersey was that the police didn’t really care when you drove your historic car, just as long as they don’t see you driving it to work everyday. A historic registration is exempt from inspection, which means no-one would question my headlamp modifications, or the emissions produced by the rump-rump camshaft and two great Dellorto carburettors. I decided to get personalized historic license plates, this meant another eight week wait. I remember phoning my mother-in-law during my vacation back home in London to find out if my plates had arrived. I even phoned the MVS once I got back, and their answer of, “it’s only been six weeks, try again in a couple of weeks time” was just comical.

I finally got my plates early in July, and I wasted no time in bolting them onto the car. For only $80, I got some plates that said CAPRI1, with two little stacked Q’s before it like all historic plates have. Over here, you can have anything on your plates for only $80 with up to seven characters, a far cry from paying thousands of pounds to get something you have to use numbers for letters back home in England.

The plan was to go to a local exhaust centre to get a piece of pipe made up, then I could drive the car to my local weekly car show at a burger bar called Fuddruckers. However, the battery had other plans, and would refuse to hold a charge no matter what, despite being only two years old. Making the rounds of all the local parts emporiums, it was a similar case to the headlamps, in that the British Capri battery is a unique part. Federal Capri batteries are squat and square, and sit on the left hand side of the engine bay, whereas mine was tall, skinny and long, and sat on the right hand side. One size battery looked the right size, but it was slightly too long and fouled on the K&N air filters I’d fitted. Again I was faced with choices, but the simplest answer shone through in the end. I could either use smaller standard carburettor and lose some performance. I could try and get some filter socks from England that clamp onto the air trumpets. Or I could move the battery to the boot. A chance visit to Home Depot (like Homebase) proved to be the answer, my wife pointed to some lawn tractor batteries and suggested we have a look at them. They were certainly small enough, but would they have enough power? One battery had a cold cranking amp (CCA) rating of 340 amps, and a discharge rate of 40 amps per hour, both of which were more than the original battery. I bought the battery, a couple of long fitting bolts plus a clamp for the top, and it sits in there nicely and seems to be running alright.

The car was taken to have the exhaust system repaired, and it was so quiet on the way back that my mother-in-law didn’t even know I’d arrived. Off to Fuddruckers the next Friday, and the car caused quite a stir. It was right in the middle of a Rolling Rods meeting, and so was surrounded by big V8s on all sides, but people still came up and looked at it. One guy who parked nearby said, “you know, you can get tired of looking at Hot Rods, it’s nice to see a car like yours”. Of course, the most often overheard comment was “the steering wheel is on the wrong side”, this was even more apparent when I drove it out. People on foot could hear it behind them, they’d look around and get out the way, then do a double take and look puzzlingly as it appeared there was no driver, only a passenger.

Since then, I joined the British Motor Club of New Jersey, and I also attended the annual Capri Swarm in Ohio.