BLUE-CHIP BLUE OVALS
Revisiting Sierra RS500 and Escort RS, as the market wakes up to the Fast Ford
It was all about the numbers, wasn’t it? Back in the day, Cosworth owners would show you the little dial under the dashboard from which they could easily summon “300, 400bhp” from their chipped turbo cars – just like the racing cars. Lord knows what it did to their Pinto-derived bottom ends. Now that the best RS500S have officially passed into Blue Chip territory, those days are far behind us. ‘Standard’ and ‘original’ are the new benchmarks, not the swell of your dyno chart. And so we’ve put together the very first RS500 with one of the last of its Escort RS sisters to see how the ‘Cossie’ evolved from raw homologation special to civilised hot hatch, crossing the £100,000 mark along the way.
You’d think that, being based on the same floorpan, they’d feel quite similar, but far from it. You sit high and narrow in the Sierra, which has a rather raffish feel, full of cooling vents at the front and trailing its lip-and-strake coat-tails over a touch of negative camber at the rear. To drive, it’s somehow pointy at the front and loose in the tail at the same time, with a race-car enthusiasm to constantly stick its nose into tramlines – fortunately, its steering is pretty fast. In its stance and body language – and through the seat of your pants – come faint echoes of the Lotus Cortina racer.
The Escort is a more aloof device; better finished, more refined, more controlled, safer, with more grip. That all-wheel drive system keeps you in check, though it responds well if you upset it with a lift and bung into a corner, provided there’s room to plant it immediately afterwards. It’s more rounded – but, after the Sierra, just a little remote. Which is where it needed to be in order to sell cars after the job of homologation for competition had been done.
Backtrack to where it all began and, as with so many great Fords, the trail leads to Stuart Turner. Appointed head of motorsport in 1983, he realised that the Blue Oval was lagging behind. The Sierra, launched in 1982, had not been well received thanks to its unusual ‘jellymould’ styling, but it did have class-leading aerodynamics and was handily rear-wheel drive. The plan was that motorsport would give it – and Ford – a boost, and was supported by Walter
Hayes, the vice-president of public relations at Ford, without whom the GT40 and Cosworth DFV would never have happened. Turner instigated a Cosworth twin-cam project based on Ford’s own 2-litre Pinto block, the YAA, which would form the basis of what Turner needed to power a Group A winner.
A request was made for a turbocharged version, which became the YBB after Cosworth said yes, promising a motor that produced more than 200bhp – but only if Ford agreed to take at least 15,000 of them. Turner only needed 5000 for homologation into Group A, and the rest would go into the four-door, second-generation Sierra Sapphire RS Cosworth, with enough left over for the Escort RS Cosworth.
Lothar Pinske was given the job of styling the new Cosworth’s bodywork, his mission to make the slippery Sierra stable at high speed. After wind-tunnel work and test runs at the Nardò circuit in Italy, a prototype was presented to the management – who were, reportedly, horrified by its looks. Pinske stuck to his guns, however: the rear wing was essential to keep the car anchored to the ground (the standard shell produced lift at the rear), the opening between the headlights was needed to feed air to the turbo’s intercooler and the flared arches would accommodate 10in-wide rear wheels for racing. Under the muscular new skin, the Sierra’s Type 9 five-speed transmission was swapped for the stronger Borg-warner T5 from the Mustang.
Though dealers originally estimated that they could sell only 1500 cars, some 5545 were made between 1986 and 1992 at Ford’s Genk factory in Belgium. To keep the price down, there were only three colours: black, white and Moonstone Blue; and two equipment options – with or without central locking and electric windows.
To give the race teams the best-possible weaponry, a more extreme Cossie was developed: the RS500. Converted by Tickford, all 500 were based on right-hand-drive cars, and all were white or black – bar the last 50 or so, in Moonstone Blue. The changes were mainly in the motor, both for extra power (up from 204 to 224bhp) and greater resilience at sustained high revs in competition. There was a bigger Garrett T04 turbo and intercooler, a thicker-walled block, a second set of injectors, plus an uprated fuel pump to drive them. The mountings for the semi-trailing arms were extended on the rear axle beam, though these were only used on the racers. Exterior changes were subtle, but enough: the front foglights were replaced by extra ducting to cool the front brakes, the ‘whale tail’ got a small lip on the trailing edge plus an extra lower spoiler on the rear deck, and there were diamond-cut cross-spoke alloys.
The RS500 was homologated in August 1987 and the cars took pole in the following six World Touring Car Championship events, winning four and securing the team prize for the Texacosponsored Eggenberger Motorsport outfit. The following year it began to sweep the board in domestic series, dominating the 1988 and ’89 Australian Touring Car Championships – including Bathurst 1000 wins in both years, and the 1990 Australian Endurance Championship. Victories in the 1988 German DTM; 1989, ’90 and ’92 New Zealand Touring Car Championship; and 1988 and ’89 Japanese series were also added to the trophy cabinet, while in the UK it became a British Touring Car Championship legend. Andy Rouse claimed the over-2.5-litre class in 1988 and ’89, with Robb Gravett taking the overall title in 1990 before rule changes handed the advantage to the BMW M3.
