RARE FORDS
# 54 Contour Concept
Another Blue Oval is pulled from the vaults.
T he Contour may well be the American version of the Mondeo, but that’s not what the name was originally given to. Back in the early ’90s Ford developed a concept car to be shown at the 1991 Detroit Motor Show – the Contour Concept. And the name couldn’t have been more appropriate – there wasn’t a single flat panel on the car!
The Contour also featured a very unusual engine configuration – a transversely mounted straight eight! And mated to a 4WD transmission! And when you look closely things start to get even weirder. For example, all the ancillaries such as the water pump, power steering and so on, were all electrical rather than belt driven from the crank. In fact, the only thing actually driven by the crankshaft was a large, single alternator.
Another odd design tweak is that huge straight-eight motor wasn’t fed any cooling air from the front of the car, but instead through the sides. In an attempt to improve aerodynamics, the front of the car doesn’t feature huge grilles to allow cooling air to pass through them, but instead the engine is cooled from air coming from ventilated front wheel wells! Nuts.
The transmission was a weird setup too. It was called the T-Drive, and used a full-time all-wheel drive system. As it was hooked up to a transversely mounted, eight-cylinder engine, there wasn’t the room to fit a traditional style gearbox on the end of a flywheel as you would normally. Instead, the T-Drive system is driven directly by a gear in the middle of the crankshaft. This allows a propshaft to run to the rear diff, and power to be delivered to the front wheels too.
The suspension saw another radical redesign, and utilised transverse leaf springs, which also acted as the upper control arms.
While the Contour was technically possible, it would become nothing more than a radical concept design, but Ford obviously quite like the name so resurrected it for what we would know as the Mk2 Mondeo.