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.....people and Ford at Boreham has allowed a great deal more to be done from South Ockendon. Broadly speaking, a meeting 12 months ago decided that Competitions would restrict supplies to Ford-contracted drivers, leaving FAVO to do the rest and reap the full benefits of supplying on a larger scale. This has resulted in the RS parts people "produc-tionising" many items that were almost impossible to get, other than by beg, steal, or borrow methods applied to competitions.
There is such a list of this new equipment that I cannot detail it here, but Ford- through the departing Mr. Reynolds working a seven-day week-have catalogued their efforts. These catalogues should be available from RS Dealers by the time you read this; if they are not, they are worth waiting to see. Covering rally Escorts for Group Four (International), Group Two (ditto) separately, there are also individual booklets to cover the Group One Escort RS2000 and Group One Capri 3-litre. These are readable and useful documents that deserve at least studying before proceeding any further with competition plans involving such specifications. They are not just lists of RS parts, but contain many of the little wrinkles that otherwise remain undiscovered and lead to rapid disillusionment. For example, Ford bolts are used on a high-ratio steering-rack installation but they are not the same bolts as standard, so the catalogue tells you the number.
It is worth noting at this point that the RS parts operation does not supply standard production bits, even for RS-labelled products today. If you want to buy a droop-snoot, that comes from the company parts depot at Daventry and the main Ford dealer network.
The booklets also contain useful addresses - e.g. the factory car engine builders, roll cage suppliers and those of bag fuel tanks, fire extinguishers and the 24-volt battery that is used just to whirr the starter motor on a works-specification RSI800: the rest of the system is 12 volts, the starter motor included, but it receives 24 volts for this onerous task! Diagrams of brake systems (which includes the hydraulic handbrake and a note about the mechanical linkage required by law), suspension struts and mechanical components abound. In short, these booklets are the work of a man who has dealt with such enquiries since the mid-sixties and represent a fitting goodbye.
Development cars
The cars I tried are the responsibility of an even more experienced Ford man-Bill Meade. Bill was the rally engineer at Boreham for many years, before accompanying Stuart Turner to South Ockendon to work on the engineering side, along with many others. Now they have all disappeared from journalistic view, save Allan Wilkinson, the young former FAVO engineer who now acts as the Ford rally engineer at Boreham. Though the two former colleagues work in the same building, Wilkinson is strictly pursuing a competition course while Bill is trying to develop parts for sale, which involves a lot more compromise.
Fiesta first, and the most impressive was a 1.1S. This had the simplest bolt-on engine parts, a re-jetted version of the standard 1300 Escort/Fiesta twin-choke Weber-Ford carburetter and a four-branch exhaust manifold. Total cost, a steep £175. This car also had 5½-in. by 13-in. steel wheels replacing the standard 12-in. items, and a remarkable set of tyres. These are not sold in Britain but ought to be. They are Phoenix 185 section with 60% low profile and provided much of the stability we encountered.
Another mild suspension tweak lowered the front with an anti-dive kit; this also provides resistance to body squat under hard acceleration, pulling the front anti-roll bar mounting down an inch or so. More additional equipment coloured our impressions. The first was the neat black bucket seat (complete with side holes for full harness) which costs £53.44 and was accompanied by an appropriate recliner. The fact that an 1100 Fiesta has a 4.056-to-l final drive, while the 1300 has a step up to 3.842 to 1 made a marked difference at Brands Hatch. A mere 5½% difference, but the numerically higher final drive allows a lot more sparkle for circuit work, a feature emphasised by those low profile Phoenix tyres on this hilly circuit. This car also had an experimental short-shift gear-change linkage, of which more anon.
The 1.3S Fiesta looked more the part, carrying a full roll-cage and resting on 6 in. by 13 in. Ford alloy wheels. A new tyre was fitted on these as well, a fresh version of Goodyear's faithful Rally Special, this time of 195 section; so this Fiesta carried plenty of deep blocked rubber. The engine has two Weber 40 IDF 30-mm. choke carburetters and the four-branch manifold, again hitched up to the standard silencer system.
This layout of double carburetters is not yet available, but the bigger diameter solid disc brakes are. Costing approximately £50 these larger discs only fit behind the 13-in. diameter alloy wheels and utilise the standard caliper, which is merely moved outward for the new installation. Again the anti-dive suspension was fitted.
I was supplied with power curves for both 1100 and 1300 taken by Ford at the Laindon test centre. These showed the smaller unit giving 65 b.h.p. between 6,100 and 6,200 r.p.m.,, 11 b.h.p. more than the standard 1.1L. This really gives an idea of what these simple aids can release in the Fiesta unit, for those interested in speed would be more likely to plump for the 1300 in the first place. In this case peak power was over a much broader 5,500 to 6,000 r.p.m. band and was 77 b.h.p. with all silencers in place. Removing the forward resonator silencer released another couple of horsepower but made the car "unsocially noisy", in Meade's estimation.
Interestingly, the company also tried just the effect of a four-branch manifold (presumably with the right single carburetter jetting) and found the unit gave 70 b.h.p., minus the resonator box; 68 b.h.p. with. By comparison the standard 1300 unit produced 64 b.h.p. at 5,500 r.p.m. Looking at the curve for the fully-equipped twin-carburetter engine tested I see that the power advantage over standard is really noticeable from 2,000 r.p.m. onward. At 4,000 r.p.m. the production engine realised 51.5 b.h.p. where the twin-carburetter unit allowed exactly 5 b.h.p. more.
We also had on hand an Escort RS2000 in the bolt-on Group One 145-b.h.p. trim, looking rather strange as it was carrying the polyproplene flexible wheel-arches intended to replace the glass-fibre wheel-arch extensions normally used in club rallying. Strange, because they do not match the RS2000 style but would be quite at home without the droop-snoot look.
The attraction for me was a Capri 3000S. Looking very standard indeed, this Ford actually featured few changes aside from the painstaking triple-carburetter installation. Opening the hood one wondered what all the fuss was about, the big glass-fibre air-cleaner looking very standard and shrouding the row of Weber 44 DCNFs that sat on a new sand cast alloy manifold. The bulk of the carburetter linkage is by rod with rubber block joints, finally connecting to an accelerator cable. It was designed as a bolt-on item at £400, and had been carefully designed with low overall height in mind. So it is quite possibly of interest for people such as TVR and Scimitar owners.
Bill says development traces back to "just before the fuel crisis. We had been playing with two- and three-carburetter layouts on the V6, finding that an increase of 20 b.h.p. was available either way, but with the triple set-up the better fuel distribution also gives a better torque curve. For obvious fuel reasons we did not go ahead at the time, but we knew that was the market: a bolt-on 20 b.h.p.
"Sure, you can get another 20 b.h.p. by.....
Captions -
Bottom-Right - This Fiesta 1.1S had all the exterior trimmings, but only a mildly tuned engine. Yet it was the most impressive of the two Fiestas tried.
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