THE MAN WHO CHANGED FORD FOREVER

RICHARD PARRY-JONES WAS THE GIFTED ENGINEER WHO TRANSFORMED THE DYNAMIC SIGNATURE OF CARS FROM THE BLUE OVAL. A YEAR ON FROM HIS DEATH, WE LOOK BACK AT THE SCOPE OF HIS INFLUENCE, INCLUDING ON A LOCAL AUSSIE HERO

- MEL NICHOLS

SIR JACKIE STEWART reckons that, of all the world’s roads, a 105km loop in Scotland is the best place to evaluate cars. “It condenses so many varied conditions and surfaces into a short distance,” says the triple F1 world champion. “Motorway, main and minor roads, open bends, tight bends, crests, dips, long humps, broken edges, narrow village streets and fast kinks across high moorland. I’ve never found anywhere better in Australia, America or Europe.”

The loop is in Perthshire, 100km north-west of Edinburgh, and we are here, in March 1993, in a Ford Mondeo, soon after its launch. Jackie, in his role as a Ford R&D consultant, is driving and chatting with his front passenger, Richard Parry-Jones, presently Chief Engineer of Ford’s Small and Medium Vehicle Centre. In a few years, he will be Ford’s Chief Technical Officer, responsible for 30,000 engineers and designers and everything technical in Ford worldwide. Some believe his work will save Ford of Europe more than once and it will certainly make all Fords, everywhere, better – along with Jaguars, Land Rovers, Volvos and Aston Martins when they were owned by Ford.

I’m in the back seat, scribbling notes, as Parry-Jones and Stewart recount how, on these roads, in two weeks of high-pressure work, driving day and night, they fine-tuned the Mondeo to help make it best-in-class. Parry-Jones, a rally-loving Welshman who, at 12, wrote to ask Ford how to become an engineer; and the Scottish garage owner’s son who became a Formula 1 ace. In the process, they established a system for evaluating, prioritising and improving vehicle dynamics that transformed Ford and forced rivals to lift their game, too.