UNDER THE INFLUENCE

If the Capri is often regarded as the Mustang reimagined for Europe, the first-generation Toyota Celica owes even more to Ford’s original pony car. Where Ford of Europe at least gave its ‘Project Colt’ a new body style, it seems the Toyota stylists simply ran some Mustang drawings through a ’70s Xerox machine and when the shiny paper curled out of the machine it had a three-quarters copy.

A transatlantic approach to styling was very much par for the course with Japanese makers back then and who can blame them? Wanting to make significant inroads into the world’s biggest car market, they began by producing what the market was already buying. The European invasion would come later, meaning that when the Celica first started appearing on British roads in the early ’70s it was from an era when the buying public – fuelled by the car journalists of the day – still regarded Japanese cars