A 50-year love story
The second-generation Ford Escort went on sale half a century ago, and remained on the market for less than six years.
Even the newest examples are therefore more than four decades old, yet the Escort remains, at least in the British Isles, one of the best-loved cars of its time – and a popular classic car, too.
To celebrate the model, we’re taking a look at the Mk2 itself, and investigating its place in broader Ford Escort history.
The original Ford Escort
In one of those paradoxes which pleasantly complicates the life of a motoring historian, the Mk2 was not the second Escort, but the third.
Ford of Britain used the name in 1955 for its first estate car, closely related to the Anglia 100E saloon introduced two years earlier.
A more upmarket version of the same car, called the Squire, was launched at the same time.
The Squire was cancelled in 1959, but the cheaper Escort survived until 1961.
The Ford Escort Mk1
The Anglia 100E gave way to the 105E in 1959, and was in turn replaced nine years later by what is now known as the first-generation Escort.
This was one of the first models introduced after Ford of Europe had been created by amalgamating Ford’s British, Irish and German divisions, but it was still recognisably a UK-designed car.
Despite the growing interest in front-wheel drive shown by other manufacturers, it retained the Anglia’s front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout.
In standard form, the Escort was a big success, and unlike the Anglia it was available in high-performance versions such as the Twin Cam (pictured) and, from 1970, the Cosworth BDA-engined RS 1600.
The Ford Escort Mk2 arrives
As motoring author Eric Dymock would write many years after the Mk2’s introduction in 1975, ‘Nothing was changed at Ford unless it was absolutely essential’.
The Mk2 was ‘essentially a re-skin’ of the Mk1 Escort, with most of the mechanical parts simply transferred from the older car.
The body, however, was new. It was less curvy than before, with larger windows, more room for rear passengers and a redesigned dashboard.
Ford’s Kent engine
Most Mk2s were powered by overhead-valve engines from the Kent family.
The first of these, a replacement for the Ford Sidevalve introduced in the 1930s, made its debut in 997cc form in the Anglia 105E, and in 1967 it was given a crossflow cylinder head.
In the earliest Mk2 Ford Escorts, this was the only unit available, though customers had a choice of 1098cc, 1297cc and 1599cc capacities, the cylinder bore being 81mm in each case while the stroke varied.
According to a 1975 brochure, power outputs were 48bhp for the 1.1, 57bhp for the 1.3 (or 70bhp as fitted to the Sport model) and 84bhp for the 1.6.
Saloons
Although Ford’s first hatchback, the Fiesta, was already well through its development, and would go on sale in 1976, that body style would never be used for the Mk2 Escort.
As with the Mk1, most examples were saloons, though the fact that the rear window was set at a much shallower angle gave them a slightly coupé-like appearance.
With a single exception which we’ll be meeting shortly, Ford Escort Mk2s had flat fronts with one pair of headlights.
Those lights were generally round, though square units were fitted to upmarket versions, and gradually filtered down to the cheaper ones.
Estates
Creating the estate version of the Ford Escort Mk2 was a relatively simple matter.
From the windscreen forwards, it was clearly new, but, to quote Eric Dymock once more, ‘the slightly curved waistline of the Mk1 seemed to blend quite well with the [new] front and it was cheaper to keep it’.
Seen from the rear, Mk1 and Mk2 estates are therefore almost indistinguishable, and you have to move forward to see which is which.
The Mk2 Ford Escort estate had a load volume of either 1519 litres or 875 litres, depending on whether it was fitted with two or five seats.
Vans
During the lifetime of the Ford Escort Mk2, commercial vehicles based on small family cars were far more common than they are today.
Like the estates, the Mk2 vans were hard to tell apart from the corresponding Mk1s if you couldn’t see the front end.
They were not simply estates with fewer windows and seats, but had their own bodyshells whose rooflines were considerably higher above the passenger compartment and rose further towards the rear.
Access to the load area was not through a tailgate, as it was on the estate, but through two tall, side-hinged doors.
Van derivatives
Sometimes a van is not necessarily just a van.
As it had done with the Ford Escort Mk1, Devon-based C&W Conversions adapted the Mk2 van into a camper, the example pictured here having been modified by fitting Revolution wheels and replacing the original 1.3-litre engine with a 1.6.
