Vauxhall Victor F-series

It’s almost exactly 60 years to the day since the original Vauxhall Victor was launched. We look back on both the car and its launch year of 1957 

- Ted Connolly

Yesterday’s throwaways are today’s treasures. That is not a well-known phrase or saying that you’ll find in a book of famous quotations. The reason is that I’ve just made it up, but it does, I think, sort of sum up the classic car scene. And here (surprise, surprise) is an example and it involves a car-mad mate back in the ‘Sixties. It was towards the end of that decade that he flogged his Hillman Minx, bought an Austin A70 Hereford estate and sold that to buy an F-series Vauxhall Victor. I can’t remember the year of the Victor, but it was pre-suffix registered, so it must have been about 1962. He paid £30 for it and ran it around as an everyday hack for a year. We went out in it loads of times and I loved the leather seats, the smooth ride, three-on-The tree gear change and, perhaps above all, the American styling influences. It was just so different from the outgoing Wyvern – a bit of a lumberer – and was pretty cool transport for a couple of young jack-the-lads, even in its battleship grey paint work.

After a while, he shoehorned a six-cylinder Cresta engine under the bonnet, renamed the car a ‘Crestor’ and tazzed around in it until rust put paid to any further exploits and it was scrapped. No great sentiment involved, it was just another set of wheels that came and went. He replaced it with a MkI Ford Cortina, a real looker at the time.

It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that the F-series Victor is now 60 – that’s bus pass age – because (pause to allow the arrival of a cliché) it seems like only yesterday that it was not only a current car, but also fairly common.