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The Cortina wasn’t meant to be a rally car, but with some lateral thinking, Boreham’s engineers turned the GT into a multiple winner. Here’s how.

- Graham Robson

As everyone knows, the Cortina eventually became a great race and rally car — but the miracle is that it became competent in motorsport at all. Nothing that Ford’s engineers built into the car made it remotely promising at first and it was only a combination of Boreham’s expertise, and Keith Duckworth’s engine genius, which made its motorsport success possible.

The story really began in mid-1962, when Ford was running its motorsport programme out of the old Lincoln Cars building in Brentford, using Anglia 105Es (too small and underpowered) or Zephyrs (too big and heavy). Fortunately, a nucleus of forward-thinking mechanics and engineers — Bill Meade and Mick Jones among them — joined Ford Motorsport at this time, and along with team coordinator Bill Barnett and manager Syd Henson (and later Alan Platt) they would make all the difference to the team’s prospects, and the move to a brand-new workshop at Boreham cemented those prospects.

First steps

The first works Cortina to go rallying was Jeff Uren’s highly-tuned 1200 (TOO 528), in the 1962 RAC Rally, though because the engineers and mechanics knew virtually nothing about the design, that car hit all manner of problems, which included losing its entire exhaust system at one time. However, team leader Henry Taylor then started the 1963 Monte, using the same 1200, and was rewarded with second in class. This car, incidentally, was prepared at Lincoln Cars, and was definitely subordinate to the works Anglia 105Es of the period.

Things then became more serious in the spring. Immediately after the GT was introduced in March 1963, cars were sent to tackle the East African Safari — but every one of them retired. On the Tulip, which followed, Pat Moss struggled against unfavourable handicaps, so it wasn’t until May, and the hot, rough and dusty Acropolis, that the GTs made a show.