On the other side of the world, Ford of Australia created the Sundowner, a youth-oriented van with eye-catching graphics and bubble-style rear side windows, which added a touch of glamour but didn’t help visibility to any great extent.
The Ford Escort RS 1800
By far the most exciting of all Ford Escort Mk2s, the RS 1800 was the successor to the Mk1 RS 1600, and created for exactly the same reason.
Powered by a Cosworth-designed, Kent-derived, 1.8-litre engine with twin overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder, it was the basis of a rally car which quickly became enormously successful in the hands of works, professional and amateur teams.
In standard form, the engine produced only 115bhp, but after substantial modifications and a capacity increase to 2 litres, that output could be more than doubled.
The Ford Escort RS 2000
The Ford Escort RS 2000 stood out from all other Mk2s thanks to its ‘droopsnoot’ front end, quad headlights and small boot spoiler, the first and last of these being claimed to reduce aerodynamic drag and lift.
Mechanically, it was similar to the less visually distinctive Mk1 RS 2000 – both were powered by the 2-litre, overhead-valve Pinto engine.
The standard output was not far short of what the RS 1800’s Cosworth unit could produce, but the Pinto was far less tunable.
Nevertheless, the RS 2000 was competitive in motorsport’s Group 1 category, in which only minimal modifications were permitted.
The Ford Escort Mexico
Like the RS models, the Mexico was a follow-up to a model in the Mk1 range.
The original version commemorated Hannu Mikkola and Gunnar Palm’s victory in the 1970s London to Mexico World Cup Rally, and was powered by the 1.6-litre Kent engine.
For the Mk2, Ford switched to the 1.6-litre version of the Pinto, which produced a reasonable enough 95bhp.
Public enthusiasm was limited, however, and the Mexico was abandoned after just two years in 1978.
British number one
The Ford Escort Mk2 became the UK’s most popular car almost immediately.
According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, it was the most-registered model in the country in 1976.
The SMMT had begun collating figures in 1965, and for the next decade the top spot was only ever occupied by the second- or third-generation Ford Cortina, or the multi-titled car usually referred to as the Austin/Morris 1100/1300 (though other brands and model names were also used) or, more generally, as the ADO16.
The Mk2 was the first car other than any of the above to lead the charts, but it did so for only a single year – for the remainder of the 1970s, it was Cortinas all the way.
Worldwide production
The majority of Mk2 Escorts were built at Ford’s Halewood factory in Liverpool (which produced nearly a million) and at Saarlouis in Germany, but it also emerged from other facilities around the planet.
Among several examples, Ford Australia built a few thousand saloons and vans – sometimes using the 2-litre Pinto for versions other than the RS 2000 – in each year of the model’s lifetime, though annual production exceeded 20,000 only in 1976.
On the other side of the Tasman Sea, Ford New Zealand manufactured its own Mk2s at Wiri, South Auckland, nearly 400 miles north of Lower Hutt near Wellington, where it had produced Mk1s.
UK rallying
The Ford Escort RS 1800 quickly became the car to have in British rallying, to the point where it was a surprise if anything else even came close to it.
Its first event was the Granite City Rally in April 1975, and it was the star of the show, with Roger Clark/Jim Porter and Billy Coleman/John Davenport finishing first and third, split only by the Nigel Rockey/Ron Channon Mk1 RS 1600.
With the new car, Clark enhanced his already stellar reputation in the British forests, but many other drivers – including Russell Brookes, who split Clark and Coleman in an RS 1800 one-two-three on the Scottish International a few weeks after the ’75 Granite – also used it to great effect.
Ford Escort Mk2s in the World Rally Championship
Starting with Timo Mäkinen’s victory in the 1975 Lombard RAC Rally, Ford Escort RS 1800s won 20 World Rally Championship events in seven seasons.
Of those, 16 were achieved by Finland’s Hannu Mikkola (pictured) and Ari Vatanen, and Sweden’s Björn Waldegård – the last two making further contributions to Mk2 history which will be discussed shortly – while Brookes, Clark, Mäkinen and Kyösti Hämäläinen claimed one each.
