Rallye Sport Fords

The inside story of the creation of Rallye Sport Fords in the 70s and 80s. Popular with enthusiasts, essential for works teams and private owners to compete in motor sport, these affordable performance cars achieved phenomenal success in rallying and racing.
In the 60s Ford built the sensational Le Mans-winning GT40, started making high performance production cars the Lotus Cortina and Twin Cam Escort, and recognizing how motor sport success had improved the company’s image, sponsored Cosworth in Formula 1. Two Motorsport works teams were developed: Boreham, Essex for rallying and Cologne, Germany for Touring Car racing.
In 1970 they established Advanced Vehicle Operations (AVO) in the UK, with 350 people, to produce limited volume sporting Ford cars. The first was to have been the GT70, a two-seater sports car for rallying, but it was never made. All subsequent AVO Rallye Sport cars were based on production Fords. They sold to thousands of customers and in the UK, created the Ford RS and AVO Owners Clubs.
Most significant was Escort RS1600/1800, with its Cosworth engine, the mainstay of many rally teams, while Escort Mexico and RS2000 were used by enthusiastic Clubmen. The Ford Escort won more competition events than any other single marque in motor sport history. There was also the Capri RS2600 in Germany, winner of many Touring Car race championships.
In 1975 the Energy Crisis and company politics caused AVO to close, but its design principles evolved later into Special Vehicle Engineering (SVE), since responsible for many sporting derivatives, starting with the Capri 2.8i and Escort XR3i.
This story moves to Ford Motorsport in the 80s, behind the scenes of a second breed of motor sport inspired Rallye Sport cars. The Clubmen‚s Escort RS Turbo, the sensational Sierra RS Cosworth, the technically advanced RS200 four-wheel drive International rally car, the World Touring Car Champion Sierra RS500 Cosworth, the Escort RS Cosworth four-wheel drive International Rally Car, and other projects that never made it.
Mike Moreton, car enthusiast, engineer and 23 years at Ford, was in the frontline, working for Stuart Turner as Product Planner and Project Manager, making it all happen. First at AVO and subsequently at Ford Motorsport, working with talented and dedicated people, negotiating with industry giants, and meeting celebrities. This is his story behind the Rallye Sport cars, from dream to reality, how and why they happened, the political arguments, the failures and successes.

Mike Moreton worked as a design/development engineer for Vauxhall in Luton before spending 23 years with Ford, where he was involved in engineering, product planning, marketing and motorsport. Mike has also worked for TWR/JaguarSport, where he was project manager for the Jaguar XJ220, and acted as operations director for Aston Martin before becoming Managing Director of KBD Design. Classic & Sports Car, June 2008
At first, this looks like more Veloce cannon fodder, with our usual moans: unimaginative design, ads in the back and apparently no input from a sub-editor. That said, without the publisher’s support, stories such as former Ford AVO and Motorsport man Moreton’s might remain untold. And it’s an interesting tale, a mixture between an autobiography and a marque history as he adds a personal spin to the story of Ford’s AVO and RS competition models and their roadgoing relations. Moreton even went on to project manage the XJ220 for TWR and JaguarSport, which you suspect might be his next book project. Chuck in some fascinating archive – ever seen a Granada RS2 800 or the bewinged Sierra Sapphire rally car prototype? – and this is a must for fans of the Blue Oval’s hottest offerings.
Review from Ford News, June 2008
Former motorsport project manager Mike Moreton has penned the 160-page inside story of Rallye Sport Fords. The Boreham-based engineer until 1989 charts the development of over 20 Rallye Sport cars – all offering performance derivations of high volume production Fords.
Sandwiched between the opening and closing chapters on Mike’s pre- and post-Ford influences and motorsport’s future are a mix of people and product stories.
The book covers the creation of Advanced Vehicle Operations (AVO) before activities were suspended by the mid-seventies Oil Crisis. They resumed with a second wave of competition-inspired Rallye Sport cars, including the Escort RS Turbo, Sierra RS Cosworth and its RS500 race car.
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Review from Track & Race Cars magazine, June 2008
Mike Morton was heavily involved in the success of Ford’s RS cars and here he describes how Ford created Rallye Sport. With his inside knowledge, this gives for a well-informed and detailed account of the RS cars. Tracking back to how he became involved in racing himself and with Ford, you get a real first person view of how things developed. Some unpublished photos and a well-written account of the Ford Motorsport over the years. With its success’s in the ’70s and ’80s this is a real story of progression, innovation and leading the way in motorsport.
4* stars – TRC recommends

