MEXICO ESTATE
Mk1 Escort Mexico estate is this month's 'Ford that nearly was'.
Evolution has a lot to answer for. Lots of your body parts serve no useful function; body hair is pointless for modern human living, for example; wisdom teeth do little other than to misalign jaws; the auricular muscles around your ears are unnecessary as we don’t swivel our ears to hear sound like some creatures do; and your coccyx has no purpose because you don’t have a tail. Your appendix is rubbish too – when people largely ate plants it might have had some role in digestion, but nowadays the only
thing it can do is get inflamed and explode, which doesn’t help at all.
Nevertheless, evolution is superclever. Just look at the quirky national characteristics of speech patterns – the Spanish are loud and boisterous, the Italians lyrical, the French romantic, and acoustic adaptation theory suggests that such traits develop so that the sounds we make work best with our natural surroundings: harsh consonants get lost or distorted in rainforests, but have room to breathe among European hills and valleys. Open syllables like ‘aloha’ work better in tropical climes. And so it goes. It’s not just humans, this is true of birds and cats and all sorts. Things change over time because nature just wants to help us out.
The gentle path of evolution can be readily observed in Steve Rogers’ XR4i here too. A man better known in some quarters by his forum username ‘Cossie4i’, you can probably guess what’s hiding inside this pristine Sierra before we even lift the lid. But this isn’t a fresh-for-2019 build; indeed, Steve’s amused to note that some
people may be surprised to see this car resurface after a protracted spell in hiding; this very car was in fact featured in these pages way back in 2003… although it hasn’t been seen in public for a little while, and it’s been gently evolving ever since. The back story could be a Hollywood movie in itself; a rolling shell swapped for a crash-damaged XR4x4 that had been bought for fifty quid, sidelined by an RS Cosworth and pillaged for parts, left languishing in the shadows before being reborn, it’s got more plot twists than a Tarantino flick.
This is all just part of Steve’s rich tapestry, as he’s been fettling old Fords from day one: “I started off with a base-model Mk5 Cortina 1.6 back in 1990,” he recalls. “It ended up with a well-worked 2.0-litre Pinto and a five-speed, making 160bhp; I crashed that one, so I got another and swapped all the running gear into it, before then going on to fit a nat-asp Cosworth YB with twin 48s and a Cossie T5 gearbox. Then I changed that for a Cosworth YB turbo engine…”
We can see how the thread of logical evolution has followed Steve’s builds from the early days. Having unfortunately crashed this Cosworth turbo Cortina, the running gear was transplanted into a two-door Mk5 shell, so it’s safe to say that the Cortina model has a special place in his affections, but he’s also pretty keen on hot Sierras, as his motoring CV is eager to demonstrate. He’s had three XR4is – a restored standard one, another one which he fitted a 24v motor to, and of course the one we see today – along with three RS
“...Now he’s got time to unleash the beast once more, the Sierra’s set to re-enter the realm of hard-driven, big-power fast Fords...”
“...All hell breaks loose at 4,000rpm! I’d estimate power in the high 400s, but I’m planning to change the inlet cam to an AB07 and carry out a few other tweaks”
Cosworths: a Diamond White 2WD Saph, a Magenta 4x4, and a Moonstone Blue threedoor, the latter of which played a significant role in the evolution of this XR4i.
So what prompted the move from Cortinas to Sierras? “Basically, I couldn’t find a Cortina to replace my Mk5 two-door after it died of serious rust around the front chassis crossmember area,” Steve explains. “I found this one as a rolling shell at the XR4i Spares Centre – standard interior, OK paint; it was the plan from the start to swap the old Cortina’s engine into it.” This was back in 2002, and by the following year it was complete and impressive enough to merit a Fast Ford feature: looking largely stock externally, it hid its Cossie firepower well. As the evolution casually panned out over time, the YB ended up running greens and a T34, with a mapping session by the legendary Tony Mannock of Turbosystems delivering a solid 300bhp-plus. That engine, however, is not the engine you see here.
“I blew it up in 2012, missing a gear while chasing a bike,” Steve recalls with a wince. Having been a daily driver, the car was parked up while he considered the next move, and a quirk of fate meant that his attention was diverted elsewhere: “I’d always wanted a Moonstone Blue three-door Cosworth,” he says. “I had the opportunity to buy one around this time, and set about fully rebuilding it to standard. This was back when people weren’t really doing that, before the prices got silly!” This was the pursuit of a dream, and a few of the best and most original parts were pillaged from the forlorn XR4i in the pursuit of Moonstone perfection – the front indicators, the bulkhead trim that goes across the engine bay, the Ford badge from the boot…
“I did put an engine in the XR4i in 2014, because I was moving from Kent to Somerset and it was useful to be able to make it move!” he continues. “I had the engine for a year before getting it fitted at Motortech in Herne Bay (too lazy to do it myself!) along with the Cosworth power brake set up. I only used the ’4i a few times in 2015 before parking it up again.” Busy with house renovations, when the XR4i’s MOT lapsed, it was again parked up and left to hide away in the shadows, awaiting its time to shine. And that time came in mid-2018, when Steve felt the moment was right to pull it out of the garage; it sailed straight through its MOT, and this is the chapter in his Sierra history that sees Steve selling his beloved Moonstone three-door and once again placing the Cossie ’4i at front-and-centre of his affections.
Now, a number of people have suggested that this was a mad thing to do, but it’s important to realise that this isn’t about