This week’s Prime Find is a car I don’t think I’ve seen at a show or on the road for many years. It’s a car one of my cousins drove back in the early 1980’s, and I remember being pretty impressed by it, belting down the Autobahn at 160kmh, even though I’m not generally a big fan of Japanese cars.
However, in the UK, this car has effectively disappeared – checking on howmanyleft.com, there are literally none of this generation left in this country, either licensed or SORN. And yet, for a short time, it even had a very UK name, or to be more precise, a Scottish name – the Mazda Montrose. Besides being the name of a hoary hard rock band featuring future Van Halen vocalist Sammy Hagar, Montrose is a small town of roughly 12,000 people on the east coast of Scotland, and the car was apparently so named in honour of the Mazda dealership in that town. Elsewhere it was badged as the 626, except in its home market, where it was called the Capella. With me so far?
Our Prime Find is an example of the second generation of the model, launched in 1978, although it didn’t actually go on sale until the following year. The first generation – also known in Japan as the Capella, but as the 616 in export markets and there was a Wankel rotary engine version known as the RX-2 – had an eight-year production run from 1970.
It was available as both a saloon and a coupé, and engines were a 1.6, 1.8 and later, a 2-litre, depending on which market the car was being sold in. European spec versions came with just 1.6 or 2.0 options, pushing out 74 and 89bhp respectively.
Drive was to the rear wheels, and a 5-speed ‘box was standard in the UK and Europe on the 2-litre models. Top speed according to Mazda was 106mph or 170kmh, and the sprint from 0-100kmh was covered in 11.3 seconds, also per the factory, and just under 724,000 were built between 1978 and 1982.
Competing in the UK with the Ford Cortina and Vauxhall Cavalier, the Montrose had fairly anonymous but clean lines in saloon form, but as a 2-door coupé, with its big wrap-around rear window and pillarless profile, looked much more stylish and quite purposeful – I liked it then, and I still like it now.
It was, however, a car I had completely forgotten about until I stumbled across one for sale while scouring the interweb for something interesting for this week’s Prime Find, which is a 626 Coupé GLS for sale with a dealer in Copenhagen for DKR 65,000, or c.£7,500 at current exchange rates.
There’s not a great deal of information about the car other than it’s an early 626 – built in 1979 – and has covered a modest 129,000 kilometres or just over 80,000 miles. The exterior is a nice shade of metallic blue, and the paintwork looks to be in good condition. The interior is a slightly impractical but nicely contrasting cream, the seats having what look like velour inserts. There’s a lot of plastic around the interior – seats (except the inserts), door cards and dash, but based on the photographs there are no obvious cracks.
Of course, cars generally look good in photographs – we’ve borrowed a few from the dealer’s website – so as usual we recommend arranging an inspection if possible if you’re interested in this exceptionally rare (in the UK at least) Japanese coupé. On the face of it, it seems to represent good value – unsurprisingly I can’t find another for sale in the UK to compare it with, and even though these cars were fairly popular in Germany, I can’t find one there, either.
You can see the dealer advert – which although short of information, has plenty of photographs – here. So – Dkr 65,000 (or €8,750 or £7,500) could buy you a car that you are highly unlikely to see anywhere else, that looks to be in pretty good shape inside and out, looks pretty good and is almost certainly going to be as reliable as clockwork…tempted?
With our Saturday instalment of Prime Find of the Week, we’re offering our services to the classic car community, by passing on our favourite classic car for sale from the week that passed. This top-tip might help a first-time-buyer to own his first classic, or it could even be the perfect motivation for a multiple-classic-car-owner to expand his garage with something different. We’ll let us be inspired by anything from a cheap project to a stunning concours exotic, and hope that you will do the same.
Just remember – Any Classic is Better than No Classic! We obviously invite our readers to help prospective buyers with your views and maybe even experiences of any given model we feature. Further to that, if you stumble across a classic which you feel we ought to feature as Prime Find of the Week, then please send us a link to primefindoftheweek@viaretro.co.