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Rod Mansfield, one imagines, in company with the rest of the tightly knit team, must have been bitterly disappointed when, in 1974, Ford announced that it was closing the Advanced Vehicle Operation (AVO) at South Ockendon, only five years after it had been set up to produce limited numbers of special vehicles, such as the Escort Mexico, RS1600andRS2000.
Anyone who was involved with Ford at that time will tell you that AVO was an exciting place to be in those days. And it must have been particularly so for the tall, quietly spoken young engineer who had been a Ford man since finishing his National Service in late 1959. He had been racing a bog standard A35 van even during the time of conscription and, by his own admission, was a dead keen motorsport enthusiast.
Twenty-two years on. Rod is outwardly a successful Ford company man, his engineering and administrative capabilities recognised with the captaincy of his own special section. Now there is nothing particularly extraordinary about this; upward mobility is something dreamed of, and achieved, by many career- minded individuals.
What is significant from CCC's point of view is that the operation of which Mr Mansfield is head is Special Vehicle Engineering (SVE), reponsible for two of the most interesting cars to have come out of Ford in the last two years -the 2.8 injection Capri and the Fiesta XR2. Those cars, plus the ties with AVO and a 15-year racing career meant Rod Mansfield warranted a bit of investigation. And so it was that we found ourselves in the middle of the small, but growing SVE operation at Ford's Dunton Research and Development Centre.
What were his early memories of Ford, we wondered? How had he become part of Ford's Essex Mafia?
"The first cars I worked on were Consul Classics. I remember being very new and green and delighted with the industry when I first joined because there were a couple of mechanical prototypes for the Classic which had 1340 engines and front disc brakes built into the old 10OE shells. God, those things used to go. I'm sure they didn't by today's standards- I'm sure they were pathetic- but I can well remember roaring around the Essex countryside with them thinking this was absolutely fantastic and I was actually being paid for doing something I enjoyed I Those were my first impressions of Ford, and I suppose that sort of thing interested me a lot.
"My Ford career was spent mainly on the development side working on all the models the company was doing, up to - and the most significant stage, to my mind -the start of AVO in late 1969."
So the late, lamented AVO had come up this early in our conversation. Rod continued reminiscing.
"I was actually the fifth employee of AVO. I knew something was afoot and I made all sorts of moves behind the scenes to try and make sure I was included in whatever happened because it sounded to me as if it was just the sort of thing I wanted to do.
"We started off in the early 1970s in AVO and did all sorts of interesting cars. We were experimenting with four-wheel drive Capris which didn't go into production. We were also working on the 2.6 Capri at that stage.
"In fact, it's rather interesting because in the very early days of 1970, we were working on a fuel-injected Capri that was lowered with wide wheels and all the things you would imagine a nice Capri to have, and it turned out to be quite an interesting car. In the early days of 1980, we were doing exactly the same with the 2.8 injection Capri, which I thought was rather an interesting comparison 10 years on.
"Anyway, I was there for the Mexico and the RS2000, and I left there at a stage when AVO was unfortunately winding down."
Now everyone you talk to has their own ideas about why Ford closed down an operation which seemed to have a lot of promise. What were Rod's views?
"Well, AVO actually survived quite healthily for a couple of years and then had a sharp downturn. The thing you must remember is that it consisted of a line capable of building 25 to 30 cars maximum per shift, and that is a considerable task that a small organisation like AVO finds very difficult to manage. That is, you've got to feed that line, and it was quite a problem to keep it going at the necessary rate to prove its financial viability.
"From that point of view, in retrospect, it was a mistake to have one's own manufacturing facility.
"I think those reasons, coupled with the fuel crisis of 1974, made AVO an easy economy for the company to make. It was a separate entity, it was emotionally the wrong thing to be doing - using extra petrol in times of a fuel crisis -and it was the end of the old model. All these things accounted for the demise of AVO."
For the performance motoring fan, then, it was seemingly a sad end to a brave experiment. For Rod Mansfield, it meant 18 months in Public Affairs on a sort of sabbatical, and then four years back in the Product Development Group, and specifically. Automotive Regulations. Not exactly the pointed end of engineering, you might say, but Rod found it an interesting enough interlude - until, that is, he was approached to set up Special Vehicle Engineering, which came into being officially on February 1,1980, to within an hour of 20 years after he had started with Ford.
But is SVE as it appears on the surface, a sort of '80-style resurrection of AVO, a slimmed down and rationalised version of what the South Ockendon operation should have been? Rod looked thoughtful for a minute: "Yes, I think that's a fair way of putting it. I think we learned a lot from AVO as a company. I think we set a scene in the market place which couldn't just be forgotten.
"People do desire more sporting, faster and jazzier versions of production cars, and although I guess the fuel crisis knocked it off for awhile, you can't keep people down forever- they do want that sort of car. Certainly I think marketing, after the demise of AVO, had been desiring mainstream engineering to produce that sort of car. They would say something like, 'If only we had a top of the range Capri that we could sell, we'd sell more Capris.' That has been their requirement.
"It thus became obvious that a small department set up aside from everybody else, and given a bit of a free rein to get on with it, could meet those marketing requirements. That's really how it happened: Marketing was demanding it; everybody in Ford could understand it, but it would result in a hell of a mess if you confused the mainstream programmes with it. Therefore, obviously what you do is set up a separate department, which doesn't get involved with mainstream but does have full responsibility for carrying out these sorts of projects. That was my brief to set up SVE, we did it in a very short space of time and, until just recently, employed only 10 people.
"Our first car was the 2.8 injection Capri, which we came up with in left-hand drive form after a nine month gestation period. We followed it with a right-hand drive version, and then about a year later, with the XR2."
So the benefits of AVO had not been lost on certain individuals within Ford of Europe. That was an encouraging piece of news. But how could Rod be sure that Ford wouldn't find it pojitically expedient to close SVE at some point? It seemed as though he had rehearsed the answer to that one a few times.
"We go back to this business of AVO having its own production line. This time, with SVE, there has never been any intention of doing our own manufacture in anything separate from the normal, mainstream manufacture, and therefore we don't have the same.....
Captions -
Top-Middle - Current SVE flagship (above and below) is the Capri 2.8i, here demonstrated by apprentice rally driver, Mick Jones.
Middle - "... in the very early days of 1970, we were working on a fuel-injected Capri that was lowered with wide wheels and all the things you would imagine a nice Capri to have...."
Bottom-Right - One we remember with a certain fondness: the old 3-litre Capri in its ultimate X-pack guise, complete with glassfibre arches and 170 horsepower engine. Germany's 2.8i turbo is quicker still.
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