► As many of you probably know, my first job in motoring journalism was as an editorial assistant on Practical Classics which at the time (the mid-late 1980s) was at the forefront of the movement to bring into the classic car hobby some more mainstream cars and mass-market saloons; things like Hillman Minxes, BMC Farinas and sixties Ford saloons. Yep, it might well seem incredible now, but there was a time when acceptance as classics of cars like Ford Escorts and Cortinas which today are worth a fortune was by no means universal.
Yet – and I think that, 37 years on, I can reveal this – accepting cars like this wasn’t a universally-popular
