London to Germany in an original, 45bhp Ford Fiesta

Pedalling around the M25, evening rush hour is over and traffic is moving pretty briskly. The Fiesta’s engine is hoarse, its performance negligible. Reaching 70mph feels like a distant dream. I can oscillate the steering-wheel rim a couple of inches either side of straight-ahead without the car’s path deviating at all, which means I’ve no control as it wanders around its lane like it’s had a drink too many. There’s an agonising interval between my pressing the centre pedal and the non-servo brakes waking up. The bodywork might as well be eggshell. Oh, and I have to be in Cologne by tomorrow afternoon.

This feature was originally published in issue 291 of Top Gear magazine

Photos: Lee Brimble

Never mind. I’m pretty confident I’ll enjoy the drive. Because it’s always the way with old cars that they feel ropey to begin with, and then you adapt. For the first few miles, I keep telling myself that in 1976, people thought the Fiesta was vastly capable. It’s engineering was as on-trend as its groovy-baby orange houndstooth seat trim.

Up to that point, Ford’s engineering had always been unyieldingly orthodox, but with the Fiesta it threw itself with abandon onto the new bandwagon of transverse-engined front-drive hatchback superminis. A lot else was changing in the mid-Seventies, not least ’76, when punk became a thing and the Sex Pistols brashly elbowed aside the overproof prog rock of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Apple launched out of a garage; Concorde began scheduled flights.

Yes, a long time ago. A time when the L trim came with no radio, no left-hand door mirror, no headrests, and screenwash pumped by a little rubber bulb on the floor. When 45bhp was enough and four gears an abundance. When on a cold morning you pulled out the choke, glanced silently heavenwards, turned the key and wondered if anything was going to happen.

This is the procedure before dawn on the sub-zero second day of our trip. The Fiesta barely hesitates, and settles into a lumpy idle while we scrape the ice off its glass. There’s a lot of this (glass not ice) and it’s an essential characteristic of the car. It gives you an extraordinarily panoramic outward view, and it makes the cabin feel big and airy. But it also means the parcel shelf is low and we can’t get all our stuff into the boot. And being surrounded by glass imparts a certain vulnerability to the general impression.

Yet the glassiness and the simple surfaces make the Fiesta a very pretty and delicate little thing. Its design was finalised by Tom Tjaarda, and he’s good enough for me because he did the De Tomaso Pantera and Fiat 124 Spider. The Fiesta’s reverse-rake nose was a contemporary idiom, later erased by Ford’s immense talent for facelifts, but it’s a reminder of an age when a level waistline and forward-leaning stance represented dynamism. That, I suspect, was the dying echo of futurism, and by the Eighties everyone knew the diktats of aerodynamics and demanded a shovel nose and wedge profile even in their shopping superminis. Not that we’re going shopping.

We set off across the quiet roads of Normandy. Frankly it’s a relief, after the M25 and M20 last night, to let the little car make progress at its own speed. Which is slow. There’s no rev-counter, of course, so I’m trying to figure out where to change gear. The wheezy pushrod motor sounds fit to burst by about 40 in third but a few mental calculations tell me no harm will be done if I push a bit harder on steep uphills. On the level in top, 60 seems equally busy. The speedo, by the way, is surprisingly honest.

The steering might be vague around the straight-ahead, but it’s actually rather pleasant, if heavy, as you wind some lock on. It’s vividly expressive in the language old cars mostly speak, an intimate connection with the mechanics. You can feel the tyres’ efforts as the slip angle builds. Even at the time, no road test said the Fiesta was much fun – you needed a Fiat 127 for that – but it’s entirely predictable as it rapidly ascends the foothills of Mount Understeer. The gearlever also operates with long travel, but again the strong impression is of linkages pivoting and teeth meshing.

There’s no sense in subjecting the Fiesta to the autoroute when the N-roads towards Belgium are so flat and empty. After a cakelicious breakfast in Saint-Omer we strike out east again. Beetling through a tiny village, I spot an abandoned fuel station, all cobwebbed windows and faded signs. I figure it’d make a nice photo spot and turn around, only to find it’s still operating. The fuel gauge is pretty low so we get a tank. It’s run by a magnificent Madame, surely in her 80s, who takes cash purchases by yanking the handle on an antique brass till, converted to euro. Her son runs the workshop next door, and I just know that if the Fiesta had developed stuck points or a blocked carburettor, as cars of its time often did, he’d have relished sorting it out.

Belgium is best crossed by autoroute, and since they’re covered in cameras set for 120kph, the Fiesta copes. Even so, as always in an old car, you’re on hair-trigger alert for some strange sound or new vibration or anything else untoward. “I smell burning,” says photographer Lee. I reflexively check the temperature gauge (normal) and look in the mirror (no smoke visible). A minute later, we overtake a Sierra with obvious piston-ring trouble, its exhaust trailing blue haze. The smell immediately fades.

Time for more fuel as we hit Germany, so we get a quick break among Aachen’s cobbled streets, stepped gables and Christmas market. And now, gulp, the autobahn. Gingerly I approach the limit of what the old thing can do. I feel like an interloper in the outside lane and don’t want a concertina of BMWs up my chuff, impatient to return to their righteous 155mph, but after a deep breath the Fiesta settles at 79mph, exactly the rate it was tested at when new. Honour satisfied, I ease back.

See, the Fiesta is noisy and pretty unhappy at that sort of speed. This trip has shown what a first-generation supermini could do, but also slightly exceeded what it could do comfortably. Especially with this little engine. It was thoroughly competitive with its rivals when new, but there were only four at the time: the Fiat 127, VW Polo, Renault 5 and Peugeot 104. All of them also gen-1 products. It was understood they would struggle on a big trip. In those days, if you wanted to cross Europe in speed and comfort, you had to pay a lot for your car. The concept of a Gran Turismo still held currency. Then came the next-gen superminis, especially the Peugeot 205, and all of a sudden even small cars could do big-car jobs. We’re now at the point where roads are so busy and policed that the low tyre noise, long-tank range and simple stealth of a diesel supermini makes it perhaps the best vehicle to pack 800 miles into a day.

Today’s Fiesta obeys that. Tomorrow’s highly connected, driver-assisted Fiesta, even more so. At the end of the trip we meet tomorrow’s Fiesta in the Cologne plant where it will be built. But I don’t lightly turn away from the day-before-yesterday’s Fiesta. Because it has worked its little heart out for me, how could I not be grateful?