The Dark Wob

We had 'em at work. Two 1.6L Montys. They were meant to be sales cars but every rep that got one found increasingly imaginative reasons not to drive it. Eventually they ended up as pool cars (pool in the sense of getting the chips at lunchtime) until one of them got issued to an unsuspecting new manager. He was inordinately pleased and immediately put a management-training cassette tape in the player.

It was still officially a pool car so it got ragged at lunchtime just the same. One fella flicked the tape in, heard a load of "clear sky thinking" type bollocks, pressed eject and lobbed it out of the window.

I drove both of them a few times. They were not exactly shit, just lacking in any clear redeeming feature. We had a 1300 Marina Estate as a workshop car at the same time - I much preferred that.

Montegos seemed to be the perfect car for a junior manager with a new Barratt mid-terrace and an unharnessed streak of ambition.

Went to look at a Montego Countryman diesel a few years back, and fuck me it was an absolute bag of horror to drive.
I'd been piloting a 2.0 Cortina estate until not long before this, but despite being 13 years younger this thing felt way more antiquated than even the baggy old Ford.

Everything that was meant to move felt like it was seized up, while everything that was meant to be tight seemed to be loose.

That said, I probably would have bought it only the seller's mate was giving me a really weird vibe - and there were parts clearly visible in the ad pics which had mysteriously been removed by the time I came to view, but which they hotly denied any knowledge of (like the rear wash/wipe - now blanked off, yet with washer fluid pishing out out it...)

One of the very few times I've ever gone to see a car and not come home with it.

1984; Montego.

1986: Renault 21.

That's just how far out of touch BL were. Two years old and utterly outclassed.

Weren't the Maestro and Montego originally due to be launched a lot earlier but were delayed by the Metro launch as that was considered a far more important car? I think that they were then due for a 1982 launch but BL being BL missed the target.

Probably. But compare the Montego with the Renault 18 (1979) and they were still no further forward.