Tucked away in the Rhonda Valley lurks a Ford Capri like no other.
Plum Crazy, once a standard mark I model, has been transformed into a muscled-up custom pick-up featuring a cocktail bar in place of the back seats and a vivid pink interior complete with skeleton passenger, a leftover Hallowe’en prop.
The man behind the metamorphosis is proud Welshman Dave Moon, an inveterate modifier who has overseen the evolution of the Capri over more than 40 years of ownership, shelling out a “small fortune” in the process.
The car you always promised yourself
Since agreeing a finance package to buy his six-year-old dream car for £825, trading in his Hillman Minx back in 1976, the 63-year-old has constantly reshaped and refined the car through a series of colours, body designs and engine modifications.
In the four decades since, the car has had almost as many regenerations as Dr Who.
When it came to market the Capri was championed as Ford’s European answer to its own mighty American Mustang – a pony car for the masses.
Almost 2,000,000 were sold between 1969 and 1986, and Dave was hardly alone in believing the Ford marketing team’s hype that the Capri was “the car you always promised yourself”.
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It’s a work of art and I’m proud of it
He is almost certainly alone, though, in changing the once-black coupe into the type of car it’s impossible to ignore.
“When we are driving it everyone comes out to see it or get a selfie with it. It must be one of the most photographed cars in Wales,” he says.
“The Capri is my life’s work. It’s a work of art and I’m proud of it.”
Dave felt immediately at home in the Capri – his first car had been a Ford Cortina mark I, which spawned many of the mechanical components for its somewhat racier successor.
But the car didn’t stay standard for long, as Dave fitted a fully-chromed Essex V6 engine, new four-speed gearbox and specialist racing clutch.
On the outside, the car has undergone a number of paint jobs. Back in the sweltering summer of 76 the Capri was John Player Special black and gold, but it was later resprayed in a Starsky and Hutch-style red and white (“it was all the rage and me and my mate used to be called Starsky & Hutch”).
Dave then opted for a brown makeover and called the car Night Owl after the 1979 Gerry Rafferty song.
The car was then left garaged for almost a decade before Dave got the old urges back and decided to get it running again and give it yet another new look.
He had it sprayed purple with a Mickey Mouse logo and rechristened it Fantasia, after Dave asked local kids to pick a name randomly out of a hat.
Now it is purple with a metallic fleck, leading to the car’s current pet name of Plum Crazy.
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The customization package includes chrome side pipes, full spoiler kit, flared arches, obligatory jacked-up back with chrome Jaguar independent rear suspension, a nine-gallon beer barrel in the rear for the petrol tank, wooden tongue and groove pick-up refit in the boot cavity and special effect lights to the front and rear.
At one stage he fitted a triple-40 carburetor but, after burning £65 worth of petrol on a 40-mile round trip, he swapped it back for a far more economical single jet.
The interior, meanwhile, is decked in pink draylon and boasts a fully illuminated, hand-crafted cocktail bar where the back seats used to be.
Dave likes it so much that he has fitted a concealed tow bar and built a trailer in the same livery for when he goes out and about to shows.
“I am very happy with how the Capri looks now so I have no immediate plans for any more changes, though I have to do some work on the clutch to get it running just right,” said the self-taught mechanic, welder and spray painter. “If I change anything else it’ll probably be the colour.
“My view of customising is that any fool can go to a garage and say ‘here’s a list’ – my idea of customising is to do 90 per cent of the work myself. It took me six weeks to spray the car as Plum Crazy with metal flake paint imported from the States.”
The customisation programme has cost a small fortune over the years, but Dave is satisfied in the knowledge that it has been money well spent.
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I have put my life and soul into that car
Plum Crazy is currently insured for £12,000 but just two years ago, after showing it at a custom car rally in Cardiff, one besotted admirer offered him £25,000.
On another occasion an admirer from the Netherlands offered a Cadillac plus cash for the car. Again, Dave turned it down.
“I would never get an 18-foot long Cadillac in my little garage” he jokes.
In truth, no amount of cash would tempt him into selling Plum Crazy.
“I have put my life and soul into that car. Every respray, every modification, every bit of welding, every tune-up, I did it all over 40 years. How could I put a price on that?
“My photo albums, to me, are almost worth more than the car. It sounds silly, but when you see all the pictures of my car with the family…”
He took the Capri out with the Rhonda Valley Cruising Club and had the occasional run out at the Llandow race circuit in South Wales, but he admits to being rather too frightened of damaging his car to really thrash it.
The first custom car show he took it to was in Woburn and it was a regular medal winner at many shows around the country. The car, its trophies and many photographs of it are showcased in the garage at his home in Tonypandy, Mid Glamorgan.
The more work I did on the car the less she liked to ride in it
“When I bought the car I was courting Amanda (Dave’s wife-to-be) and we would go out driving a lot,” he says.
“I had already built the cocktail bar in the back but the more work I did on the car the less she liked to ride in it. Then she stopped getting in it completely. I think she got frightened because of the noise the engine made.”
The couple have five children, so it was never much use as a family car as it only had two seats, but the kids did love it just the same as dad did.
The family car was, in fact, another restoration project, a very old and slow Bedford van with twin wheels at the rear – the complete opposite in terms of style, performance and wow factor to the customised Capri.
Dave suffered a heart attack in 2016, but has made a good recovery and has vowed: “It won’t stop me looking after the car.”
Love it or hate it, the head-turning Plum Crazy has become an enormous celebrity in Tonypandy, and is set to entertain the locals for a good while yet.
