Big Resto: RS2000
This stunning machine is the result of one man’s 30-year devotion. But it so nearly ended in tears…
One man’s Escort restoration.
Not many chaps know their car as well as Adrian Shimmans knows his 1974 Escort RS2000 MKI. At first glance you’ll fairly assume it’s freshly emerged from a lavish restoration at a professional workshop. Gaze a little longer and you might spot rare details, affordable to only a deep-pocketed aficionado. But Adrian’s not a millionaire, he’s a lifelong bricklayer – and until he decided to roll up his sleeves and breathe new life into his old weekend toy, he’d never welded in his life. Even more impressive is the way he’s kept it in such dazzling condition, still collecting awards many years after its return to the road. But this Escort hasn’t always been so lucky; it’s a miracle it exists at all.
Back in the Eighties, its corroding floor resulted in a painful MOT failure for the previous owner, a friend of Adrian’s. ‘It sat on his mum’s drive for a couple of years rotting, with bits disappearing for other
projects, its footwells full of water. Another mate decided he’d weld it up and get an MOT on it – that included a lot of welding around the floor, and new chassis rails at the front. Then he sold it to a young lad whose parents refused to let him have it and bounced the cheque; that’s when I ended up buying it, in 1989.’
Adrian was already a committed Ford man, having owned a string of Capris. This was his first Escort, and it soon won his affection as a plaything for wild weekends in the Bedfordshire countryside – even if it wasn’t in the best shape. Nine keepers were on the V5, and Adrian reckoned it had probably been in a shunt. Not long after buying it, calamity was narrowly averted when he heard hissing from under the bonnet; a previous owner had installed new fuel lines down the wrong side of the car, and a melted pipe was dripping petrol onto the hot exhaust. ‘A bit of a teabag,’ Adrian describes it.
And he knew his hard driving wasn’t helping either. ‘I thought, if I carry on like this I’m going to kill it, so it sat around for a few years until I started stripping back some underseal. Then I got carried away…’
The work begins
His first job was to amass a complete collection of new panels. All were new-old stock – genuine items, mainly sourced through the AVO Club (which had a healthy supply at the time), and Adrian found himself driving all around the country to fetch them.
The plan was to get a mate who was a professional fabricator to tackle the welding. ‘But when he saw it he said: “Nah, I’ll be here for years! You’ll have to learn to weld.” I’d always played around
‘I’d played around with cars, but I’d never restored one and I couldn’t weld’
with cars mechanically, but I’d never restored one and I couldn’t weld.’ Determined to see it through, Adrian armed himself with a £50 secondhand MIG welder and a few pointers from his mate. ‘One of the previous owners was in the pub one night telling me I didn’t have the skills to finish it,’ he recalls. ‘Well, that was a red rag to a bull!’
Run your finger over the glossy blue bodywork and you’d never guess the repairs are the work of anyone but a pro. The boot floor is original but the formerly rotten rear chassis rails are now immaculately renewed, all the way down the inside of the inner wheelarches and against the outer body too. ‘Yeah, I got quite good at it in the end,’ says Adrian, with genuine modesty.
Originality has always been top of the agenda, so he tracked down all the parts that had been previously stripped from the car. Seats, steering wheel and cylinder head all returned to become part of the recipe. Gearbox and axle were sent off for professional refurbishment, leaving Adrian to focus on the rest.
The seats were past it, so Adrian stripped and painted the frames, ordered new fabric, and sent them off for a professional retrim. The result, however, was a disappointment, so Adrian stripped them again and did it himself, properly, with willing partner Lorraine sorting the stitching. ‘I couldn’t have done it without Lorraine,’ Adrian says. ‘She’s not afraid to get her hands dirty and lets me strip the engine on the kitchen table, with parts curing in the oven. She’s good like that!’
Adrian’s years spent playing with Pintos and Crossflows meant the engine rebuild was ‘the easy bit’. The 2.0-litre unit was totally stripped, then rebuilt with its original head to factory spec. A previous owner had had it rebored and it was in relatively good order; new piston rings and bottom end bearings were all it needed. Meanwhile the wiring loom had to be created from two 1300 looms, as RS2000 items weren’t available. Everything on the car is to original spec, though,
with the options of a Webasto roof, Group 1 Bilstein suspension with CD6 rear springs and headrests.
Unlike many replicas, this is a genuine AVO shell of the kind that Ford originally devised for 1300GT buyers in Australia, and later repurposed for RS models and motorsport. The strengthening plates on top of the suspension turrets give it away, along with Rs-specific plates on the inner front mud guards.
A rocky road
The only panels that stumped Adrian were the front wings. ‘Most of the panels were from the end of production, so Ford weren’t going to invest in new presses,’ he explains. ‘Even when the cars were new from the factory the panel gaps were often shocking. I spent maybe three weeks on them, but I just wasn’t prepared to butcher them enough.’ Eventually he roped in a friend for a day of painstaking fettling, cutting the wings back and re-bending them to fit.
It certainly hasn’t all been plain sailing. Pattern parts and disappointing workmanship from supposed specialists have been Adrian’s biggest bugbear. When the outfit who quoted him for a respray landed him with a bill for double their original estimate, Adrian refused the full sum and settled somewhere in the middle. The project also came close to a grisly end when the paintshop was consumed by a terrible inferno. The Escort escaped by the skin of its teeth, still on the salvaged supermarket trolley Adrian had ingeniously devised for moving it around. Further issues led to the shell needing a second respray, which remains lustrous. The mechanicals have also been through the mill. The axle, newly returned from a professional rebuild, developed a whine and had to be sent off again. As did the gearbox after springing a leak. And since our visit, Adrian has had to begin yet another engine rebuild, after the drive peg under the electronic distributor (less than two years old) sheared itself smooth, losing drive to the oil pump and giving zero oil pressure. ‘It’ll keep me out of mischief!’ he jokes. Despite the setbacks Adrian now has one of the finest Escorts in the country, and his trophy cabinets are stuffed. Well over a decade after its restoration the car won the AVO Owners Club’s ‘Best RS2000’ award – despite driving to shows under its own steam. Adrian’s RS2000 is currently worth more than he ever dared to dream, but that will never rival the pleasure he so clearly gets from owning and driving it. Does he drive it more carefully now? ‘Hmm, maybe a little bit,’ he says with a smile. ‘I still have a play every now and then.’