Cars I have driven #8 – Ford 105E Anglia

2 Aug

I bought my Ford 105E Anglia from someone at work who had owned it from new. I was running a Mk2 Consul at the time that was tow bar equipped and the idea behind the Anglia was that myself and a couple of pals could turn it into something that we could run in Autocross racing as a cheap entry to motorsport, towing it on a trailer behind its big sister. We all worked in the motor accessory trade and so had access to a lot of contacts for parts and the local Duckhams rep had promised us support, partly financial and partly in product supply (but only once we had a runner and had done an event).Anglia 105E crop

 

I also had a re-built 1340cc Ford engine ready to transplant into the Anglia, but the promises made over a pint or three in the pub were soon forgotten in the light of reality and converting the Ford for the rigours of Autocross was beyond my own skill set and budget. So 681 BLH (if I remember correctly) became my personal transport for the Summer of 1974 as the Mk2 Connie had run its main bearings and been disposed of. The spare 1340 engine was sold on to a guy with one of the first generation Ford 116E Capris.

One day a guy stopped me down near Rayleigh in Essex and said he’d buy it from me for the registration providing that it still had a valid MoT certificate, but I didn’t want to sell at that stage. Later in the year I began to have problems with the fuel system that I could not fix and got keen on selling, but he wanted a runner and we couldn’t do a deal. I finally found someone who would take it for spares.

These were great little cars. Parts were plentiful and cheap and they were easy to work on, even for someone unskilled like me. They ran well and were generally reliable, but, for me, they were a bit on the small side. Having said that, I replaced it with a 1969 Morris Minor van.

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