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hurray it's the new ford capri ...


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Why are all new 'coupés' just hatchbacks with big wheels, chopped roofs and slightly more angular lights than the car they're based on?

This has got my goat for years...Renault started it with the Megane 'coupe' Up until that point it was just a 3 door hatch.....it's like calling an Escort XR3 a coupe..As for the 'Capri', they could at least have kept the design of the rear side windows the same as the original. As already said, that is more like a new Puma.
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That is vile. The front end reminds me of the face my cat makes when he's having a particularly 'large' session in the litter tray.Auto Express has been utterly irrelevant for years. I'm sure they just dream stuff up as they go along. I can't imagine why anyone who is actually a car enthusiast might buy it.

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The trouble is, whenever a 'new Capri' is 'scooped', presumably from the same poo that collects in my local park, the design studies all have the same fundamental problem:They're front wheel drive. How the bollocks can a new Capri be FWD? 4WD I could just about accept, because there were a couple of Ferguson Formula Capri rally cars back in the day. FWD didn't work for the Cougar and it certainly didn't work for the Probe, and they were both mooted as spiritual replacements for the Capri. That they flopped in the sales charts said something about their drive layout and their failure to capture the hearts and minds of a certain generation that would have jumped at the chance to own a new Capri without the endemic rust and arthritic piston slap of a Pinto engine.To me the Probe looked out of place from the start. Its MX 6 cousin never sold well even though there seemed like a place for FWD coupes at the time - witness the strong sales of the Calibra, which was dynamically awful. I think with the Cougar what Ford should have done was sell it as a car with its own identity, rather than hang the weight of all that Capri baggage on its shoulders. That it was a competent car made no odds - it was heavily based on the Mk 2 Mondeo world car platform if I remember - it was then the late nineties and the game had moved on. VW never directly replaced the Corrado despite critical acclaim.It does seem a shame that the Americans can have a new Mustang (as agricultural as it is mechanically) but Europe, and especially the UK, can't have a new Capri.If it was up to me I'd take an RX8 chassis, shorten it a bit and drop the most recent Duratec V6 in up front with an off the shelf Tremec or Borg Warner gearbox and various adapted RWD Mazda bits to take the power.Not much of Ford's current European chassis architecture is RWD, and Jaguar is now part of Tata. There hasn't been a RWD Volvo in years so the only place left to turn besides a clean sheet development would be Mazda.Most of the money would be in adapting the front end and crash structure to take a piston engine, as I imagine a 3 litre V6 would be a damn sight heavier than a Renesis. That's the only way I can see a new Capri being viable, both from a production and an enthusiast's standpoint. Using the Mustang architecture would be way too crude and somewhat on the large side.You might even get away with stretching an MX 5 platform. I bet a Mk 3 isn't far off the size of a Capri now. When I was younger I was convinced a Capri was comparable in stature to a Mustang or an XJS. When I saw one for real I was shocked at how narrow it appeared to be. All those Zakspeed promo films did nothing for my sense of perception.

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Building that 'new' Mk1 would have been instant win, especially if RWD. Ford would literally be taking their trousers down, getting their wang out and pissing straight into the face of every other 'retro' style car that's come about in the last decade.

It looks too coupe esque for me, but I agree that they'd sell every one they could make.You could have some fabulous retro rehashes if the manufacturers did it properly and not as a cynical marketing exercise.I'd be first down the Volvo garage if they brought a new Amazon with RWD and a T5 turbo lump up front :) Better than all this reheated Focus shite anyway.
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If they made a 'new' Mk1 Escort and Capri Mk1, and did it right, they'd be absolutely laughing.Nice snorty n/a motor with shit loads of grunt and tuning potential, RWD, light weight, oversteer on tap, with similar looks to a bubble arched Mk1 Escort and a Cologne RS2600. The perfect one for me would look like a Cologne Capri, have a tweaked Mustang engine, RWD, Recaros, 6 speed box with the shift action of a Mk2 Escort, huge brakes, big deep minilite replicas and an insanely quick steering rack. Maybe huge RS four spokes on some models.Shouldn't weigh more than a ton ideally, maybe 1100 for the full spec road one with airbags, ABS and a few other random bits of safety clobber.Problem is, they'd end up making a 1.4 TDCi engined 'Laser' version which would bollocks it all up. Capris should always be V engined, the poverty models just aren't the done thing. Be ideal for Autoshite 2036 but I wouldn't want one. Capris should be antisocial, 'blokey' motors capable of going sideways everywhere.

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