Ford Escort Rally

Ford Escort Rally
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Written by Ben Branch |
April 8th 2021

Published by Ben Branch - April 8th 2021

This Ford Escort Mk II is a road-legal historic rally car with significant racing history to its name, it’s a Mk II RS1800 Group 4 and it’s powered by the historically significant 2.0 litre Cosworth BDG engine capable of over 275 bhp in race trim.
The Mark II Ford Escort, or Mk II as it’s better known, is one of those rare instances in the automotive world when the successor to a popular model becomes just as beloved as its forebear. In this case of course it was the Mark I Ford Escort that came first, retroactively renamed the Mk I. This first Ford Escort was both affordable to the average blue collar worker, and it was wildly successful on the race tracks and rally stages of the world.
With the Mk I Escort Ford knew they had struck gold, they built over two million of them from the model’s release in 1967 until 1974 when its successor was launched. The pressure was on in the early 1970s to design the new Escort, money was tight at the time and so much of the core structure of the M I was kept in place, and a new more modern body shape was fitted.
As it happens this turned out to be a great strategic move, as the racing prowess of the Mark I was essentially transferred into the Mark II. Despite the fact that it used a live rear axle on leaf springs the Ford Escort RS1800 proved wildly successful in World Rally Championship (WRC) events taking over 20 victories as well as the 1970 Championship – in fact it took all three places in the 1979 standings.
This was a remarkable effort from the Ford Escort RS1800, it was competing against the likes of the Lancia Stratos HF, the Porsche 911 SC, the Renault 5 Alpine, the Fiat 131 Abarth, and the Mercedes 450 SLC 5.0. With its live axle rear end and leaf springs the Escort was by far the most old-fashioned of the cars in the field, but somehow it proved more than the sum of its parts on countless race outings – beating the most impressive rally machinery of its day.
Above Image: The Mark II Escort is a cult classic in Britain and much of the world markets where it was sold new in the 1970s.
Ford would keep the Mark II Escort in production from 1974 until 1980 when it was replaced with the third generation model . Today the first and second generation Ford Escorts occupy and almost mythical place in the car culture of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the other regions where it was originally sold.
So profound is the impact that these cars had that you can still buy brand new unibody shells for them, along with every other part you need to build one essentially from scratch over 40 years since the last one left the production line.
The car you see here is a road-legal racer equipped with a 2.0 litre Cosworth BDG inline-four built by Alan Sherwood, coupled to a 5-speed ZF manual transmission. Many historic race cars like this one have been subject to restorations over the years, with some receiving a full new body shell to bring them back to as-new condition – this is one such car.
New body shells always trigger Ship of Theseus philosophical debate in the classic car community. No one car argue that they make the cars more exact and arguably stronger, but some prefer the original shells for the sake of authenticity. I belong to that former camp personally, in fact I have a classic in the garage with a new bodyshell and I have to say, it’s fantastic.
The 2.0 litre Cosworth BDG is an inline-four cylinder engine that remains in very limited production today through certain performance tuning houses. It’s an engine that was developed by Cosworth back in 1969 using the Ford Kent engine block as its starting point.
Above Image: This is the Cosworth BDG engine, a mighty 2.0 litre unit with DOHC and 270+ bhp when in full race trim.
Unlike the pushrod overhead valve Kent, the Cosworth variant had a new head with double overhead cams powered by a belt drive. The first of these engines was the 1601cc BDA (standing for “ B elt D rive A “), followed by the BDB, the BDC, the BDE, the BDF, and of course the BDG – which would be the largest capacity engine in the series with a new block cast from aluminum to match the pre-existing aluminum head.
In full race trim these Cosworth BDG engines could produce over 270 bhp, and when paired with a 5-speed transmission and a vehicle like a WRC championship winning car like the RS1800, it creates a machine very hard to beat in the right hands.
The car you see here is the ex-Malcolm Wilson and Terry Harryman “Total Team Gold” RS1800 from 1978. First registered on 17 February 1978, this RS1800 has five previous keepers on the V5C log book. Piloting ‘FFV’ with its original shell in 1979, Malcolm Wilson secured some notable results during the season, including third overall on the Phonepower International Welsh Rally, and second overall and first in class on the RAC MSA Scottish Rally.
Much more recently, and sporting the replacement shell, it was driven in numerous events between 2012 and 2015, largely in the UK, including the Ulster Historic Rally, the Jim Clark Historic Rally, and the Rally Isle of Man. It was acquired by the current private owner in July 2019.
Today the car is presented in excellent condition, ready to race and registered for the road should the new owner wish to go out and destroy some B-roads on the weekend. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can click here to visit the listing on Collecting Cars.
Ben has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with millions of readers around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ford Escort WRC in action at the 1997 Rally of Finland with Carlos Sainz at the wheel.

