PUMA COSWORTH
Looking at faster Fords that never made it to the showroom, this month we discover that Ford were close to adding Cosworth power to the little Puma…
A faster Ford that never made it to the showroom.
N o sooner had Boreham lost the contract to run World Rally Cars in 1997 (that prize went to M-Sport, with the Escort Cosworth World Rally Car), than the engineering team cast around for a new challenge. To quote chief engineer Philip Dunabin: “The Puma looked attractive to us, so the first thing we did was to start looking at ways of integrating the Escort RS Cosworth four-wheel-drive system into the Puma. We then developed a body style to go with that sort of car. We set out the parameters of track width and wheel sizes, and had a go, ourselves, about developing new wing shapes and new bumpers.”
Ford’s Dunton styling studio experts were not impressed, and bluntly told Philip that “We think we’d better help you ….”. The result was the Puma Concept car, which appeared at the Autosport Show at the NEC Exhibition Centre in Birmingham in January 1998. As it turned out, everyone except the company’s top bosses was enthusiastic about the car, so it was duly rejected, and only the one prototype was built.
The style, of course, was extremely sexy, but what went on under the skin ? The Puma, after all, had a transversely-mounted normally-aspired 1.7-litre Zetec SE engine and front-wheel-drive, whereas the Escort RS Cosworth had a turbocharged YBP 2.0-litre, in-line engine along with fourwheel-drive. The other major difference was that the Puma had a mere 123bhp, while the standard-tuned Escort RS Cosworth had 224bhp.
Not only that, but as with the transformation which saw the original Escort RS Cosworth grow out of the 1990s-style Escort, to combine the two more modern body shells – Puma and Escort RS Cosworth – was going to be complex, costly, and would need an SVE-type design/ development operation to put into effect. Basic figures tell their own story; the Puma ran on a 96.3in wheelbase, with a 57in front track, and 15in wheels; the standard Escort RS Cosworth ran on a 100.4in. wheelbase with a 62in front track and 16in wheels.
Although Boreham’s engineers had
already carried out one of their ‘miracles take a little time’ programmes, the major problem for the production engineers at Dunton was that they would have to find a refined way of shortening the chassis platform yet again (don’t forget, it had already been shortened from the Sierra Cosworth 4x4 of 1990), and of coping with the change in front-to-rear weight distribution the Cosworth would impose.
For the sporting enthusiasts at Ford – and there were (still are, for that matter) many of them at all levels – this put the company in a big dilemma. On the one hand, the Puma was a new model (it was based on a Fiesta platform) but the body shell was novel, and the Concept style was stunning. But the pedigree of the YB engine was already more than a decade old, and one reason for the Escort RS Cosworth being made obsolete (series production had ended in early 1996) was because it was struggling to meet current noise and exhaust emissions regulations.
At this point you will note that there was never any criticism of what the Concept looked like, no doubts about the performance potential, and none about the potential handling balance – everyone, without exception, knew that the combined talents of Boreham and SVE at Dunton would be able to iron out any short-comings.
One major headache, however, was to wonder where such a car might eventually be produced in quantity? The Escort RS Cosworth had always been built, on behalf of Ford, by Karmann in Germany – but after that car had been dropped in 1996, the production line equipment had been dismantled and swept away. Nor was there any practical way that it could be built at Saarlouis in Germany among other Pumas.
There was also one other major problem, the British dealer chain. They weren’t too enthusiastic about having to sell such a car. A front-wheel-drive coupe? Of course. A four-wheel-drive saloon? Maybe. But a fourwheel-drive coupe ‘supercar’? Errr…
So in 1998 the Concept was cancelled and, as far as is known, the single prototype was dismantled. It was a great loss.