Red Bull Motorsports
Rally
5 of the best Ford rally cars
As Sébastien Ogier signs for M-Sport, we pick the greatest Blue Oval rally cars.
With Sébastien Ogier signing for the M-Sport team for 2017, there’s a fair chance that a Ford might win the Drivers’ title in the World Rally Championship for the first time since 1981. That would be a big old 36-year gap!
With the prospect of seeing the Blue Oval in the ascendancy once again, it’s seemed like the right time to look back through Ford’s history to pick its five greatest rally cars of all time. Will Ogier’s all-new 380bhp M-Sport Ford Fiesta WRC join them? Watch this space…
1. Ford Escort Mk I
The Escort Mk 1 driven by Jean Francois Pinot
© DPPI
The first incarnation of the Ford Escort is, quite simply, the granddaddy of modern rally cars. The car achieved arguably its most famous result in 1970, when Finnish rally legend Hannu Mikkola manhandled an Escort 1850GT to victory in the London to Mexico World Cup Rally, a gruelling 16,000-mile trek through 20 countries.
The rear-wheel drive RS1600, the most common rallying incarnation of the car, became serious bedroom wall fodder for thrusting young men in the 1970s, with the road-going version ushering in the age of the hot hatch the UK.
2. Ford RS200
The RS200 on its WRC debut in Sweden
© Ford
By the 1980s, rally hard taken on a more serious, competitive edge. With the advent of the Group B era in 1982, unsuspecting rally drivers suddenly found themselves having to control snorting beasts of cars which kicked out a couple of hundred more horsepower than they were used to. Ford realised that using quaint Escorts against the likes of Peugeot’s 205 T16 and Audi’s monstrous Quattro was simply not going to cut it. So it purpose-built a car, the RS200, especially for the job.
The combination of a short wheelbase and an engine that pushed out a maximum output of around 450bhp made the RS200 a tricky little beast to handle. The car achieved a relatively unimpressive career-best of third at the 1986 Rally of Sweden, before Group B was abolished later that year following the death of Lancia driver Henri Toivonen at the Tour de Corse. Despite the RS200’s lack of success, however, it remains one of the icons of 1980s rallying, and went on to have a successful second career as a rallycross star.
3. Ford Escort RS Cosworth
Carlos Sainz won the 1997 Rally Indonesia
© Francois Baudin/DPPI
Effectively the RS200's replacement, the Ford Escort RS Cosworth was perhaps most famous for the homologated road car that it birthed. In the WRC, though, the Escort was driven by some of the biggest names in the business, including the immaculately-moustached Juha Kankkunen and Spanish rallying legend Carlos Sainz. The Mk V and Mk VI versions achieved 10 WRC victories between them between 1993-1998, before the Escort bowed out after 30 years of rallying competition, to be replaced by…
4. Ford Focus WRC 99, Ford Focus RS WRC 00-02
Colin McRae at the 2000 Rally Argentina
© Ford
Used by the Ford team from 1999–2002, the first incarnation of the Focus made its WRC debut in the hands of Simon Jean-Joseph and 1995 WRC champion Colin McRae at the Monte Carlo Rally. The car got off to an inauspicious start when scrutineers at the rally discovered an illegal water pump on the Focus and promptly disqualified it from the event. From then on, though, the Focus notched up 11 WRC victories, all of them coming from either McRae or Carlos Sainz, who’d returned to Ford following two years with Toyota.
MORE: Try our Colin McRae quiz
5. Ford Focus RS WRC 06-07
The Focus took Ford's last rally title
© Ford
The last Ford to ever be steered to a championship, the mid-noughties Focus won consecutive Manufacturers’ titles in 2006 and 2007, largely thanks to the hard-charging of Finnish giant Marcus Grönholm (seriously, the guy’s six foot three) and team-mate Mikko Hirvonen. In fact Grönholm, Hirvonen and the Focus were one of the biggest collective thorns in the otherwise largely untroubled career of Citroën’s Sébastien Loeb – and that’s saying something!
Like this? Try these…
- Take our Sébastien Ogier quiz
