Your rank,
spelled out in badges.

The sapphire blue 1972 Triumph Stag represents the peak of seventies grand touring romance. With its Italian styling by Michelotti and a lovely, rumbling V8 engine, it was a magnificent thing when it was running right. But as anyone who lived through the seventies will tell you, they kept you busy under the bonnet.

You had to have your glasses ON for this sort of work. The engine bays back then were tight, packed with hoses, ignition leads, and that V8 cylinder setup that was notoriously fussy about cooling. I remember leaning over with a small spanner in a thick sheepskin coat, trying to get the ignition timing just right before the autumn show season started.

It was a decade of work and worry — industrial disputes, hard winters, and rust that seemed to start the minute the car left the showroom. But when you got that V8 singing, and you took the T-bar roof panels off on a crisp Sunday morning, all of that was forgotten. It was worth every single hour of graft.

If the Seventies had a company car park, half of it was Cortinas. The Mk3 was the one that went a bit American — the coke-bottle hips, the big soft seats, a dashboard that fancied itself. Reps lived in them, families holidayed in them, and on a Saturday a lad with a bit of ambition washed his under the streetlight and called it a GXL. I spent a fair few cold mornings under one of these bonnets. The engines were honest and the rust was honester, but there was nothing on a British road that said "ordinary made good" quite like a clean Cortina. Get one running sweet and it'd ask for nothing but oil and attention. That's my kind of car: no airs, just graft and a bit of pride.