ESCORT TURBO CHAMPIONSHIP
(1983 AND 1984)
It was to keep the Ford ‘clubman’ happy that Boreham promoted a fixed-spec Escort Championship to run in British events throughout 1983 and 1984. Private owners were invited to buy their own XR3s (not XR3is, please note, for a Weber carburettor and not fuel injection was part of this Championship), and Ford provided a complete turbocharging kit (and added viscous-coupling differentials for 1984) and closely monitored the UK series. The cars, which had the newly-launched five-speed transmission, had about 130bhp. Although the rally cars were not very fast, they handled well, and were fun to drive. The series was very competitive, and in 1983 the series was won by an aspiring young rally driver from a small town in Somerset – that man was Mark Lovell, who would go on to be entwined with Escort story and who we would hear much more of in the future.
The whole point of this series was that all the cars were nominally spec’d and should all have had equal performance. Ford appointed scrutineers to keep a very careful eye on them, and there seemed to be little deviation between types. Professional preparation helped a lot, of course – for although Mark Lovell was clearly an outstanding driver, the fact that his car was prepared and maintained by RED of Widnes must have been a factor.
For the average enthusiast there was one good after-effect, for as a direct consequence of this series, Ford’s ‘mainstream’ Product Planning department liked the idea of selling turbocharged Escorts in numbers, which directly led to the launch of the Series One Escort RS Turbo at the end of 1984.