[Gallery] Celebrating the Ford Capri’s 50th birthday at Eighties Sunday
How can the Ford Capri be 50 years old? I’m afraid to tell you that it is true. This icon of the ‘70s and ‘80s first joined us in 1969, so is celebrating its big five-oh this year.
We thought the final Breakfast Club of 2019, a celebration of everything ‘80s, was the perfect place to celebrate the life of this British coupé icon, as the ‘80s was the home of perhaps the Capri’s most iconic edition – the MkIII.
The third generation Capri was so popular during its life that in the mid-1980s and even into the 1990s it was classified by the Home Office as the most stolen car in Britain for several years. But the ‘80s was also the end of the line for the Capri. The popularity of coupés began to decline, Ford’s rivals also consigned theirs to the history books, and in 1986 the Capri was no more. It had soldiered on for two extra years in the UK than it managed in Europe, but that was it.
But the Capri, and the image of one as something one could aspire to own, lives on. It’s almost impossible to turn on ITV4 and not find someone driving one in a long-running detective drama from the era, and today they look fantastic at Goodwood. The love which people have shown the Capri today maybe should give us hope that another golden era for coupés can come around in the 2020s!
Photography by James Lynch.