RWD V6 ESCOS
The Escort Cosworth is a world-famous Ford icon, but did you know Ford intended to build a RWD version using the 24v Cosworth V6 too…?
Ford considered the 24v V6 as an engine option for the Mk5 Escort.
How many of you have driven an Escort RS Cosworth road car? Yes? Good. Congratulations – and I join you in being in love with the model. My own experience, incidentally, covered two years in standard machines, in which I was never let down. Not once. And even survived an attempt to have the car stolen when it was parked, overnight, in a hotel near Birmingham.
I always thought the performance was stunning, the four-wheel-drive was reassuring, and the styling was great. The only drawback, in my opinion, was that I had recently changed over from driving 24-valve Scorpios, which had fabulous, silky-smooth engines and great refinement. The engine, by the way was the normallyaspirated 2.9-litre V6 which Cosworth had developed (they coded it FB), which had twin-overhead-camshafts per cylinder head, four-valve per cylinder, and was already producing a smooth and torquey 210bhp, with much more to come if needed.
I was well on the way to the end of my ownership of my second Escort RS Cosworth, therefore, before I knew of the existence of a development of the car which might just have suited me down to the ground – a 24-valve engined car, with rearwheel-drive!
You didn’t know about this car? No, neither did I until I turned up to do a commentary job at an RS Owners’ Club National Day the mid-1990s, where I met up with John Bull of SVE, who had arrived in the only prototype. It was only there because the project had been cancelled, and could therefore be seen in public. By that time, incidentally, Escort RS Cosworth production at Karmann in Germany had fallen away drastically, from 3,448 in 1992, down to 1,180 in 1994, which was the year in which the 24-valve engine car was conceived.
Later, this is what John Bull told me about it, and the reason it was developed: “That was an attempt to overcome the poor sales,” he says. “It was obvious that we weren’t selling as many Escort RS Cosworths as we had hoped, but we had contractual
obligations to both major partners – Karmann and Cosworth.
“One or two of us – and people at Karmann – started to think: ‘What can we do?’ Eventually we came up with the marriage of the Cosworth 24-valve FB engine, to the V6 version of MT75 gearbox, but only in rear-wheel-drive form.
“The engine was a bit big, and it was difficult getting it in. I remember cutting and carving the radiator and engine bay panels to make it fit. We had a special fan built up too. But it was really only a one-off toy, very much an under-the-table project, we certainly didn’t spend much money on it. The engine was quite a bit heavier than the YB, but as we were deleting the front prop shaft, the front diff and the front drive shafts that would almost have balanced it out.
“It was built up at Karmann, in a corner of the prototype/development workshops there, not at SVE in the UK. It really was a very nice car, it was subdued, and it didn’t need the big spoilers, so it just had the neat single spoiler at the back.
“We built it at about the time VW was introducing their own VR6 (V6-engined) Golf, and it would have been an obvious competitor for that. I remember writing a product paper, detailing what it consisted of, and spelling out just how many we needed to sell to make it a viable programme. Really, it was only hundreds of cars, not thousands – because we weren’t proposing to spend a lot of investment money on engines and transmissions – but even so we couldn’t get any of the marketing territories (not one, if I remember rightly) to sign up for it.”
John, being a typically capable, but endearingly modest, SVE engineer, rather under-played the work which was needed to make this into a sensible, viable, and pleasing machine. He rather omitted to say how much work was needed to mate the new five-speed MT75 transmission to the engine, but my overall impression was that he, like me, would have been very happy to own such car.
Just think of the joys of controlling such a powerful engine which drove only to the rear wheels? Sideways, anyone?