A car seldom remembered these days, except perhaps for the Cortina aficionados, is the wonderful Cortina GT500. The brainchild of
Harry Firth, the GT500 was manufactured by Ford Australia to satisfy homologation rules to allow it to race in the
Armstrong 500. The Lotus-Cortina would have fitted the bill perfectly, however as the rules were at the time, 250 would have needed to have been imported to allow it to qualify. The GT500 was a strictly local affair, the rules stipulating that only 100 needed to be built. The donor unit was the GT 1500, Firth then adding a new cam, reshaping the combustion chamber, raising the compression to 9.5:1.