RESTORED MK1 MEXICO
Classic Fords restored: Distraught at having to part with his RS1800, Jeannot Boesen overcame the blues in the best way possible — by rebuilding the Escort Mexico of his dreams with the help of motorsport legends, Mücke Motorsport.
Escort gets the bubble arch treatment courtesy of Berlin’s finest.
As far as origin stories go, you’ll find fewer more impressive or as impactful as that of the Escort Mexico. So well known is the tale of the birth of the sporting Escort that it can largely be told via a series of phrases, buzzwords and second-hand anecdotes and images — assuming of course that you’re significantly far down the old Ford rabbit warren to more readily associate ‘Mexico’ with ‘Escort’ than say, Tequila.
We doubt even Ford’s own Walter Hayes could’ve conceived of the impact his decision to dispatch five examples of the Escort from London to Mexico city way back in 1970, at least in the longterm. And yet the process he set in motion would lead to the creation of the most attainable and thus most accessible hot Escort of them all, a performance offering for those not well-heeled or bothered enough by rally-derived street-cred to lust after an
RS2000 or RS1600, yet unwilling to submit to the somewhat tepid charms of the GT.
Scroll forward a long, interminably turbulent half-century, and the Mexico’s place in the pantheon of sought-after Escorts is more than secure. It’s a point underscored both by the values they now routinely command come the time of sale, and also the number of individuals – many of whom weren’t converting O2 to CO2 at the time of the Mexico’s launch — queuing up to buy them.
Cruise missile
Jeannot Boesen’s can attest to the immense pulling power of the first-gen Mex better than most, what with his association with the example you see here, an example he’s owned since 2008, having first begun while he and his wife were on a cruise around the Mediterranean. An otherwise unremarkable debarkation at the port of Vigo, Spain allowed Jeannot to set eyes on the car, and from then it was merely a question of time; how long it would take to find the Mexico’s owner, how long it would take to convince them to sell it — and of course how long he and his wife could spend haggling before their cruise liner set sail once more.
“It was for sale at Classicos de Mos, a restoration specialist. They were planning on undertaking a complete, nut-and-bolt restoration on the car having pulled it out of a barn in Bordeaux, so it was far from perfect at that time. I didn’t mind, and I would’ve bought it there and then… had they allowed me,” explains Jeannot with a chuckle.
The couple therefore departed with nothing but an assurance from the owner of Classicos de Mos that he would call and offer