My Ford Escort Mk1 Rally Car HistoryRED ESCORT No. 1
It all started way back in time when I was young. I had my first car a Ford Cortina Mk3 Estate, which was purchased to enable me to get all of my fishing gear into the back. One day I was out in the country to the south of Bristol and found myself on a loose surfaced track - as you do - and thought let’s see what happens if you give it some welly. Needless to say the car was all over the place, Cortinas were pretty crap handling anyway, but it was fun! Thought to myself why not get a car that can do this sort of stuff properly, and not try to behave like a blancmange on jelly. I used to go to a few motor racing events at the time and got all the info for trips from Motoring News ( now Motorsport News) , so I had a look in the classifieds section and saw a Mexico road rally prepared car for sale just across the bridge in South Wales. I arranged to go and see the car, took one trip up the road in it , paid what was asked (no bargaining - too impressed) and that was the start. The car was an original Mk 1 Mexico and was very tidy, as most of them were in those days seeing that they weren’t that old. As far as the spec goes this is as about as much as I can remember:
Standard Mexico type 49 shell, full cage, GT8 seats, 1600 x-flow engine with some sort of cam in it, twin 40’s (what else), no back seats etc. I had a bit of spare cash at the time - single bloke!- so spent a fortune getting it sorted to go rallying, new billies & springs all round, various mods like putting the capri tank in the boot, red top fuel pump, cut off switches, extinguishers etc.
You have to realise that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, only stuff gleaned from magazines etc. and I did still use this as a road car, and it was parked on a public road outside my flat. My security system was pretty good as far as I was concerned, no alarm (they weren’t common then) but to start the car you had to get into the boot, bonnet and passenger compartment to flick/turn on various switches. Anyway, it was nigh on finished and one night some F******g pond life thought that now it’s done I’ll have that. Never saw it again. Of course the insurance company only paid out the book value (what else?) and left me a couple of grand down. I looked for the shell at loads of rallies etc because you get to know your car, but never saw it. Unfortunately I have no pictures of this car (not that I can find anyway). RED ESCORT No. 2
Well, pissed off but not to be deterred, got the money from the insurance and went straight to Motoring News again. This time I bought what was basically a dog, not a patch on the previous car , but you have to have wheels and I’m notoriously swayed by the induction roar from twin webers. The spec of this car wasn’t very high at all, just a two litre pinto in a Mk1 shell, twin 40’s, big bore exhaust, it did have billies all round and was turreted, but apart from the safety stuff, cage etc and stripped out interior not much else.
Anyway, got together with a mate at the local motor club and set off to do our first rally. This was a road rally in Devon, the Illfracombe Rally in 1982 (ancient history). All I can remember about this rally was going off the road up a bank on one of the selectives and knocking the tracking way out. (We later found out that the track rod was bent and that the car was toed out by over an inch!) We struggled on to the end of the event without attempting to fix the problem - we seriously had no idea- with the car handling like a pig, but we got there in the end. This being my road car as well, we were driving home from the rally up the motorway when one of the front tyres blew out, having been worn away on the inner edge due to the tracking, the shredded tyre lashing round inside the wheel arch knocked all the filler out of the wing with bits flying everywhere. It must have looked quite funny to the other cars around. No real problems though , changed the wheel , drove home. But the bug had now bitten and we looked around for the next event to do. Picture gallery of the second red Escort rally car here more to come soon............... | 
