RS Motorsport :: Classic Speed Restored

Gidday all from New Zealand. I’ve been on the old forum from time to time and even the one before that but I’m not what you would call a regular contributor and have never actually told anyone what I own. I thought it was time to come clean and share some photos of a couple of toys from my collection. Both these cars are sitting in my garage here in NZ. The works Escort has been there for about 18 months and I’ve owned the RS1600 for nearly 10 years.

Don’t get too excited about the works car because it doesn’t look anything like these pictures now unfortunately. It’s a restoration project and will take more than a few years and huge amount of cash on top of the mountain I paid to own it to have it looking like these shots again.

I have the original shell with alloy arches complete with the original chassis tags (now in my safe by the way) documented in Graham Robson’s “The Works Escorts” book. I have 8 and 9 inch magnesium Minilites, ZF box, fully floating Atlas, LHD column / rack / Springalex wheel, chronometric speedo and tacho, dash top, works radiator and alternator, exhaust manifold and loads of miscellaneous bits I’ve collected but no engine suspension or brakes! An engine is probably easier to come by these days however than a ZF so not a real problem as I see it but an expensive one all the same. It’s quite a special works car as it has torsion bar rear suspension with a watts linkage and long 4 links with compression struts at the front.

All photos were taken in 1975, B&W’s by Martin Holmes and colour by Esler Crawford.

A little bit of history. Originally Boreham built in 1972 as a tarmac race car it ended up in Denmark and won the Danish Touring Car Championship sometime in the early 70’s also competing in other European championships of the time. Obviously Ford retained ownership of it as eventually it ended up back at Boreham and was one of the last Mk1’s used by the works team in 1975 driven by Roger Clark on the Circuit of Ireland Rally (tarmac). Imported into New Zealand about 1976 and raced in various NZ touring car events in AWA livery for a few years dogged by reliability problems then sold. Subsequently robbed of all its goodies by various owners and found with a 1600 crossflow and standard running gear around 1990 having been used for gravel rallying.
















Moving right along, the Electric Blue RS1600 was restored in the UK by a friend of mine for use in classic racing and he brought it back to NZ on his return in 1995. I was just in the right place at the right time when he decided to sell it. As you see it in these pictures it’s fitted with Bilsteins, vented disks, Princess 4 pot’s, w/c crossmember, works bellhousing, straight cut single rail box, single leaf springs, LSD, Capri rear drums and a custom works style wiring loom with an original Mada centre dash. Engine has Cosworth forged pistons with 45’s and a Group 4 exhaust. I’ve now sourced virtually all the bits to put it back to standard and it’s stripped at the moment waiting to have them all fitted. I fitted the Minilites but I still have the original slotted type steel rims and hubcaps correct for the year. I just need to extract my digit now and get it sorted so I can get out in it again but I’m trying to organise to build a big shed at home and doing some house renovations at the moment so work is temporarily on hold.

Hi Kris,

Great looking cars you have there. You may remember you bought some parts off me a few years back. Great to see they are put to good use!

Bruce

Chris,

Fantastic collection you have there. The blue RS1600 looks stunning. Keep us updated on progress with that one.

The Works car will be an invaluable collector piece whenever you finish it. A great find and it sounds like you have most of the really hard to get bits.

luv the blue rs1600

Great pieces of history there Chris. Make sure you keep us updated with pics of the rebuild

Rhys

Hi Chris,

Your RS1600 is a good piece of gear.

I'd read somewhere about certain works cars having torsion rear.

The works car will be worth the effort.

I have a couple of questions.
In this photo, it looks like the left still has a leaf spring in place ?

I see a transverse bar across the car up high connected by drop links to the diff. I can't see a fixing point for the mid point to the chassis. Is this the torsion bar or simply the anti roll bar or are both bars up there ?

The lower trailing arms appear to pick up next to front leaf mounting point, what have they done with upper arms ?




In the side shot the the rear wheels look further back in the chassis, optical illusion or special works location ?

Gidday Bruce. Yes I do remember getting the bits from you of course although we didn’t meet. They were for a Twin Cam I owned and planned to restore as well at the time but have sold that recently as I have enough on my plate restoring the works car and a few other projects I have on the go as well.

John you’re very observant. I thought if there were any questions about the car it would be about the rear suspension for sure.

From what I can work out from books etc there were two works cars with torsion bars, this one and the sister car SPU 255K. 255K was written off in 1973 and scrapped. There are two other cars that I know of also that have torsion bars – The Alan Mann Twin Cam XOO 349F and a Wilment RS1600 now in The Netherlands. Both are similar in concept only and completely different to mine.

The apparent leaf spring is a fibreglass dummy. The other one was riped off during the event. Escorts were only homologated with leaf springs so they had to be fitted of course but that doesn’t mean they had to actually do anything! I have some photos of a MK2 works car with fibreglass springs and coilovers as well. The photo isn’t that clear because of dirt on everything but the torsion bars run from side to side. The drop link you can see is attached to the rear bar which is attached to the RH chassis rail. Opposite for the other side of course. Torsion bars incidentally from a Morris Minor!

Another photo to make it clearer.



The top arms are there hidden behind the diff and watts linkage. The attachment for the top arms to the diff is only just above the axle tube. You can see in this picture that the pivot point for the Watts isn’t in the centre of the diff cover it’s about 35mm above. The boot floor and chassis rails have been modified and an absolutely huge diff tunnel has been fitted to allow the car to be set up very low.

Yep the rear wheels are back a little. I have no idea why they’ve set it up like this but can only assume it was experimental at this stage. I need to do a bit more research on it.

Thanks Chris now I see how it is setup.

Gotta like there interpretation of homologation.

Yes definitely a very creative interpretation of the rules.

Nice cars

is this Dr Kris ? Auckland University ?

cheers
Brian

No that's not me.

I'll post some pictures of the blue one when I get it going again but that wont be much before Christmas the way I'm going. I still have a standard spec stainless exhaust sitting at a friends place in the UK that I need to get here somehow. Unfortunately I missed 2 free containers coming here but that's another story.