^ "Escort WRC" . Rallye-info.com . Archived from the original on 26 November 2007 . Retrieved 29 January 2022 .

^ "Escort WRC" . Rajdy.v10.pl . Archived from the original on 2007-10-24 . Retrieved 29 January 2022 .

^ Jump up to: a b "Escort WRC" . Juwra.com . Retrieved 29 January 2022 .

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ford Escort WRC .
Ford Escort WRC is a rally vehicle based on the Ford Escort RS Cosworth with World Rally Car homologation. It was built by M-Sport to compete in the World Rally Championship for the Ford World Rally Team . [3] It replaced the group A version that the brand had used since 1993 and was later replaced by the Ford Focus WRC in 1999.

The car was presented at the end of the 1996 Rally de Catalunya, the last race of the Group A cars, but unlike the rival Subaru Impreza, the Escort is almost a Group A further evolved according to the specific technical regulations of the World Rally Car.

The car made its debut at the 1997 Monte Carlo Rally, with the two factory drivers Carlos Sainz and Armin Schwarz. Sainz immediately wins a good second place behind Piero Liatti, a result that the Spaniard will repeat also in Sweden. At the Safari Rally Sainz retired due to a mechanical problem while Schwarz finished fourth, the German then finished 3rd in Portugal with Sainz again out of the race. In Spain both Escorts do not score points but Sainz hits the second position in Corsica.

From the next race, the Rally of Argentina, Ford replaces Armin Schwarz with the expert Juha Kankkunen, who obtained good results from the beginning, in Greece at the Acropolis Rally Ford made a double with Sainz first in front of Kankkunen; in New Zealand they finish in the same order 2nd and 3rd and in the New Zealand round the Escort WRC is updated and thanks to the FIA homologation of 1 July 1997 it is equipped with a more modern and performing six-speed X-Trac sequential gearbox instead of the "H" linkage as well as numerous other evolutions on suspensions, electronic systems and electronic differential control. Subsequently Kankkunen finished second in Finland, and then at the Rally of Indonesia Ford made a double again with Sainz 1st and Kankkunen 2nd; will be Escort Wrc's last worldwide win.

The Fords are also fast in Sanremo where Sainz is 4th by a whisker and Kankkunen is 6th. In Australia Sainz is first when he retires, while in the last race of the year, in Wales, Kankkunen finishes 2nd ahead of Sainz 3

In 1998 Ford, after the passage of Carlos Sainz to Toyota, decided to field Juha Kankkunen and the Belgian Bruno Thiry, the latter already a pilot of the blue oval in the seasons '95 and '96 aboard the Ford Escort Group A. The season begins with the best conditions given the evolutions that Ford has made to the model, such as the new engine developed by Tom Walkinshaw's TWR, despite the close retirement to give way to the Ford Focus WRC.

The season starts well, Kankkunen finishes 2nd in Monte Carlo third in Sweden while Thiry finishes 6th and 8th respectively. At the Safari Rally and the Rally of Portugal, Bruno Thiry was replaced (due to injury) by Ari Vatanen, a great connoisseur of dirt roads. Vatanen finishes third in the challenging Safari where Kankkunen is 2nd, while in Portugal Vatanen is 5th and Kankkunen only 7th.

The next race, the Rally of Spain, sees the return of Bruno Thiry, but for the team managed by Malcolm Wilson it will be a double retirement with Kankkunen going off the road and mechanical failure on Thiry's Escort. In Corsica, the Belgian Thiry proves to be very fast but due to some errors, the race on Napoleon's island relegates the Belgian to fifth place, while Kankkunen only finishes ninth.

In the next two races, Argentina and Greece, Kankkunen finished in third place, while Thiry was forced to retire in both races due to engine failure. In New Zealand Thiry crashes off the road while Kankkunen is 4th. After Kankkunen's 3rd place in Finland, the season proceeds quietly for the two Ford drivers. But in the last race of the season, the RAC Rally, Kankkunen and Thiry obtained the 2nd and 3rd position respectively, finishing perfectly the career of the glorious Escort in rallying.

