Smoke ’em if you got ’em

Exquisite Tolman Ford Escort XR3 restoration includes pack of period-correct cigarettes

UK company Tolman has become known for its impressive restomods, including the awesome Tolman Edition Peugeot 205 GTI. But it has recently expanded its team to “undertake more period-correct restorations of modern classics”.

It has just revealed the first: a “factory specification” restoration of a rare 1981 Ford Escort XR3. On sale from 1980, the Ford Escort

XR3 was a popular alternative to the class-leading Golf GTI. But despite more than 11,000 XR3s being sold in the first year of production alone, less than 200 carburettor cars are still on UK roads. Many have been crashed, stolen, converted into RS Turbo clones or condemned by neglect; surviving Halewood-built cars are now rare.

Tolman received this matching numbers XR3 as an unfinished project from another restorer. With parts missing and not knowing exactly what had been done, taking over was fraught with difficulties.

The company started the 18-month project by undertaking its own metalwork repairs on the bare metal shell that was ultimately finished in its original Sunburst Red. For originality, Tolman cut and polished all the original glass, retaining the windows etched with the registration number and recreating the period Identicar decals, going so far as to create four variants of the sticker as it debated whether to recreate it in as-new vivid white, or with some patina.

Other work included stripping down the instrument cluster and airbrushing the cluster needles to bring back the vivid orange lost to fading, and reverse engineering the double-printed (to display the blue and red colours both day and night) heater control decals.

Underlining Tolman’s attention to detail beyond the car, it also sourced period-correct accessories including a genuine 1980s Feu Vert air freshener, a packet of Embassy cigarettes and period race programmes.