July 1999 was a pretty significant month, in the grand scheme of things. The Sopranos made its British TV debut, Macy Gray and Destiny’s Child were all over the Top 40, and cinema-goers had the choice of gross-out humour with American Pie or being scared witless by The Blair Witch Project. The Queen unveiled a statue of Eric Morecambe in, appropriately, Morecambe; Manchester United beat Bayern Munich to win the treble, and NASA launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a space telescope that’s still up there doing its thing today.
Down here on Earth, newsagents across the UK were eagerly snipping the string off their fresh new bundles of Classic Ford magazine, sporting a vibrant and vivid Mk2 Escort 1600 Sport on the cover. The very car you see on the cover of this magazine today, in fact, although rather a lot of water has passed under the proverbial bridge over the
