
Millbrook Proving Ground, one of the UK’s premier car testing sites, very nearly wasn’t in Millbrook. In the 1960s, Vauxhall’s owner, General Motors, wanted a vehicle testing facility in the UK, inspired by its historic Milford proving ground in America, right down to a similar mix of flat tracks and hills: 600 flat acres, 200 hilly ones. Vauxhall searched long and hard and found only three really suitable locations, two of which were in Wales and one in Scotland. Air-freighting cars to Scotland was thought too much of a faff, so one of the Welsh sites was selected. Until, that is, during detail planning, two farms came up for sale next to each other about five miles south of Bedford, between the villages of Millbrook and Marston Moretaine.
It was bigger than Vauxhall needed and two million tonnes of earth would need moving to sculpt the hills exactly to shape, but it was also just up the road from Vauxhall’s headquarters in Luton. Work started in 1968 and in 1970 – 50 years ago – the GM-owned Millbrook Proving Ground opened.
The early-1970s Victor FE that you see here was one of the first Vauxhalls developed at the site. The other car is the current Astra, one of the very latest Vauxhalls to have graduated from Millbrook. Which, via being a subsidiary of GM-owned Lotus in the 1980s and then a part of GM Holdings, is today a fully independent business with subsidiaries of its own – the frozen Test World winter-testing centre in Finland and Leyland Technical Centre in Lancashire.
While neither Millbrook nor Vauxhall is owned by GM any more, the German engineers from Opel/Vauxhall used to like fine-tuning ride and handling in the UK and until recently kept a unit at Millbrook for the purpose.
How far have the cars developed at Millbrook come in the past half-century? It has been a while since I drove a near-50-year-old car (my own doesn’t work), but Autocar road tested this mechanical specification of Victor in period, with ‘fifth wheel’ timing gear strapped to the back for obtaining performance figures.
This saloon is a 2300, meaning it has a four-cylinder 2.3-litre petrol engine driving its back wheels through a four-speed manual gearbox. Peak power is 100bhp at 5200rpm, but it’s quite a lazy unit, with 138lb ft of torque from just 3000rpm.
A big family car of the time, it’s 4.54m long, 1.69m wide and has a 2.67m wheelbase. As tested, it weighed 1344kg.
Today’s Astra – a small family hatchback – has an engine barely half that capacity and shorn of one cylinder. But the 1.2-litre triple makes 143bhp at 5500rpm and a fulsome 166lb ft at 2000-3500rpm, owing to a turbocharger that gets going early in the rev range. It too has a manual gearbox – although of six speeds – and drives the front wheels, as has largely become the norm for all but executive and sports cars.
Perhaps surprisingly, given that cars have tended to become bigger, the Astra, which technically sits in a lower class than the Victor, is notably shorter, at 4.37m, although with a similar 2.66m wheelbase. It’s wider, mind you, at 1.81m, which is no great surprise, considering modern safety demands. It’s claimed to be lighter, at 1280kg, but I suspect there isn’t much in it once the cars are laden.
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The venerable Victor most definitely wasn't a "big family car" ... its 4.54m length equates to less than 14ft 11in, putting it firmly in the same medium-sized sector as the Cortina. Vauxhall's large car half a century ago was the Cresta PC; my brother owned a gorgeous maroon one in the late '80s. Sadly its 3.3 litre straight six proved too much for the twisty lanes of Somerset and he wrote the car off in a messy confrontation with a stone gatepost.
And who, except an ill-informed Autocar hack, could be "surprised" that the little Astra is shorter than a medium-sized car? Duh!
(In the same way, Ford's Consul/MK1 Granada is a car that now enjoys a coolness that today's Mondeo will never have).
For those of us from certain generations of the past, we see a Victor or Consul/Granada in modern traffic, and chances are, we'll stare more than if it was a modern 911!
Turn up to a party in a Victor/Consul/Granada and people will be impressed (in part that it actually made it!), but brace yourself for the words of Princess Leia: "You came in that thing?.....You're braver than I thought!"
Were they great cars: "back in the day"? - No, not really. The great thing is though, you don't have to be great, to be cool!