ANDY SAUNDERS
CONTRIBUTOR
Show a photographer like Andy a Ford with plenty of details and they’re happy — just like Automax’s Mk2 Escort on
Wholesome father and son activities are a staple of popular fiction and have been for generations, to the extent that when we see the classic scenario depicted in celluloid (or pixel) yet again, it can be hard not to roll your eyes at the notion such a hackneyed cinematic trope being wheeled out yet again. Most of us have come to recognise the signs of such a bonding exercise whatever the media, normally through the suggestion of that most basic and default of father-son undertakings, the fishing trip.
And yet, becoming so jaded about something so wholesome and fundamentally good as a father-son activity isn’t merely sad, it’s counter-productive. After all, who says that you have to set out to catch fish with your father or your son (delete as applicable), especially when, as the car you see before you demonstrates, working together can ultimately land you something altogether more exhilarating than even the wiliest and largest of carp.
Nigel and Max Holman can take credit for creating this Mk2, a process only recently completed but many years in the making. The father and son team run a specialised garage, restoration and tuning business called Automax in the day, while their spare time is also spent together albeit in aid of producing the Escort you see here, a tribute to their combined efforts and expertise.
“My dad has been involved with Escorts for most of his life. He spent the 1970s working on them, preparing them for competitive work…he was personally charged
with looking after Bill Gwynne’s Group 1 RS2000 for a spell in the late 1970s, so yes, he lives and breathes them.” recalls Max.
Youth and experience
Having a father so steeped in second-gen Escorts meant that Max really didn’t have a hope, and indeed he was indoctrinated into the cult of oversteer before he could legally leave the house unsupervised! Lessons from primary school upwards were spent doodling ever more outlandish Escorts on the sly, while close friends and peers struggled to comprehended Max’s obsession with an outwardly unremarkable, 40-odd year-old saloon.
While there was never any doubt that father and son would work together to produce the best Escort they could, Max readily admits that their wildly different ages resulted in some disagreements about which route to take the car down. For instance, Max was dead set on putting his own stamp on the car by mixing the best of modern thinking with proven, old-school practices, while his father — quite understandably given his lifelong interest in these cars — wanted to tack closely to the historic specification.
This difference in opinion in how best to proceed was thrust into the foreground when the pair came to actually look at a Mk2 with the intention of buying, the rolling shell of what had begun life as an 1100 Popular. It came with wheels, panels, the merest suggestion of an engine (an XE block, roughly bolted into place with nary an ancillary in sight), and dozens of boxes stuffed with various parts cluttering every square inch of its interior.
The deal was done, the Escort loaded up and the long drive back to Automax’s HQ in Banbury commenced, whereupon Max wasted no time in ensconcing himself in the workshop to begin the extended process of
unpacking, sorting and labelling the vast selection of parts the Escort had come with.
Block (sanding) party
The Escort had commenced life under Holman ownership as the aforementioned rolling shell, albeit one that had already been gusseted and seam welded by its previous keeper. It was painted in a mix of different colours however and as such had the potential to be hiding any number of ferrous horrors, which was ultimately convinced Max to take the plunge bodywork-wise.
“I committed to prepping the whole shell by myself, pretty much by hand. It was a labour of love, at least that’s what it started out as. At the end…well, let’s just say it was a labour by that point!”
Thus, Max spent many, many months with a DA sander, painstakingly stripping layers of red, black, and finally the Escort’s original, factory-applied colour, Solar Gold. Minor restorative metalwork was then carried out to a number of areas, chiefly the boot floor, front wing splash plates and headlight buckets, after which it was time for another father-and-son, inter-generational poser — which colour to paint it!
“We’d narrowed it down to a white, that much we agreed upon,” recalls Max with a wry chuckle. “But my dad was dead set on Diamond White, the Ford colour he knew from his time working on Escorts back in the day. I, however, wanted the car to be in Frozen White, and seeing as I’d done all the bodywork prep to bring us to this point, well you can guess who won that one!”
The Mk2 was thus treated to a brand-new coat of Frozen White, a hue flawlessly applied by Max’s friends at SGM Racepaint, and a key reason for this particular Escort’s immense road presence.
XE marks the spot
While Max busied himself with some intensive old Ford brand archaeology, father Nigel was putting him time-served Escort skills to good use rebuilding the Red Top into a living, breathing, high-carb entity. It therefore gained forged internals, a pair of Newman’s more aggressively-profiled cams, and this particular XE’s signature fitment — a pair of barking Weber DCOE 45s. Because really, some old school things are just objectively brilliant, and OPEC-bothering DCOEs more than fit the bill!
Max busied himself planning, then making the Escort’s new wiring loom; a daunting task for anyone, never mind someone with no first-hand experience of automotive wiring.
“I took my time, approached the task logically and made very sure to note everything down as I went, but I still wasn’t under the impression that it would start on the key first time out, not with it being my very first wiring task. It blew an ECU fuse the first time we started it, but that really was about it — and it’s been faultless ever since.”
From this point on things began to move at a frantic pace, or as swift as Max’s funds would permit. A self-confessed details man, Max points to the rear brake callipers as evidence of
his willingness to go the extra mile to build an Escort that meets his own, towering levels of expectation.
Taken from a VW Golf and fitted with custom brackets, Max selected these units largely because their almost corrugated, intensely-fluted design matched the similarly stamped differential casing and Watt’s linkage brace, and thus would look in-keeping as a whole — presumably for the benefit for whoever finds themselves lying underneath it, swinging spanners in anger!
At its very heart, this is a fundamentally real-world build, by which we mean it was undertaken and completed with a decidedly relatable budget. Nigel’s hard-won experience and appliable know-how has undoubtedly helped in this of course, but it’s hard to look beyond Max’s passion for the car, and on a directly related note, his willingness to get stuck in himself.
Max and Nigel’s hours of father-and-son graft came good when the car fired up for the first time (with help from the former’s newly-demonstrated wiring talents), soon followed by a successful MoT test and the obligatory, celebratory B-road blast afterwards. It isn’t hard to imagine this being an entertaining experience what with the car’s well-polished chassis and twin 45 soundtrack, though Max does admit that it isn’t something he’s been able repeat as much as he’d have liked.
Max now admits that the kernel of his love affair for Mk1 and Mk2 Escorts can be found in the building rather than the driving, and as such this Escort might (might — we can’t stress that enough) be up for sale. It all depends whether or not Max can convince his father to begin building him another high-carb Red Top to go in it.
“AT ITS HEART THIS IS A REAL WORLD BUILD UNDERTAKEN WITH A DECIDEDLY REALISTIC BUDGET”