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.....The Sierra was more me though, it had loads of cubes, effortless grunt and rear-wheel drive. Now, some people think I'm a bit old skool in thinking all proper cars are rear-wheel drive. I mean front-wheel drive is OK for shopping trollies, isn't it?
So I had a bit of a dilemma: scrap the Sierra or scrap the Fiesta - or get rid of them both and buy something else. That was when my wife stepped in with a flash of inspiration saying: 'why don't you just put the Sierra engine in the Fiesta?' Bloody brilliant or bloody mad? Probably a bit of both. Then people started telling me it couldn't be done, so that was it - the gauntlet had been thrown down. She told me later that she was only joking. Oh well.
Of course, swapping the engines would be too easy, so I decided to cut the whole Sierra floorpan out and use it in the Fiesta. To kick things off, that Christmas Day, my brother-in-law, David, and I went at the Sierra with a hacksaw, well several hacksaws by the time that stage was finished. Et voila, project Fiesta was born.
I did the boring things like measuring to make sure the engine would fit, drew up some plans and made some calculations, then worked out where things would go and a rough budget. The Sierra was stripped to a floorpan on wheels and the Fiesta to a bare shell. I removed the floor-pan section from the Fiesta and suspended the shell from the garage roof, while I pushed the Sierra floorpan underneath. It was about this time that I started to wonder if I was mad. My wife, supportive as ever, confirmed that I was.
Obviously the Sierra floor had to be shortened to fit the Fiesta, so 305 mm was cut out, basically the rear footwells of the Sierra are gone. The two halves were welded and strengthened, then welded some more. The body was lowered on the floorpan by 50 mm, to help keep the centre of gravity as low as possible and give it that purposeful look. This, as you can imagine, took quite some time roughly - a year of evenings and weekends.
I then fabricated and fitted the backbone of the car, which consists of an eight-point CDS cage. The main hoop is 50 mm OD and the rest is 40 mm OD. It's triangulated forward to pick up on the front strut mounts and rearwards to the rear spring mounts. It seems to give ample strength and rigidity. The engine and 'box are set as far back as possible, with the bulkhead stepped 50 mm to accommodate them. The exhaust runs along close to the floorpan and through the boot floor, which all had to be boxed in. It then exits the car through the rear panel.
Next I bought four brand-new wings (£86 - that's how cheap Fiesta bits can be), I then cut through and banded them 90 mm, there wasn't a bodykit wide enough, and added metal into the front panel to close the gaps at the front. Despite all my efforts in widening the car I still had to roll the wheel-arches back to clear the Cosworth wheels.
When all the welding was finished it was then time to paint the beast. I painted the shell in Ford Blue, Diamond White and Signal Yellow - well you've got to be inconspicuous haven't you? The bonnet is a fibreglass skin courtesy of Smith & Deakin, with various bulges to clear bits of the engine and suspension. Some of the lumps and bumps do look a bit awkward, but they've got to be there nothing would fit otherwise.
I decided to stay with the V6 as it's a lazy 150 bhp. It pulls from tickover, and when you do it really makes a great noise. With this raw power jammed in the engine bay.....
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