Hello… long time, no see…

Keith Adams

Cortinas on AROnline? Who knew...
Cortinas on AROnline? Who knew…

I must admit that it’s been a tough few weeks for AROnline. Firstly, there was a serious outage at Streamline.net that deprived us of our Forum, News and Blogs pages, followed by a dearth of new stories to upload and keep you – the loyal readership – amused.

I guess what I did wrong was to have a huge splurge of new stories over the May Bank Holiday, that filled the updates page and gave you far too much to read. What I should have done was to produce the new pages as I did but then ration them out over the period of the following couple of weeks. Oh well, we live and learn.

It’s good to know that the feedback system is growing in popularity and there are now some lively debates at the end of every new article that’s uploaded. The one that’s particularly pleased me is the Vauxhall Cavalier story, which I’d assumed would go down like a lead balloon, but instead has been greeted rather favourably.

It’s clear that the AROnline readership enjoys seeing what the opposition was up to and has a much wider enthusiast appreciation of what came before than many of the ‘fan sites’ that litter the Internet. That got me thinking – again – about rivals on this site…

A while back, I’d mentioned that I was considering putting up a Ford Cortina page, to which someone responded that there’s loads of stuff out there already and that there’s no place on AROnline for such things. I beg to differ: after putting in a Google search to see what’s out there, I found very little of use.

We’ll see but, for now, I’m convinced that it’s right to carry on with the ‘rivals’ thing on this site.

My final point of the day – sorry for the groundhog day Front page experience of the past few weeks. It’s been a busy time at AROnline Towers. Normal service should be resumed soon. If you’d like to see more new stuff, do feel free to contribute – it’s your site as much as anyone else’s!

Keith Adams

17 Comments

  1. Variety is the spice of life! It’s good to read about the other stuff and good to make comparisons between competing period brands.

    I also think that a Ford fan researching Cortinas may find this site by accident having not been aware of its existence and so become a new reader with new input.

    My taste varies as I suspect does that of a lot other regulars such as yourself Keith and that all makes for a more interesting read. I found the articles about the Rapport Ritz and the AC 3000ME interesting and would love to hear more about people like Bob Jankel or Jem Marsh etc….

    This is a true petrolhead’s site so keep up the good work Keith … Simon

  2. Keith, keep up with those ‘opposition’ articles – they all have a relevance and make for great reading. Good work as always.

  3. It’s all excellent Keith – the opposition articles are just as welcome as the BL stuff and add variety as Simon suggests.

    A site with 1% of the content of this site would be invaluable – you’ve put together an amazing resource over the past few years and all for free. How could we possibly complain about any of it?

  4. Nice one Keith – I was a bit negative regarding articles about “other” cars on an Austin Rover website but I have to say that, having read a few articles, I was completely wrong! I particularly liked the Cavalier article.

    Keep the posting the articles Keith – it’s all good stuff.

  5. I’d like to the see the Cortina included here as it is the car from my formative years that I hold in the highest regard today. The best Cortina page at present is this one – although it only covers the 1976-1982 models:

    http://www.cortina80.co.uk

  6. I left Streamline as they’re very expensive. Someone who I went to school with has set up a company called Vidahost. It’s much better and around half the price of Streamline. He also knows what he’s talking about and gets back within 15 mins every time. Anyhow, nice website!

  7. A Cortina page would be an interesting read. The Cavalier and Sierra pages were very well researched.

    Any more on the French stuff: Peugeots, Citroens etc? 🙂

  8. Keith,
    I, for one, would love to see a page about the Cortina. It was a very important car in the UK and, without it, the BL range could have turned out very differently indeed in the 70s.

    Look at what happened to the Marina during its development. It would’ve been very different if Ford hadn’t brought out the larger Cortina MkIII.

  9. Keep the opposition pages coming. It’s always good to read well-written articles like these on everyday cars even if they aren’t not BL-related.

    After all, with new Rover cars no longer available at the moment (not counting the MG TF), every reader has to buy from the opposition if they want a new car.

    The Cavalier article was interesting and filled a gap as there is very little information available on older Vauxhall cars.

  10. A Cortina page sounds great – I’ve also not seen very much of use about classic British Fords especially when it comes to the development of the prototypes which led up to these iconic cars. Might I suggest an Anglia page as well?

  11. Great idea to put other brands on here. That’d not only spice up the website with variety but also show what the opposition had to offer against BL products – it would illustrate where BL went wrong in the market as well.

  12. when I was at PSF (oxford) they told me that PSF had contract in the 60s to build one of the Ford BIWs for them. Could have been the corsair, can’t remember. But the quality was too good, hence took too long to build, hence too exspensive, Ford relocated it back to their own factory.
    Though PSf did build vast numebr of Hillman Minxes for Rootes

  13. @mark
    It was the Corsair – shortly afterwards they bought Biggs. The Corsair was an expensive car to build and never made Ford a profit.

  14. I blame Mr Alexi Sayle you know?

    I,ve literally lost count on the number of Cortina,s i,ve owned. Mark 4 & umpteen Cortina 80,c (aka MK5)

    The 2.3 was a bit of a waste of time in my point of view, offering little more bangs over the 2.0, but the soundtrack was superb. Close your eyes and pretend your driving a Granada.

    Ford never got to grips with corrosion though, as a teenage driver / trainee mechanic at the time, I learnt to weld on these bloody cars. Sloppy handling and the desire to disintergrate in front of very eyes they may be known for, but a car so remembered so fondly!

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