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It isn't odd to celebrate the birthday of a long-dead celebrity, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at the huge to-do being made over the 50th anniversary of the Ford Cortina - a car that went out of production 30 years ago. Its celebrity status comes from the fact that it lived fast and died old, in car years: over the course of two decades, it racked up four generations and 4.3 million sales around the world. Half of those sales were in the UK, putting the Cortina atop the year's best-seller list for ten of its 20 years, in second place for another eight and in third place the last two. That isn't surprising when it's discovered that the MkIV Cortina alone came in more than 32 different versions and was a fleet mainstay.

Befitting a star, the Cortina has been in movies like Get Carter and The Spy Who Loved Me, on television in The Benny Hill Show, it created a trend called The Cortina Class, it has been celebrated at the Goodwood Revival, been a bank robbery getaway car and its 1982 goodbye was marked by an hour-long documentary called The Private Life of the Ford Cortina. No mere creampuff, the Lotus-tuned version of the Cortina won rallies, saloon car championships and endurance races piloted by some of the world's best drivers.

To celebrate what was, Auto Express commissioned Ford designer Paul Wraith to design a Cortina for 2012, the BBC hosted another show on the car's action-packed run and the MkII Cortina driver's club is driving from the Dagenham, England plant where the car was built to Italy, which sounds like one of the best ways to celebrate anything. The press release below can tell you more about the Cortina's greatest hits.

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Ford celebrates 50 years of Cortina with BBC originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 25 Sep 2012 07:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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