The Ford Sierra Cosworth RS
The Ford Sierra Cosworth, introduced in July 1986 with outlandish styling that made motor sports enthusiasts weak at the knees and Insurance Brokers rub their hands with glee. It looked like the result of a rainy weekend in a cheap hotel between a Porsche and a frumpy rep mobile. This hyperactive bastard child caused a sensation, with its 201hp, unique exhaust note and outrageous looks, it took the ordinary hum drum car that photocopier salesmen pootle around the country in and turned it into a full on leering monster.
The hugely exaggerated whale-tail spoiler, the multi spoke alloy low profile rims, the bonnet vents and the RS body kit all gave you the sense that you had the keys to something that would be better suited on a race track, not the suburban streets. Nowadays a car that produces 201hp from a two litre engine is not such a rare breed, but back then it gave people a reason to take up some tools and make it go even faster, talk of 400 plus horse power is often whispered on track days. It got off the line in 6.4 seconds and could reach 154Mph and at only £16,000, well you couldn’t buy a Porsche or a Ferrari for that money!
Only around 6000 were manufactured and it was only available in three colours - white, black and moonstone blue these were rare beasts indeed. This was of course because Ford had made it to pass the test of being a production car, so they could go racing in them. So in the middle of the eighties we have a car that was designed for the track, tearing up and down council estates, unwatched motorways and those beloved ‘mad miles’ that we all knew about when we were growing up. And go racing in them it did, success in Rally and touring cars followed its introduction, it’s success was largely down to two factors, the aero package and the engine.
The engine was developed by Ford’s Special Vehicle Engineering Group based in Belgium, not much to do apart from stick crazy engines in cheap rep mobiles, so that is exactly what they did. They found a way of sticking a cosworth developed 16 valve head on top of a 2 litre ford pinto engine block, tinkering more and fitting low compression pistons and bullet proof crank and rods.