Havoc, February 2008
If you are interested in PS Fords then this is a must-have book for you. It is a very well illustrated book with many pictures I’d never seen before.
Born in Birmingham Mike Moreton was destined to be connected to the motor trade, his father owned a Morris dealership where he worked during the school holidays. He was a keen motorsport fan and visited many racing circuits in the South of England watching the likes of Fangio, Moss, Hawthorn, Ascari etc. After his National Service he went back to the family garage where he remained for a short time before he began his formal framing when he joined Rootes as trainee mechanical engineer.
I found this part of his life fascinating, the way he built his own special racing cars, which were very competitive alongside much more expensive machinery, his driving exploits both on and off the public highway make very entertaining reading.
After serving his time at Rootes, he was off to Vauxhall as a designer where he was heavily involved in the design of the Viva and Cresta suspension set up. These next few years also taught him about the politics in the motor industry and this was to prove invaluable when he joined Ford in 1966 because to be honest, with all the internal back-biting, I’m surprised he stayed there! But stay there he did, for 23 years, and after several years in the more mundane areas of the Ford machine, he was invited to work for Stuart Turner at AVO.
As a fully paid up AVO nut this part of the book was my favorite. The inside stories are fascinating and I was quite surprised to learn about some of them. For example, it is fair to say that were it not for the Escort 1300E, AVO could have closed in 1972, the year before the RS2000 project began. It seems Stuart Turner and his gang had to beg, borrow and steal work from anywhere they could just to keep the plant going. After AVO closed its production in January 1975, a skeleton design team stayed on to produce such goodies as the Mk2 RS1800 and that was the end of the AVO part …
He moved to Boreham (Motorsport) and spent some time on the Mk2 Escort RSs, the Stillborn RS1700T, PS1600i, Fiestas (and even some trucks), but Mike’s biggest project was the RS200, I guess this was one of his favorite cars too, as he spends almost 50 pages on this particular chapter in his career. There are plenty of detailed design drawings and photographs to keep the RS200 fans amongst you very happy indeed … What do you get when you cross a Reliant with an Aston Martin – you’ve got it The best looking Group B car of them all … What a shame they  were banned just as the RS had got going.
After the banning of Group B his next big project was the Sierra Cosworth 500 face car, another very successful motorsport car – some say so successful, the FIA cancelled the championship as the Sierra was winning too easily.
Mike has had a life many petrolheads would give their back teeth for. This book nicely depicts his life and details the Ford RS section of it in a very interesting way. To be honest, there are one or two mistakes, but only an anorak will notice them, it’s worth buying for the pictures alone. totalkitcar.com, February 2008
To ‘Blue Oval’ fans there’s nothing more evocative then an RS-badged Ford. This book, by authority on the subject (he worked for Stuart Turner at AVO), Mike Moreton, covers the inside story of Ford’s Rallye Sport models in the seventies and eighties.
 
The cars were hugely popular with enthusiasts and essential for ‘works’ teams and private entrants to compete in motorsport, and these affordable performance cars achieved phenomenal success in rallying and circuit racing.
 
Charting the progress of AVO (Advanced Vehicle Operations) and Ford Motorsport, this book covers the celebrated production car-based models from the Escort RS1600 to Sierra RS Cosworth-inspired RS500.
 
Also detailed are the models that never quite made it, such as the RS200 rally car.
 
Here, Moreton relates the real story behind the Rallye Sport cars, from dream to reality, how and why they happened, the behind-the-scenes arguments, the failures and the resounding successes. An interesting