FORDS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN…

The Ford Fiesta was and still is, a fantastic car. The Cosworthdeveloped BDA engine was a world-beater. So, what would happen if the two were to meet? We nearly found out…

Graham Robson

By 1978/1979, Ford’s ‘works’ motorsport team at Boreham had been campaigning Escorts for more than a decade, and that remarkable car was still a winner. Along the way it had progressed from using 160bhp Lotus engines to 250-270bhp Cosworth BDAs, but now it seemed that the end was near. Not only had the splendid BDA reached its normally aspirated limits, but the rear-drive Escort line was soon to be killed off.

Boreham, then, would need a successor, and it was in a rather frantic atmosphere that the search for a new theme began. It was in this period that the development of three different machines – one being the famous ’FiEscort’ (a mixture of Fiesta and Escort architecture), one being the first attempts to produce an Escort RS1700T, and a third being an unlikely little car which everyone knew as the Fiesta-BDA. I think we all know what happened to two of those projects; the ‘FiEscort’ was abandoned at a very early stage, while the RS1700T dragged on for three years without ever coming close to production, but… what about the Fiesta-BDA?