Over the past few years, the car industry has seen the advent of so-called continuation models. This means that a company – sometimes the car company itself, sometimes a third party – recreates a classic model. Bentley and Jaguar are especially fond of doing this. Now, Ford is getting in on the fun with a company called Boreham Motorworks. The cars that it’s reviving? Nothing less than the legendary RS200 rally homologation and the beloved Mk 1 Escort.
Boreham is doing these recreations or continuations with the full support of Ford UK, and that’s awesome because there should always be more old rally cars in the world. The RS200, for the uninitiated, was a 1.8-liter, Cosworth-powered, mid-engined, heavily turbocharged, all-wheel drive plastic-and-fiberglass deathtrap.
Ford contracted Reliant (of Reliant Robin fame) to build the 200 RS200s required by Group B homologation rules, plus another 20 cars’ worth of spare parts. In addition to these original 200 cars, a few more were assembled out of those said parts and are not considered “canonical,” for lack of a better term.
Ultimately, Group B racing was shut down after the deaths of several drivers and spectators, and so the RS200 program died with it. Rally legend Stig Blomqvist did take an RS200 up Pikes Peak a few times in the early aughts, though, which is undeniably cool.
The Boreham cars will likely be pretty faithful to the original, though we hope that the 1980s Ford build quality stays firmly in the past where it belongs.
The Mk 1 Ford Escort will be the first of the two models released and will be built to rally racing specs. Somewhat oddly, the press release from Boreham says that the Escort will be built to Group 5 specs, but that’s a later road racing formula. The Mark 1 Escort rallied quite successfully under Group 2 with a 1.7-liter twin-cam Cosworth engine producing around 180 horsepower.
We’ve reached out to Boreham for clarification and will update this story when we have it.
While other details on both of the Boreham continuation models are scarce, we do know that both will be offered only in very limited numbers, and they are meant to be the first two in a larger series of classic Ford continuations. All we know is that we’re extremely excited about these cars and can’t wait to see more of them.
