Some (not me) will be able to cast their minds back to the late 1970s, when TV screens were awash with hit detective shows.
You had the great Gordon Jackson starring alongside Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins in The Professionals (which to this day still has one of the best theme tunes), Dennis Waterman was tearing up west London in Minder, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was buddying up with John Thaw for The Sweeney.
Many moons ago, Phillips Sr – who grew up watching Bodie and Doyle take fake punch after fake punch – would often subject me to re-runs of his favourite episodes during the school holidays.
While the storylines didn’t strike much of a chord with me, the cars of the protagonists certainly did.
The silver Ford Capri 3.0 S in The Professionals was a peach, as was the Diamond White Mk2 Ford Escort RS2000 – not to mention the immaculate Copper Bronze Ford Consul GT driven by The Sweeney’s DI, Jack Regan.
The producers of these shows obviously chose cars with the same star power as the actors: you can’t imagine George Cowley skidding around an industrial wasteland in a Reliant Robin.
And what made the Capri and Consul even cooler was that their propensity to intimidate was undented by stickers, plant pot lights and comically tall aerials.
These were unmarked police cars – and all the more effortlessly threatening for it.
Using plain cars to snatch wrongdoers became a popular tactic for police forces during the 1980s and 1990s, and they’re still deployed to great effect by traffic units and drug squads today.
But the thing that makes unmarked police cars so much more dramatic is that they are often supercar-slaying performance derivatives, capable of chasing down a miscreant without breaking a sweat.
Dive into the Autocar Archive and you’ll see that many forces relied on V8-powered MGBs for traffic enforcement work in the mid-1970s – a far better prowler than the sluggish, Austin Princess that British Leyland was supplying to the police at a similar time.
The snarling Daimler SP250 is another early undercover icon, and you would have slowed right down if a sinister-spec Rover P6 flew up behind you on the motorway.
Later, at the turn of the millennium, some road crime units famously turned to the likes of the Subaru Impreza WRX and Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, as these mighty WRC-inspired heroes could easily keep up with any vehicle hoping to evade the police – on or off road.
And we can’t ignore today’s unassuming estates. The other day I stumbled across what looked like an unmarked BMW 320d Touring but was in fact a dressed-down M340i, complete with the punchy ‘B58’ engine. Talk about the ultimate sleeper.
The best thing about these unmarked patrol cars is the air of deception: they’re basically hot, enthusiast cars styled to look like humble cooking models and equipped with the necessary hardware to take down the bad guys.
What’s more, buying a used one is a fantastically cheap way of getting into an aspirational motor – so long as you can overlook the moon miles and PIT-manoeuvre scars…
