GRANADA RS2800
Another fast Ford to fall foul of the Energy Crisis of the 1970s was the RS2800, a performance version of the Granada Coupe that would surely have been a hit...
Ford were on the verge of building an RS-badged Granada.
It was only the other day that I stumbled across a picture of the mid-1970s Granada Coupe – a two-door fastback version of the original Granada four-door saloon which we came to know so well – and saw it described online as a ‘lovely Old Barge’. I agree with that – but I wonder how much more successful it would have been if it had been offered with enhanced performance and some real marketing panache?
The fact is that Ford-UK put that car on the market in 1976 with only a choice of unmodified four-cylinder 98bhp ‘Pinto’ 2.0-litre engine, or the big Capri-tune 138bhp 3.0-litre ‘Essex’ V6 – neither of those having any pretensions to sporting tune. Don’t for one moment, however, think that this sort of Granada-hybrid had not already been investigated. AVO, no less, had already done a lot of digging, and if the economic times had been more encouraging a car to be called the Granada RS2800 might already have been put on the market.
AVO, as we all know, had opened up in 1970, and 1972 their reputation was high, and their corporate confidence seemed to be booming. Unhappily, although the AVOtype Escort RSs were well received, AVO had still not found a way of adding an extra model to fill up their Aveley plant. The Capri RS2600 was already being built in Germany, while the V6-engined Cortinas had been frowned upon by mainstream Engineering (that model was finally built in South Africa).
Things changed significantly in 1973, No one at AVO could ever warm to the old Zodiac Mk IV (and, let’s be honest, who could blame them?), but once that dreadful old machine was replaced by the first of the Granadas, things looked very different. It looked better, it handled better, it seemed to be better built – and it soon became famous on TV in the highly popular The Sweeney series.
Originally inspired by mainstream Product Planning, a car which later matured as the Granada RS2800 came along, and (to quote my good friend Mike Moreton): “Two possibilities were turbocharging the 3.0-litre V6, or installing a Ford-USA V8 engine… Most people preferred the V8 version, but a big upheaval would be required to install the engine …. but after some delay the steam went out of the programme, and it went no further.”
AVO then glimpsed an exciting derivative and produced a new version of such a car they called Granada RS2800, which they envisaged as a ‘Businessman’s Express’, only as a four-door saloon (for some Ford-UK managers did not like the style of the forthcoming Coupe). This was to have a 2.8-litre version of the fuelinjected Ford-Cologne V6 engine (like that of the Capri R2600), stiffened suspension settings, AVO alloy road wheels, Recaro front seats and a modicum of what styling engineers of the day sometimes called ‘jewellery’ (extra decoration, a different grille, a different range of paint options among them), all intended to perk up the
exterior style.
This was all very promising, for everyone, repeat everyone, seemed to enjoy driving and assessing the prototype, the 2.8-litre engine size was just right to meet certain legal capacity limits in Europe, and the thought was that bodies would be supplied from the Neihl plant in Cologne, Germany, but for assembly to be completed on a new compact line at AVO in Essex. Mike Moreton reckons that up to 1,500 cars could be sold in a year, which made this a profitable possibility.
Top management seemed to like the car in 1973, and the initial plan was that it could be ready for introduction in the autumn of 1974. Except, the project soon seemed to lose its way, lost any priority that it might have had at AVO, and was finally abandoned after only the one car had been completed.
And for why? Simply, most people agree, it was because of the effects of that dreadful phrase ‘The Yom Kippur War’, for the Granada RS2800 project was put up by AVO, for top management approval, in the same month that Egypt decided to attack Israel, after which OPEC (the Arab-dominated Organisation of Petrol Exporting Countries) quadrupled the price of oil in retaliation, cut supplies to many Western countries, and precipitated a huge fall in the demand for motor vehicles…
At a stroke, AVO found itself selling few cars, within weeks Ford-of-Europe decided to close the operation down, the Granada RS2800 was one of various fast Ford projects to be abruptly cancelled – and that was that.