If you take a quick look at the results of the London-Sydney Marathon of 1968, it seems as if Ford had never looked like winning. If, on the other hand, you look again, and carefully, you’ll realise that Boreham came agonisingly close to victory. Even so — and no-one said it would be easy — it was the Lotus Cortina engines which let the side down, for no fewer than five of the seven units either blew up completely, or had to be cannibalised to keep them going at all.
The world now knows that it was Andrew Cowan’s Hillman Hunter which finally won the event, but surely every Ford enthusiast knows that it was Roger Clark’s Lotus Cortina which led the entire marathon for 8500 miles until Port Augusta in Australia, which was only 40 rallying hours from the finish. Even then, he might have caught up the deficit, only for the back axle to fail and delay him even further. From first, he finally dragged the crippled car across the line in tenth place, feeling depressed if not humiliated. Not for nothing did PR supremo,
