RS1700T STORY
Denied its moment of glory by the launch of Audi’s Quattro, the RS1700T has nevertheless passed into Ford Motorsport history as a rallying’s ‘what might’ve been’…
Looking back at the unfortunate story of the Escort RS1700T.
One of the most interesting aspects of the car-based internet, is its ability to make household names of even the most overlooked of race and rally cars. Case in point, the star of today’s Motorsport Memory feature, the RS1700T. Built as the ultimate rear-wheel drive Escort rally car and the result of Ford of Europe’s steadily expanding understanding of forced induction, the RS1700T was intended to be the Blue Oval’s means of anchoring itself at the top of the World Rally Championship order as the ‘70s gave way to the ‘80s.
As everyone reading this doubtless already knows, that didn’t happen. The RS1700T never got a chance to showcase its undoubted pace or potential, and it can all be summed up by one, single word – ‘Quattro.’ The Audi A2 Quattro was launched upon an unsuspecting (and some might say naïve) rallying world in 1981, and within months it was abundantly clear that the game hadn’t so much moved on as been changed entirely, and while those early Audis were beset with maddening reliability issues there was no hiding the truth – the days of the rear-wheel drive rally car were already numbered.
Yet the RS1700T had so much going for it, and there’s no reason to doubt that had things panned out slightly differently then it would have been a world beater. First and foremost, it was a Boreham creation. Ford had of course shuttered its Works rallying effort in 1979 and sold the whole lot, lock stock, to David Sutton, but the expertise remained. The men from Essex had concluded the ‘70s as the masters of building cars capable of making light work of terrain as diverse as Welsh forests, Corsican asphalt or Greek bedrock.
Given Ford’s recent success with the Mk2 Escort it was perhaps unsurprising that the division should seek to make use of as much of the old car’s proven hardware as possible, and something of a ‘Greatest Hits’ of RS1800 oily bits would eventually make its way beneath the RS1700T.
That’s not to say that Ford had been completely oblivious to the march of technology, as evidenced by the tell-tale ‘T’ at the end of its title. Even here, Ford stuck with the BDA as its basis for the new car, albeit highly modified to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by Group B. The engine’s capacity was dropped from 2000cc to 1800cc in order to take advantage of the formula’s forced induction multiplier rules, which in practice meant that when the factor 1778cc x 1.4 was applied, the new car would be deemed to have an effective capacity of 2489cc. This would in turn permit it to weigh as little as 890kg.
The setup outlined above became the beloved BDT, a firm Ford favourite and something of an icon, yet it wasn’t the only engine under consideration. Only too aware of the power (and confidence) sapping effect of monumental early ‘80s turbo lag, the company also green lit a naturally aspirated variant driven by a Brian Hart penned 2290cc screamer. A prototype was built and bench tested against its boosted twin, but Ford ultimately decided that the sheer power potential of turbocharging outweighed any concerns over tractability.
Whatever the engine up front, it was clear that the RS1700T would need a reliable means of sending upwards of 350bhp to the rear wheels, and there was an added complication – weight distribution. Nullifying the downsides to the car’s front-engined layout fell to one John Wheeler,
who wholeheartedly recommended the adoption of a trans-axle setup in order to better spread weight front-to-rear. His specific solution was that of an aluminium torque tube, which would both feed drive from engine to trans-axle and act as a chassis strengthening device.
It was now late 1981, and while the combination of a Sutton fettled Mk2 Escort and Ari Vatanen had been enough to give the latter his sole championship crown, it was painfully clear that this was not representative of the true run of play. Blue Oval top brass was becoming impatient at the lack of a fully formed, competitive challenger (the company had officially bowed out of the sport in a Works capacity at the end 1979, remember), and there was increasing disquiet within the camp.
Come 1982, and the can could be kicked no further down the road, or more correctly, stage. Both the N/A and turbocharged versions of the new Escort were shipped to Rally Portugal for an in-depth test, with Vatanen and Penti Airikkala roped in to drive. Neither Finn was especially enamoured with the performance of the N/A car but both waxed lyrical about the performance of the BDT one, with the incumbent drivers’ champion a full second and a half per km faster than the car which had won the rally 12 months previously, a Fiat 131 Abarth.
Yet to use the Abarth as a yardstick was to miss the mark entirely. It might have been the dominant rallying force mere years previously, and also the Mk2’s chief rival for much of its Works career, but the Fiat was so far removed from the face of the WRC in 1982 as to be irrelevant. The Quattro was the true benchmark, and, on gravel at least, it had comfortably shaded the RS1700T’s times.
Things came to a head late in 1982 when Stuart Turner was made Ford Motorsport head honcho. Unimpressed with the proposed plan to homologate first a rearwheel drive, then a four-wheel drive variant of the RS1700T, Turner instead instructed that the Mk3 programme be killed outright and a new, clean-sheet car built along pure Group B thinking commenced instead.
So, what did Ford get from its multiyear sabbatical and untold hundreds of thousands of investment and development budget? On the face of it, not much. The Blue Oval found itself with 16 largely useless RS1700Ts (the bulk of which would see limited service in South Africa) and on the back foot in its quest to return to the top of the rallying pile. The one upside was that it now had the fully developed, impressively powerful BDT, the motor destined to power the aforementioned RS200. That, however, is a story for another issue…