1981 Ford Cortina L review from Australia and New Zealand

The timing belt broke about six months after I bought the car. I had a mechanic repair it and I asked him how often they need to be replaced. He said Ford recommended 70,000 km intervals. I looked at the odometer and it showed 69,990 km. Luckily on that occasion I did not damage any valves, but this happened again at around 180,000 and I had to get a reconditioned head fitted because it bent a valve. A valuable lesson: replace timing belts at the correct intervals!

The radiator had to be replaced a year after I bought my car, due to the former owner not using the correct inhibitor.

During the eleven years I owned it, the car needed a lot of niggly little repairs. It went through rear resonators at a rate of about one each 18 months until I stopped replacing it with genuine Ford ones and fitted a Hot Dog muffler in place of the rear resonator. It sounded better and lasted years longer. The exhaust continually came loose at the manifold and I could never find a permanent fix for that.

The boot leaked and I could never find a cure for that either. I have read that this a characeristic of Cortina's from the TE series onwards.

When I sold the car in 1996, with 217,000 km on it, the engine was dieseling badly due to carbon build-up, and the diff was howling from worn bearings.

Where do I start?

I bought the car in 1985 when it was four years old. It looked pretty good and I got it at a good price. It was reasonably comfortable and had sufficient room when I was single and then when my kids were small, so I kept it long after I should have traded it in, and it held together well on the poor roads around western New South Wales where I lived most of the time I owned it. On smooth bitumen it held the road reasonably well, but any bump, any ripple, any patch of broken bitumen, or any other normal feature of an average Australian road, made it skip around unpredictably, and you never knew which way the tail would jump. On dirt roads the handling and roadholding were frankly poor, and on corrugations, it was diabolical. There was no inline fuel filter fitted to the car as standard, so after the second time the carburettor got dust in it, I fitted one myself.

The car always seemed to need something tightened, or attended to in some way, and although the design is straightforward and simple, i.e. front engine, rear drive, it was a very awkward car to work on.

The performance was acceptable and fuel economy was good, and parts were reasonably priced. However, as the engine and transmission were imported from England, some parts were dearer for my 4-cylinder Cortina than the same part for a 6-cylinder version would have been, because the sixes were made in Australia. I had my Cortina serviced at a Holden dealer because the Ford dealer in the small town where I lived charged like a wounded bull for sloppy work, but naturally, not all Ford dealers are like that.

My TF Cortina served me well for 11 years and 160,000 km, but it needed a lot of attention in its time. I traded it on a later model Falcon and never looked back. I have to say I liked it when I owned it, and got a good run out of it, but I once read a magazine that named the TF Cortina (specifically in 6-cylinder form, but still giving the fours a mention), as one of the ten worst cars of the 1980's.