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Yet when they are applied to the East African Safari Rally there can be no person who has ever had anything to do with that event who would deny that they are applicable in the most complimentary sense possible.”
This is the opening paragraph of the event report on the East African Safari Rally in the May 1972 issue of Motorsport magazine. Author Gerry Philips continued: “Some years ago we described that event as the toughest test of a motor car ever devised by man. After watching eighty-five cars whittling themselves down to eighteen along an impossibly fast 6,000 km route through the East African bush at Easter time, we can only confirm that it has not outlived its reputation.” Of the eighteen surviving cars, the Ford Escort RS 1600 shared by Hannu Mikkola from Finland and his Swedish co-driver, Gunnar Palm, was the fastest of all. It was a historic victory, as Mikkola became the first winner not born on the African continent.
The first East African Safari Rally was held in 1953 to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Accordingly, the event was originally known as the Coronation Safari Rally and ran through the British colonies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. What made the event so infamous was the fact that it was run on more than 5,000 km of public roads. If this in and of itself was not demanding enough, these very roads were still open to regular traffic. Not only was this very challenging for the driver and co-driver but perhaps even more so for the support crew, who had to chase the rally cars to make almost continuous repairs. The inaugural edition was won by Alan Dix with a Volkswagen Beetle. He was born in Kenya and up until 1972 all subsequent winners were either from Kenya or Tanzania, underlining the fact that local knowledge was crucial for success. From the eighth edition, in 1960, the event was renamed the East African Safari Rally.
In 1955, Vic Preston Sr. drove a Ford Zephyr to victory. This was by no means a factory-developed rally car but rather a mildly modified road car with changes focusing more on durability rather than performance. During the 1960s, rallying really became a professional sport and Ford established a works team. Operating out of Boreham in Essex, England, the Ford Competition Department debuted their first car, a mildly modified Ford Cortina GT, during the 1963 season. Over the winter, the Cortinas were further modified and a total of six were entered in the 1964 East African Safari Rally. The example driven by Peter Hughes won the grueling event and a sister car driver by Peter Armstrong was classified third. Championed by the new head of public relations, Walter Hayes, the motorsports efforts at Ford were ramped up during the decade as the Cortina was replaced by the all-new Escort.
First introduced in 1968, the Escort line-up included the “Twin Cam” model, which, as its name suggests, was powered by a twin-cam engine. This was the same eight-valve, four-cylinder unit that had originally been developed by Lotus for the hugely successful Cortina Touring and Rally cars. The production road car served to homologate the Escort Twin Cam for use both in international Touring car and Rally championships. The Escort continued where the Cortina had left off, dominating the 1968 British Touring Car Championship but also scoring a win in the prestigious 1970 London to Mexico World Cup Rally. Even though the Twin Cam had been replaced by the new Escort RS 1600 in 1971, Ford was not convinced that the new rally car would last the distance and entered the Twin Cam once more in the East African Safari Rally. Sadly, the eight-valve Escort could not take victory in the most grueling of all rallies in 1971.
Added to the Escort range in 1970, the RS 1600 was powered by what was effectively a thinly disguised racing engine. The RS was short for “Rallye Sport,” which clearly signaled the new model’s intention. The main trick up its sleeve was the “BDA” engine that had been developed specifically for the RS 1600 by Ford’s engine partner Cosworth. For homologation purposes, it was based on the same “Kent” block as the earlier Escort engines but featured a bespoke aluminum alloy head. This featured twin overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder. BDA is short for Belt Drive, Type A, which is a reference to the belt that drives the camshafts from the crankshaft. Mounted at the front of the engine, this rubber belt was fully exposed. While the road car had a 1,599 cc displacement, it was homologated at 1,601 cc to ensure the RS 1600 could run in the top class (1,600 cc and over) to make it eligible for overall and not just class wins.
The BDA engine was mounted in a reinforced shell, which the RS 1600 shared with the new Escort Mexico that was also introduced in 1970. Fitted with an overhead valve, crossflow engine, this high-performance model was named to commemorate the London to Mexico victory. By beefing up the unitary chassis in key areas, the Escort became even more adapt at both circuit racing and rallying. The suspension was through lower wishbones and McPherson struts at the front and a live rear axle with leaf springs at the back. The RS 1600 was homologated with front disc brakes to ensure the competition cars would stop as well as they went. While the production road car looked inconspicuous, the competition version featured flared wheel arches to house wider tires and boasted a full roll-over cage to protect the car’s occupants in case of an accident.
The Escort RS 1600 was officially homologated for competition use on October 1, 1970, after the Royal Automobile Club had determined that the required 1,000 road-going examples had been produced by September 1 that year. Roger Clark had already driven an RS 1600 to victory in March of 1970 when the car was still considered a prototype. It would take until June of 1971 before the new sixteen-valve engine scored its first major success when Chris Slater piloted his BDA-engine Escort Twin Cam to victory in the Scottish rally. More victories would follow soon thereafter, and the Escort would become one of the most successful Rally and Touring cars of the era. The success continued after the original Escort was replaced by the Mark II towards the end of the 1975 season.
While the RS 1600 had sat out the 1971 East African Safari Rally, it was pressed into service for the twentieth edition, in 1972. The event was already highly regarded, but had gained increased importance as it was now part of the International Championship for Manufacturers (ICM), which would become the World Rally Championship (WRC) in 1973. With a start and finish in Tanzania’s capital Dar es Salam, the 1972 edition had the second-longest route in the history of the event. This took the entrants through all three, now independent, East African countries of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. In addition to the five Escorts fielded b
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