Mission to Mexico – FEV 1H Driven

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Daily Mirror World Cup Rally. The concept seemed so simple on paper: a rally from London, the site of the 1966 World Cup, to Mexico City, the venue for the 1970 tournament. The event was incredibly high-profile, and every manufacturer worth their salt was clamouring to climb aboard the gravy train. Austin Maxis, Citroën DSs, Hillman Hunters, they all lined up to take on what the world had to throw at them. As it turned out, the world wasn’t all that keen to do the cars any favours, and out of over a hundred entrants, just 23 crossed the finish line. And among their number were six Ford Escorts – five of them in the top ten, with Hannu Mikkola and Gunnar Palm’s FEV 1H in first place by a frankly staggering margin.

Seven works Escorts were prepared for the rally in all; four of them – FEV 1H to FEV 4H – were built at Boreham, with the other three – FTW 46H TO FTW 48H – built offsite due to time and space issues. One of the most significant elements of the spec, and one much commented upon, was the engine choice. Why use a 1.85-litre Kent engine, when the Twin Cam had made an appearance on the rally stages two years before? The simple answer was reliability. The Twin Cam was relatively unproven, whereas the trusty old crossflow could be depended upon to finish the event without too much drama. What the team was really after was a finish – it didn’t need to be blisteringly quick, just quick enough, because the important thing was actually making it to the end. Furthermore, if there should be any engine problems, the consequences would be rather less catastrophic with the Kent; if a new head were required, for example, the driver should be able to stroll into a Central American Ford dealer and pick up a workable replacement.

Development was overseen by Stuart Turner, who’d arrived fresh from BMC’s motorsport division in 1969 and saw the London-Mexico as the event to make his mark at Ford. The whole endeavour was a massive PR exercise (which explains why footballer Jimmy Greaves could be found strapped into FEV 2H), and the works Escorts offered an interesting series of contrasts and dichotomies; heavily modified in certain areas, and yet pretty close to production standard in others. The reason for this was twofold: firstly, if the drivers were to survive 16,000 miles of juddering boulders, they’d need some semblance of comfort and pliancy to ensure their spines didn’t hammer the top of their skulls. And secondly, of course, there’s that ever-present PR machine. The world was watching. Who could guess how many Escorts would fly off the forecourts if an eminently similar-looking car should win such a punishing event? Sure, your local Ford dealer won’t have a big-winged Type 49 shell with three fuel tanks, a cowcatcher on the nose and a spare set of knobbly tyres, but you could get hold of a pretty accurate facsimile of the winning car…

The travelling circus left London on April 19th 1970, easing the teams into the event with a civilised jaunt to Lisbon, by way of Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia, Venice and Salamanca. Aside from the overloaded rears causing some axle trouble, the Escorts fared well. A nine-day Atlantic crossing brought the cars to Brazil, and from Rio de Janeiro they made their way to Buenaventura, Colombia, via Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, La Paz, Lima and Cali. Look at this on a map and you’ll see a route starting on the east coast of South America, heading straight down through Uruguay, across Argentina, then all the way up through Chile and Peru. This would be impressive in 2020 with the benefit of metalled roads, satellite phones and GPS, but in 1970? It was nothing short of heroic. There was little backup along the way; if the cars broke, the drivers parked up under a tree and fixed them in the shade. If they needed to ford a river, they made a bridge out of logs. This was primal stuff, all over terrain that deafened the entrants as stones ricocheted off their chassis, often at altitudes that starved their lungs and engines of oxygen.

A three-day sea crossing brought the rally to Panama City, for the final mad dash through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and deep into Mexico. When Mikkola and Palm crossed the finish line in first place on May 27th, they’d incurred nine hours of penalties over the course of the rally, but were still 1h18m ahead of the second-place Triumph. It’s duties done, FEV 1H was brought home to Boreham and respectfully retired. A living legend, a conquering hero, the car that gave birth to the name ‘Escort Mexico’. It now slumbers within Ford’s heritage collection at the Dagenham plant, and if members of the press ask really nicely, sometimes they’re allowed to have a go.

So it is that I find myself shivering in the icy winter chill, in the shadow of a mighty wind turbine, about to climb into FEV 1H and take it for a spin. This, quite honestly, is well outside my sphere of experience. I can count on my fingers the number of rally cars I’ve driven, and still have a lot of fingers left over. And this isn’t any old rally car. This is an irreplaceable piece of living history.

No pressure, then.

Jarringly, it immediately feels friendly. Not intimidating at all. OK, there’s a set of four-point harnesses and a Halda Twinmaster in there, along with a smörgåsbord of additional gauges and toggle switches, but it still feels like the sort of car you’d trundle to the shops in. Twisting the key, the venerable Kent motor barks into life, settling immediately into a busy but even idle. All seems normal. Suddenly, I’m not at all nervous, but it’s probably best not to pull at that thread.

It’s the gearbox that’s really making the experience so pleasant. The ZF five-speeder is superb, its click-click action slotting into place with decisive, militaristic precision. Shifting into dogleg first-gear and easing away, the clutch feels pretty much like a production Escort’s; I guess the last thing you need when you’re leaping over a crevasse is a petulant left pedal.

The dash is dominated by a large Smiths rev counter; there’s no redline marked, but it’s probably safe to assume that 10,000rpm is going to end in a stern conversation with the car’s curators, so I stick to a safe 6k out of respect – it’s a performance machine that’s still occasionally hard-used, but it has nothing to prove today.

The 140bhp engine is torquey enough to give it some genuine shove through second and third gear; fizzy rather than hair-on-fire fast, but of course that was always the point of it – it’s an endurance racer, not a dragster. Nevertheless, it’s sufficiently quick to smear the drizzly Essex countryside into a rapidly diminishing blur. As early as the first corner, the mental checklist receives a few more happy ticks as I discover that the brakes – discs all round in Mexico rally spec – have confidence-inspiring firmness, and the steering is perfectly weighted. You know what? It’s comfortable enough to tackle 16,000 miles without shaking you to pieces, I reckon I could handle that. On tarmacked roads, obviously, I’m not Superman.

As the miles tick by things settle into a rhythm, backside-steering with the grip on the thick-rimmed wheel being casual rather than maniacal. Oddly, there’s no stress in driving this iconic rally machine, it’s amiable and pliant. It’s everything you’d dream it to be. It’s not trying to kill me.

As I pull back into the warm and tea-infused embrace of Ford’s Heritage Centre, I’m overwhelmed with good cheer at this magnificent old Escort. They say you should never meet your heroes, but that’s a load of old toffee. FEV 1H has been a hero of mine since I was a little boy, and it proved to be better than I could ever have imagined. In many ways this is the Escort, the car that proved Boreham’s worth on a global scale, that spawned the Escort Mexico name, turning a gruelling and seemingly impossible event into a total Ford whitewash. This very car, on its maiden motorsport outing, covered an improbable number of miles over largely inhospitable terrain across numerous continents, skimming ground that resembled the surface of the moon with casual aplomb. FEV 1H is something very special indeed. And I’m delighted to find that it’s not intimidating at all.