Ford Racing Puma

Gorgeous buxom stance and styling Supercar running costs

Brace yourself. Only the brave need read on. The rest of you just amuse yourselves ogling the Racing Puma’s spot-on widebody stance and feline features. Pretty, isn’t it? And rare too, with only 500 ever built, exclusively for British customers. It doesn’t have any racing pedigree, but it’s gorgeous, rare and, efectively, a lower, more powerful version of one of the cars that cemented Ford’s reputation for spectacular-handling workaday cars in the late Nineties and early Noughties. So, you might be tempted by the FRP.

The Racing Puma’s infated bodywork, Alcon brakes, Eibach/Sachs springs and dampers and even the cam belt for the 7,000rpm Yamaha engine all need regular attention, like a racecar. This means running one of these things can get ruinously expensive.

All Pumas are susceptible to rust around the wheelarches. The FRP sufers more because its wider panels are welded to the original Puma bodywork, hiding the vulnerable inner panels and tell-tale bubbling. Get it fxed by a friendly welder and you can spend £750 per side; get proper parts and you could spend £5,000 fxing both.

Brakes need rebuilding every 3,000 miles, and the suspension is no longer available so if that goes, you’ll need an all-new set-up on all four corners. A rear bumper is £600, and the front splitter is £1,000. You can get two raggedy standard Pumas for the same cash.

And yet… the Racing Puma handles like a properly grown-up hot hatch, and though its 153bhp isn’t rampant, it’s a very sweetly balanced and enjoyable to thrash coupe-hot-hatch oddity. Only true enthusiasts need apply, though.

One we found...

You’d rather just buy a good’un than do all the work yourself, right? A 35k-mile FRP minter is £19,500…