THE EARLY Nineties must have been a pretty depressing time if you were a designer or an engineer working at Ford Europe.

This was the era of truly gruesome cars like the Mark V Escort, the arthritic Sierra and the Mark III Fiesta.

Actually, the Fiesta wasn’t that bad – it had ditched the old Fiesta’s live axle for a semi-independent torsion beam set up which livened up the handling – but Ford’s policy of playing-it-safe gave it all the visual appeal of a pair of tartan trousers.

Ford’s UK sales had held up thanks to a massive marketing spend and fleet sales but private buyers, influenced by largely negative reporting in the motoring press, were waking up to the attractions of other marques. Something had to be done.

And behind the scenes something was being done.

Welshman Richard Parry-Jones joined Ford product development in 1969 as an undergraduate trainee and quickly rose through the ranks. Working with ex-racing driver Jackie Stewart, he pioneered what became known as the 50-meter test.

Instead of thrashing cars at top speed, engineers were encourage to drive them slowly for 50 metres. The low speeds meant they could sense small changes in suspension and steering behaviour that were impossible to spot on a high-speed track. When he became head of European car development in 1985 Parry-Jones insisted every new model should impart a feeling of being fun to drive in those first few metres. The Fiesta had been the first model to bear his stamp.

But what could be done to sharpen up Ford’s dreary image?

President Jac Nasser and small/medium vehicle design director Claude Lobo threw down a design challenge: take the Fiesta chassis and come up with something more daring.

Within 72 hours more than 50 free-hand sketches arrived – clearly there was untapped potential for a small coupe, a kind of European son-of-Capri.

The car that would become the Puma was designed from scratch in a mere four months. The sketches were pinned to a wall and Nasser just picked the one he liked. Puma was the first Ford to be crafted entirely on a computer using a software package called Paintbox. Although Ford made a virtue of this at the time, there were entirely prosaic reasons for using Paintbox: the studio was full of other clay studies and there was no more room for a full-size coupe concept, even a small one.

Ford tested the water at the Geneva Motor Show in 1996. The Lynx concept was an early Puma with some big wheels and a roof chop. The response was overwhelmingly positive so the project was given the production go-ahead with a launch pencilled in for the following year.

Ian Callum (now head of design at Jaguar, then at the TWR consultancy) did the first Puma model before it was returned to Ford for final feasibility work.

Strangely, the team faced more resistance to its interior plans. Ford bosses said the aluminium gear knob would be ‘too cold in winter and too hot in summer’. The designers won that one but plans for dark blue roof trim (to give the feeling of sitting in a crash helmet) and a metal instrument panel were vetoed. Items from the Fiesta were used instead.

At launch the Puma used the ultimate celebrity endorsement: Steve McQueen. Ad agency Young and Rubicam carefully merged footage from Bullitt with new film of the Puma shot in San Francisco. A sequence of McQueen getting out of a taxi was cropped, flipped and pasted into the new footage to make it look as though the king of cool was exiting a Puma.

McQueen may have been ‘performing’ digitally but Ford still had to pay his family estate a fee not vastly different from that of a living Hollywood star. But Ford didn't mind.

The ad was a huge hit and, for a brief moment in time, so was the Puma. Sadly, time and tastes quickly moved on and today you can pick one up a secondhand Puma for less than £1,000. But mark my words, prices will soon start to go up - Ford's smallest coupe is a classic-in-waiting.

If you want one, now is the time to buy.