SIERRA COSWORTH
Raymond Lutton’s three-door Cossie is as clean as a whistle, and has won more than a few trophies on the concours scene. But if you think that means it lives a pampered and easy life, you’d be mistaken…
Show-winning Cossie still gets driven hard!
What’s the first thing that strikes you when you look at this Sierra RS Cosworth? The cleanliness of it? The subtle RS500 upgrades to the nose? The staggered 17in wheels? No, while those are all worthy of note, there’s one thing that’s really jumping up and down and screaming and poking you in the eye here: the car’s out and about in the rain, sliding around like a buttered salmon on the asphalt as owner Raymond Lutton gives that heavily tweaked YB a solid bootful of grunt, time and time again. These three-doors may be increasingly finding themselves being pampered in hermetically sealed collections, but there are still dyed-in-the-wool enthusiasts out there ready to use them as the good Ford intended.
The fact that Raymond freely admits
that it’s a show car makes this all the more impressive. He loves to park it up on a concours lawn and compare notes with owners of other similarly flawless machines – usually bringing home a trophy or two – but he never forgets what the car’s for. Touring Car DNA courses through the Sierra’s veins, and this fella’s more than happy to indulge its racy whims.
Speaking of DNA, it’s fair to say that Raymond is a Ford man through and through. Indeed, he’s been playing about with these machines for long enough to be able to map the trajectory from everyday runabout to revered old-school toy. “I started out in 1987 with Mk2 Escorts and Capris as daily drivers,” he explains, “then I got into classic Fords around 1997.” You see what’s happened there? Over the course of a decade, the scenescape of Blue Ovals shifted, meaning that the sort of cars Raymond was into all along had made the transition from ten-a-penny smokers to desirable collectibles; he didn’t change his proclivities, it was the world that changed around him, and he found himself referring to his stalwart motors as classics simply because that’s what they’d become. “First of all, there was an Escort RS1600i, then a Capri 2.0S, then a Series 2 RS Turbo, before finally arriving at the three-door Sierra RS Cosworth, which I’ve owned for nearly seven years now. Why a Cosworth? Well, you don’t really get a better classic Ford than a threedoor, do you?!”
Sound reasoning, we can get on board with that! The car was on sale on Gumtree and it was only ten miles away from his house, so you can’t blame Raymond for taking a look, can you? Even if it was just out of idle curiosity it would have been worth a peep, although the ripples in the fabric of the cosmos itself ensured that the act of bringing it back home with him was always an inevitability. “These never come up for sale, not in Northern Ireland anyway,” he shrugs. “I thought – why not? And of course, I ended up buying it.”
The Sierra turned out to be a bit of a peach. It had taken pride of place in a Ford dealership showroom for an impressive ten years, meaning that it had been spared endless winters, rainstorms, parking dings and salted roads by virtue of it hiding inside all the time! When Raymond happened across it, the car was totally factory-stock and had just 56,000 miles on the clock. And you don’t find a Cossie like that every