WORKS ESCORT RS1600 TRIBUTE
Gordon Spooner of GSE built some of the most evocative competition Fords of the last 50 years, and now his son, Chris, is keeping the family tradition alive with this works RS1600 replica.
Chris Spooner’s gone all out to recreate a works RS1600 with his incredible Mk1 — put together with the help of his ex-Boreham engineer Dad.
There’s a fairly solid case to be made for the late 1980s being among the most exciting and innovative periods in the history of top-tier motorsport. Back then car makers thought little of committing to multi-million-pound motorsport programmes, propped up by lashings of tobacco megabucks and the overwhelming belief in the age-old mantra of ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.’
One man with a better appreciation for the era and all it entailed than most is Chris Spooner, son of the founder of famed Ford Motorsport specialists, Gordon Spooner Engineering, and a man who began his professional association with fast Fords bang, smack in the late 1980s.
“I was serving my apprenticeship with GSE back then which largely consisted of messing about with the glut of RS200s leftover from the cancellation of Group B in 1986. In practice this often meant working on the horrendous panel gaps gifted to us by the assembly line, which wasn’t something all the owners of road-going examples could live with!”
As you’ll be able to glean from the above, Chris was destined to live, eat, breathe and sleep competition Fords from the get-go. A childhood spent clambering betwixt works Group 4 Escorts gave way to an adolescence dedicated to learning the ropes at GSE, before graduating to running the Escort Maxi of Gwyndaf Evans — the car in which the Welshman won the British Rally Championship in 1996.
And yet when the time came to build a Ford of his own, Chris didn’t for a moment ponder the twin-dampered Group B icon with the fiendishly complex transmission and
monster power BDT. Instead, Chris found himself drawn to Ford’s rallying genesis (Cortina aside) — the Mk1 Escort.
Glory days
Chris’ first taste of Escort ownership underscores just how intertwined with British rallying his late adolescence actually was, the car in question having once been driven by Graham Hill and bought (after many years of gentle ear-bending) from none other than Pat Doran.
“Not only was it a car with driver providence, it was actually the second Escort built by Boreham all those years ago and even came with a stamp marked 002.”
Nowadays Chris readily admits that his decision to go so heartily to town on a Mk1 with such history and history was, at best, misguided. After all, there aren’t many Escorts which can claim to have been driven by the owner of one of motorsport’s greatest moustaches and the inspiration for Dick
Dastardly! But it was a different time, Escorts were cheap and plentiful, and Chris was young and headstrong. He wanted a works replica RS1600, and so that’s what the ex-Hill Twin Cam became.
That car was eventually sold in order that Chris could get onto the property ladder but the desire to own another proved stubbornly impossible to shake, and as such it was only a matter of time before the plunge was taken once more, this time in the form of a 1300L purchased just over a decade ago.
The seemingly clean and tidy shell was banished for an acid bath and returned looking, well, holey.
“Only the chassis rails, the boot floor and the bulkheads are original now — everything else I’ve had to repair or replace using a selection of panels and repair sections from Ex-Pressed Steel panels, and painstakingly sourced new-old stock. It was one of those cars that flattered to deceive in terms of metalwork, no doubt about it.” The latter is a point worth highlighting if only as it reveals the upside to a long, steady approach to project car building typified by Chris’s Escort. With no need to race to meet an arbitrary deadline, Chris could afford to take his time, an aspect of the project he’ll happily admit brought him a large measure of satisfaction. Autojumbles were attended, rare parts spotted, haggled for and bought, and old contacts called upon.
“Being so closely linked to Boreham certainly helped my cause, as I was in the know when Ford set about dismantling much of its rallying infrastructure just over 20 years ago. I was there when AVO was closed and merged with Boreham — which, incidentally, allowed me to witness a handful of Brian Hart-built BDTs being run-through with sledgehammers to prevent them falling into rival hands, and I was there again when Boreham itself was shuttered in 1997.”
The Boreham bargain hunt continued to make its presence felt, with Chris’ top find probably the BD engine and ZF S5 assembly that now resides in the front of his Mk1. These were actually bought from a long-time friend and ex-Boreham bod called Phil Peacock for a very reasonable figure, though only after Chris had been convinced that the engine had, as the seller maintained, been rebuilt with all new internals in the past.
“Phil stressed that it’d been rebuilt with new internals prior to storage, and that it was proper. I replied that I’d seen his idea of proper before and that it would probably be more like a grenade! I was eventually persuaded to take a look and so stuck a bore scope inside, and yes, it was perfect: completely pristine with brand-new pistons!”
Relayed gratification
The steady build process (one extended by Chris’ insistence on carrying out a dry build
first) was brought to a crashing, shuddering halt a few years ago, when Chris’s father decided that the project could benefit from some of his decades of hard-won experience — something Chris himself was too sensible to ignore!
Thus, Chris’s car retains the English axle it had from new (for now), an axle Gordon knows an immense amount about from his days at the coalface of Ford-flavoured rallying. Indeed, the elder Spooner vividly recalls having to drive the early works cars from Boreham to the South of France for the Monte, ostensibly to take the ceremonial start but actually to bed-in the English’s pinion prior to setting the pre-load.
“My original intention was to build a Group 4 replica in all black with 10 inch wheels at the back and big arches, which would of course have needed a narrower English to pull off. This plan was shelved when my Dad came onboard and said, “I’ll help you build your Escort, but I’m not building it like that,” hence the rally livery. It might well get an Atlas at a later date though as I already own one and I no longer need to accommodate such wide rears.”
It’s abundantly clear that Chris harbours a deep-seated, all-encompassing respect for the creations engineered by Boreham (his father front and centre) all those years ago. This love for Essex-spannered Escorts can be seen in the livery his own example now sports, a hybrid of the schemes that graced OOO 96M, the RS1600 used by Roger Clark on the 1973 Safari Rally, and then a few months later, the RAC.
Despite looking for all the world like it’s just emerged from Dyfi forest liberally coated with Wales’s finest, Chris has no plans to rally his newly completed Escort, it’s just too special for a life spent spitting gravel and chewing pinecones! Instead he plans on using it in the time-honoured manner — as a weekend, fast road toy to attack the lanes surrounding his home, and something to take to shows, gatherings and events.
“It’s such a compelling car to drive; I love that it’s so docile and drivable below 3000 rpm or so, so much so that you really could pottle down to the shops in it. Get it between 5000 rpm and 9000 rpm though and it’s a completely different animal, a real Jekyll and Hyde creation… and those twin 48 carbs make on heck of a soundtrack.”
No regrets
As for regrets, Chris has none. Certainly none centred on Boreham’s creations from the late 1980s. After all, who wants to wrestle a thrown-together RS200 with panel gaps you could live in when you could have one of the finest RS1600 homages ever devised? We know which we’d rather own and drive on a regular basis, that’s for sure!
“IT’S SUCH A COMPELLING CAR TO DRIVE AND THOSE 48s MAKE A HECK OF A NOISE”