#RENAULT QUICKSHIFT GETRIEBE REGISTRATION#
The only document we have in its history from this Ford’s former life overseas is its old SA registration document. Not that it’s really of much use without the supporting SA documentation, but the car’s odometer is currently displaying just 54,294 miles. That’s right, unlike so many of these rally clones, this Escort hasn’t swapped its rear bench for a roll cage.
#RENAULT QUICKSHIFT GETRIEBE DRIVER#
That means you can bring the family along while you’re living out your rally driver fantasies. The car’s now something of a half-way house between a racer and a road car. Imported from South Africa in 2019 – it has that market’s structural strengthening – it was subjected to a restoration along with a series of upgrades. In this livery, it’s aping the 1980 Acropolis-winning Mk2 Escort, driven by Ari Vatanen and navigated by David Richards – despite having an extra set of doors.
This late four-door Escort might have started life as a fairly pedestrian model, but it’s since – like so many of its siblings – been turned into a flame-spitting rally replica.
Though the fact that a simple little rear-wheel drive Escort could still prove competitive – especially on tarmac – alongside the technically mighty Audis, shows just how right Ford’s formula had always been. It was only comprehensively bested when Audi’s game-changing Ur quattro introduced four-wheel drive to the sport. There were about as many wins as there were subsequent go-faster Escorts, with the second-generation still winning rallies right up until the early 1980s. The Escort’s off-road career was long and illustrious and included a stand-out performance on the 1970 London to Mexico Rally – spawning the Escort ‘Mexico’ model. That decision soon paid off with the Escort proving to be a winner right out of the blocks – taking the top laurels at the 1968 Circuit of Ireland Rally. The Escort, on the other hand, was designed from the off to be much stronger with half an eye on competition in its DNA. Lotus power might have made the Ford Lotus Cortina a fearsome touring car star, but its shell wasn’t up to the prodigious punishment of international rallying. That exceptional, revvy little lump from Norfolk had previously been slotted into the Cortina, of course. Though Blue Oval machines had been setting competitive stage times in the mucky stuff since immediately after the war, it was the arrival of the Lotus Twin-Cam-powered Escort in 1968 that really set the brand up as the one to beat. At the very top of the first page of Ford’s book of rally supremacy you’ll find the original Escort.
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