ESCORT COSSIE

Super clean EsCos with 305bhp and all the right mods.

It’s often said of great music that you have to listen to the notes that aren’t being played. That is to say, restraint is the creative foil to overblown embellishment – try too hard and things will end up overdone and spoiled, but exercise a little selfcensoring in the artistic process and the purity of the result will speak for itself. So it is that often, we find, the best feature cars are the ones that are done right, rather than having had every fashionable aftermarket tuning name under the sun hurled at them. Choose sparingly, and you choose wisely.

This is why you’re enjoying a set of photos of a Petrol Blue Escort Cosworth lounging lasciviously for the camera, resplendent on chunky Rondells and a merest soupçon of carbonfibre. It’s not stickered up like a WRC car, it’s not packed to the gills with ostentatious fibreglass, it’s not rocking a four-figure bhp boast that’d win at Top Trumps but be unusable day-to- day on the road. Instead, what owner Mark Hudd has done is to carefully choose the correct additions to enhance this formidable base, and take painstaking steps to ensure that the machine is flawlessly presented. Take a look at the underside, you could embrace that old cliché with both hands and actually eat your dinner off it. ( Y’know, if you were eating something gelatinous enough to stick to it. Don’t try it with soup, gravity will give you a brothy shower.)

It’s hardly surprising to find that Mr Hudd has done right by this iconic RS, however, as he’s a man who knows his Cosworth onions. Being the spanner-twirling owner and effervescent brains behind RS & Cosworth specialist M Hudd Motorsport, he’s had more than a few RS Fords featured in these pages before, and everything that passes through his revered workshop leaves shimmering with the glittery sheen of a job thoroughly well done.

“I purchased this Escort seventeen years ago, when it was totally standard,” he explains. “This was my

dream car, that I thought I’d never own – but I worked hard and saved hard until I had enough money to buy one.” He clearly bought well too – it’s not often you hear of an enthusiast hanging on to the same motor for such an extended period of time. And when they do, the temptation to keep modding and modding until the thing’s unrecognisable can invariably be too strong to resist; again, Mark’s restraint and appreciation of the car’s purity is key to its flawless presentation.

That’s not to say that the base car was any sort of shrinking wallflower, of course. Far from it. The Escort RS Cosworth is one of those mad ideas that don’t occur to automobile manufacturers very often, and when they do, the engineers are generally shouted down by the accountants and the idea quietly crumbles to dust and is swept into an unseen corner. The fact that the model exists at all is rather wonderful, and it really was a game-changer.

How so? Well, largely because the Mk5 Escort was… well, it was far from a brilliant car. Sure, the sportier variants had their merits, and there are a few of you out there who’ve taken the platform and made it rock, but the harsh reality is that the Mk5 Escort was built down to a price – and that price was ‘Er, as cheap as you can make it, lads, and then knock a further 10% off…’

The Escort RS Cosworth, however: that was something different. Something special. This was largely due to the fact that it wasn’t really a Mk5 Escort at all, it just happened to look like one for the purposes of homologation. Built in limited numbers to allow Ford to take the car Group A rallying, the road car was based around the chassis and oily bits of the Sierra RS Cosworth 4x4, which helps to explain those extra driveshafts and the fact that the engine’s pointing the other way. The iconic whaletail, so integral to the car’s character, harked back to the old three- door Cossie, and the first cars had sodding great Garrett T3/ T04B turbos – subsequent cars were a little more usable with a smaller Garrett T25 ( hence why you hear people talking

“My favourite thing about this RS is the way that it drives like a modern car”

“This was my dream car, that I thought I’d never own – but I saved hard until I had enough money to buy one”

about ‘big turbo’ and ‘small turbo’ Cosworths), and the whaletail later became a delete option. But you’d have to be mad to tick that box.

“I’d say my favourite thing about this RS is the way that it drives like a modern car,” Mark enthuses, “and the brakes are awesome.” The genius of Mark’s build is all thanks to that careful decisionmaking we were talking about: having been in the RS game for countless years, he’s got a keen eye and a sixth sense for how to perfect these cars. It’s not just a case of burbling down to the local tuning shop and saying ‘Yeah, I’ll have the lot, please.’ No, Mark has taken more of a scientific view in order to sharpen up the edges and buff down the roughness, thereby turning a factory-bitsa homologation bastard into a formidable modern classic. “It’s a small-turbo car, and I’ve upgraded that with a hybrid turbo and actuator,” he explains. “The head’s been ported, and there’s an RS500 intercooler; power’s now at 305bhp.” Nowhere near the stratospheric levels of his other projects, then – Mark’s 3- door Cossie, for example, has 732bhp, and he’s also stuffed colossal Cosworth power and four-wheel- drive into both a Series 1 RS Turbo and a Mk1 Escort van – but it’s all appropriate for the car’s character. And in a social media-fuelled tuning scene where every man and his dog is chasing hungrily after the latest fashion-forward split-rims, it’s enormously gratifying to spot that this car’s wearing chunky sixspoke Rondells – the archetypal motorsport wheel for a bona fide motorsport road-racer.

Those brakes he was talking about? They’re beefy AP Racing units that sit perfectly behind the Rondells, offering up 362mm discs up front and 300mm out back, while suspension duties are taken care of by a blend of Konis up front and Avo coilovers at the rear. Everything about the spec list exudes a correctness, a logic that’s impossible to fault.

What really stands out about Mark’s Escort, however, is the astonishing