‘The RS500 is somehow pointy at the front and loose in the tail at the same time, with a race-car enthusiasm to constantly stick its nose into tramlines’
Touring car racing job jobbed, the Escort RS came about when Ford wanted a smaller car for rallying. The Sierra had been a stopgap that never shone on the loose, though Jimmy Mcrae took the 1987 and ’88 British Rally Championships, and Didier Auriol/bernard Occelli won the (Tarmac) 1988 Corsica Rally outright.
By late ’88, the four-door Sierra Sapphire Cosworth had replaced the three-door, and from 1990 it received four-wheel drive, using the Ferguson system with the central front driveshaft running through the sump. It made sense, then, for Ford’s Special Vehicle Operations to develop the new car around the latest floorpan. Stephen Harper styled the RS, which was in essence a silhouette with little of substance from the Escort in it. But the model’s crowing glory, an evolution of the ‘whale tail’, was added by Frank Stephenson, the production version toned down from his original ‘triplane’ proposals.
Launched in 1992, initially as a run of 2500 to secure Group A homologation, the Escort used a hybrid Garrett T3/T04B turbocharger developed from that used in the RS200 rally car. Unfortunately, this gave Group B-style refinement, so from late 1994 the second-generation road car got the smaller T25, which is friendlier in everyday driving. At the same time, the famed spoiler became a delete option – though few were. During production lasting from February 1992 until January ’96, 7145 were built, including the stripped-out Motorsport edition and the Monte-carlo special sold in France and Italy.
The latter marked François Delecour’s ’94 win on the Monte, yet the Escort failed to achieve the longed-for World Rally title. It did land 10 Group A and WRC wins, however, along with a British Rally Championship for future team boss Malcolm Wilson in 1994.
The Sierra is a homologation special and looks it, with lots of mods and tack-ons to the standard three-door body, and any aerodynamically troublesome gaps plugged with rubber. After in-fighting at Ford it ended up with everything the racers needed, including a bigger turbo and an extra set of injectors on RS500S – everything except large-enough tyres. Drivers always complained that it was too heavy for its tyres, but width was limited because the road cars only had to accommodate 205-section rubber.
You notice the most striking change as soon as you flop down into the bucket seat. That wing and the lip below obscure most of your rearward vision; just what you needed in a screamingly obvious 150mph car that looked like a spaceship in the mid-’80s. The interior is utilitarian Sierra, with cardboard-box dash mouldings that could have come out of a 1.3L (actually XR4TI), the gearknob shared with the P100 pick-up and the famous Raven velour seats that go baggy as soon as you look at them. There’s a massive graphic equaliser and, yup, it all rattles a bit.
The Escort certainly had the benefit of more design and it looks a lot more finished, in a corporate Ford sort of way, thanks to its entirely new body designed in parallel with its mechanicals and built by Karmann. It might superficially resemble a slightly inflated front-drive Mk5, but if you want a laugh, park the two side-by-side; nothing’s quite in the same place. Inside, it feels more tightly hewn, with a different dash (though not so different as to alienate Escort buyers) incorporating a dedicated pod for boost, oilpressure and voltage gauges. The air-con is so neatly integrated it’s hard to spot in this Luxedition car with leather seats and a sunroof. The whole homogenised package is in keeping with its civilised power delivery – no big jumps, just
‘There’s more civilised power delivery – no big jumps, just more urge from 3500rpm when the boost gauge begins to move from negative to positive’
notably more urge from 3500rpm when the boost gauge begins to move from the negative side of the gauge to accentuate the positive. In contrast, the RS500 gets interested at 3000rpm, comes in with a bang at about 4000, then gets more brutal as you plant it. It’s hard to believe they are the same engine, although at higher revs in both you get little nuances in harmonics that give away their Pinto origins. For someone who owns one of those, that’s rather heartwarming.
The reason these, and an increasing number of Cossies, are kept so standard is inevitable: money – the market likes low-mileage originality. These cars have always been collectible, but in the past four years prices have doubled in the case of the Escort, and gone stratospheric for the best (uncrashed, no-stories) Sierras and RS500S. Silverstone Auctions consistently achieves strong prices for Fast Fords, including cracking the £100k barrier with the sale of a 10,000-mile RS500 for £114,750 in July 2017. Good RS500S regularly make £75,000, with the best Sierra Cosworths and tidy Escorts around £45k. The exceptional Escort pictured here would be more, and we had to insure RS500 001 for £125,000.
“It’s partly because they are such usable classics,” says classic car specialist Arwel Richards, who consigned the last Sierra RS Cosworth for Silverstone Auctions. “They’re blue-collar supercars that won’t give you backache like a Ferrari, and you can put the grandchildren in the back. Our buyers tend to be people in their late 40s or early 50s, who lusted after the cars as teenagers but couldn’t afford to buy them, or insure them, and now they can. Of course there’s that motorsport heritage of these cars, too, which keeps values higher than Escorts.”
Like the BMW E30 M3 that was the Sierra RS Cosworth’s racing rival in period, these cars aren’t blindingly quick by today’s standards, but they’re more than fast, offering secure (in the case of the Escort) or entertaining (Sierra) handling within a manageable package that won’t cost a bomb to maintain. And there’s fervently passionate, enthusiastic support, too, in the shape of the RS Owners’ Club. No wonder the Blue Oval is riding again.