During this period, the most successful rally cars on the planet – in WRC terms, at least – were the Lancia Stratos and its successor, the Fiat 131 Abarth, but the Mk2 Escort was able to win such wildly varied events as the 1000 Lakes in Finland and the Safari in Kenya.
Björn Waldegård
Björn Waldegård was the most successful Ford Escort Mk2 driver at the highest level, winning six WRC rounds from 1977 to 1979.
The last of those years was also the first of the drivers’ world championship (replacing the less impressively titled FIA Cup for Rally Drivers), and Waldegård won that, too – mostly because of his performances in an RS 1800, though he contested two rounds in a Mercedes-Benz.
In the same year, Ford also won the manufacturers’ title, a double which it has never repeated.
(To clarify, Ford effectively did repeat it in 2017, but in that year the M-Sport team, rather than Ford itself, was accepted as a manufacturer due to a temporary waiver of the regulation covering this subject.)
Racing Ford Escort Mk2s
Most of the Mk2 Ford Escort’s motorsport history concerns rallying, but the car was, and sometimes still is, competitive in circuit racing, hillclimbing, autotesting and production-car trials.
Zakspeed Racing built some excellent examples, one of which won the Deutsche Rennsport Meisterschaft (German Racing Championship) with Hans Heyer at the wheel.
John Robinson’s spaceframe Mk2s were very competitive in British special saloon racing, powered by a variety of Ford (four-cylinder or 3.4-litre Cosworth V6) or BMW engines.
In an extreme case, a home-built spaceframe car competed in Scotland with a Chevrolet V8 under the glassfibre bonnet.
The end of the Ford Escort Mk2
The Mk2 Ford Escort was replaced in late 1980 by the Mk3 (pictured), a front-wheel-drive hatchback which bore no relation to any previous Escort.
Since then, there have been no rear-wheel-drive Escorts, though two – the RS Cosworth and RS 2000 4x4 of the 1990s – had four-wheel drive.
In terms of UK registration figures, as supplied by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the FWD models were far more successful than the Mk2, leading the charts every year from 1982 to 1989, and then again (after briefly giving way to the Fiesta) from 1992 to 1995.
This was to be expected, since by the 1980s rear-wheel-drive saloon cars had gone out of fashion, and the Mk2 was now a product of a bygone age.
Ari Vatanen
It’s almost beyond imagining today, but the 1981 World Rally Championship was won by someone driving a car which was no longer in production.
While Talbot won the manufacturers’ title with its Sunbeam Lotus, followed closely by Datsun and more distantly by Ford, Ari Vatanen took his Ford Escort RS 1800 to victory in Greece, Brazil and Finland, and finished second in Sweden and the UK.
With the exception of Talbot’s Guy Fréquelin, no one else came close, and Vatanen was the champion driver – pointlessly in terms of publicity value to Ford, since by then nobody could buy a new Mk2 even if they wanted to.
Ford Escort Mk2s in rallying today
More than four decades after its cancellation, the Mk2 Ford Escort is still so popular in rallying that if fans are told someone is competing in a Mk2, they will understand what is meant without further explanation.
Some Mk2s, such as the one pictured here, run in historic classes, and are very similar to those used in the 1970s.
Others are based on new bodyshells, have six-speed sequential gearboxes and are powered by, among other possibilities, the Ford-based Millington Diamond engine.
They are nothing like as quick as modern WRC cars, but they look and sound fabulous, and are loved by rally enthusiasts.
The most valuable Ford Escort Mk2
In 2005, a Mk2 Ford Escort was sold at auction for $690,000 – which, by the admittedly rather fluffy method of trying to account for inflation and exchange rates, was far more in real terms than Princess Diana’s RS Turbo fetched 17 years later.
What makes this all the more remarkable is that this phenomenally expensive Mk2 was a rather tatty, 1.1-litre GL with a dented front wing.
However, it was owned by Karol Wojtyła, a Polish priest who had been appointed Archbishop of Kraków in 1964, became Pope John Paul II in 1978, died in 2005, was beatified in 2011 and ascended to sainthood in 2014.
The car is therefore the only Mk2 ever to have been owned by a saint, though subsequent auction prices suggest its value has dropped considerably since the days when Wojtyła was ‘merely’ the recently deceased Pontiff.