ESCORT RS2000
Flatfront Mk2 that’s built to drive— hard.
We all dream of finding the perfect project car, hidden away in the shadows by a seller who doesn’t really know what they’ve got. It’s perhaps not the ideal scenario when said car is riddled with terrible attempts at welding and you can pull bits of steel out by hand, but for Jeremy Hookway, the perceived horrors were simply masking a whole load of potential.
“It was a Mk2 Escort, so in my head I’d already bought it,” he laughs.
Jeremy’s had an astonishing number of Fords over the years and, having sold his RS1600i and with a slot to fill, the yearning for a Mk2 Escort was strong.
“This car was offered to a friend at a show, although he’d just acquired a project so I
decided to take a look,” Jeremy recalls. “All I knew was that it was a Mk2 that had been off the road a while; sat in a derelict shed, I was confronted with a bare rolling shell propped on its side with two-by-fours — some bits had been sand-blasted, some rubbed down, patches of red lead, primer, lots of black Hammerite, and some really bad welding. Structurally it didn’t seem too bad though, and I was trying not to look too keen…” The seller explained that the Pinto, Type-9, glass, doors and so on would be thrown in for the right price, and chucked out a figure of £1500. This didn’t seem unreasonable to Jeremy, and poking through the spares, he asked what model it was, expecting to hear ‘L’ or ‘GL’, but the owner seemed to think it was an XR3i (perhaps because of the registration number) which is, of course, impossible. But a synapse fired in Jeremy’s brain, and he started checking the car for telltale signs of greatness. Sure enough, he found anti-tramp bar brackets, spare wheel strap brackets, dash cutout for the clock pod — it was an RS! So he immediately shook the man’s hand, trying hard not to pull it off at the elbow, and carted his bounty home. The logbook proved that it was indeed a bona fide RS2000.
Plan B
“I was going to keep it original, until I saw the prices of RS interiors,” says Jeremy. “So I went with plan B, which was to flatfront it, fit a couple of bucket seats and a rollcage — which I’d wanted to do to my last RS2000 but didn’t
“WHEELING AND DEALING HELPED PAY FOR THE BODY REPAIRS JUST AS WELL, AS IT NEEDED THE LOT...”
— thinking it would be a cheaper option…” Of course, as we well know there are no cheap options with Mk2 Escorts, but it was never Jeremy’s intention to cut corners. Indeed, a visit to Historic Motorsport South West was all it took to convince him that a rally-inspired fast-road build was just the ticket.
“I sold off the spares I wouldn’t be needing, which netted £1449 — meaning I’d paid just £51 for my RS2000,” Jeremy grins. “The car then went to Historic Motorsport to have the link boxes, rear tubs, turrets and Watt’s towers fitted. At this point I was offered an accidentdamaged Focus ST170, so I snapped that up for the engine and put the rest on up for sale. I couldn’t believe how much of it sold, so I ended up buying another ST170, and another, and another… selling these parts was buying the bits I needed for the RS!”
Wheeling and dealing like a true Delboy helped pay for the body repairs, which is just as well as it needed a lot: sills, floorpans, strut tops, front tubs, gearbox and diff tunnels, wings, slam panel, and even a roof skin. The aim was to
upgrade as well as repair, and the whole shell was stitch-welded, with corner brackets in the engine bay, radiator support panel braces, harness eye plates, strut brace brackets, roll cage mounts, sump guard brackets and all the right prep. It was then sandblasted, fitted with Tarmac arches, and fastidiously prepped for its fresh Radiant Red.
“The car was approximately 85 per cent complete when I decided to fit the rear spoiler and found a small imperfection on the underside,” says Jeremy. “As I was bolting it down, it dug in and lifted a tiny bit of paint on the bootlid! I wasn’t happy to say the least but took it on the chin, assuming it would be a quick sand and repaint… however it swiftly went south in a big way as all the paint started peeling off.” A huge setback for sure, as it turned out the paint itself was dodgy and the whole lot just unstuck itself! But with steely determination (and a few more ST170s broken to fund it), the Escort was stripped back, re-primed and repainted, this time with fabulous results.
Totally wired
“Last on the list for us was the ECU,” he continues. “With the car running a DTA S40, it went back to Historic Motorsport who upgraded the loom to get everything working, and as soon as they finished I got it booked in for an MoT. Although it was running and driving it wasn’t totally happy, so the next stop was with Steve at Tipton Garage for a rollingroad setup — he managed to get just shy of 180 bhp out of it, still running the VVT.”
Unfortunately, on the subsequent road test the oil pressure rapidly dropped, and when Jeremy drained the oil it was very glittery, which is seldom good news. Fortunately, he was pretty comfortable with dismantling ST170s by this point and, given that he was due to take the car to the Duchy Classic Ford Show the following week, he grabbed another low-mileage ST170 engine from a mate, Lee, who’d been saving the engine for one of his own projects.
On the Thursday they stripped out the old engine, swapped the new one in on the Friday, got it all running by Saturday, and it was on
display on Sunday. How’s that for commitment and teamwork?
“I was pretty nervous,” Jeremy admits. “The map was for the other engine, this one had been sat under a bench for a while and I hadn’t really done more than a few miles in the car on the couple of occasions I’d driven it. I needn’t have been though, as it drove perfectly all the way to Newquay and back — and to top it off, I won car of the show!”
Not bad for a dilapidated wreck pulled from a tumbledown shed, right? It hasn’t been an easy road — Jeremy’s endured more than his fair share of setbacks (and quite a lot of Focus ST170s have been sacrificed) — but the flawless results you see before you are testament to his tenacity. A genuine RS2000, flatfronted in the classic rally style and sporting an eyewatering spec, built for road-tripping and fast road thrills.
It’s a good job he’s got six Cibies blazing a trail, because now this car’s up and running it’s not stopping for anyone.
“I WAS NERVOUS, BUT THE RS DROVE PERFECTLY AND I ENDED UP WITH CAR OF THE SHOW”