The Four Protocol

Brian McIntosh’s vision for this project was brilliantly simple: if you gave a 19 year old in 1980 a bunch of cash and told him to modify his mum’s Escort, what would it look like? Well, like this.

- Daniel Bevis

One of mankind’s most enduring and relatable behaviours is our ability to play the hands we’re dealt, to work with what we’ve got. While we’re a species of dreamers and always have ideas of what we’d like to do if our EuroMillions numbers suddenly come up, we’re also keenly grounded in reality and make the best of what he have available to us. “Two-door Escorts very hard to find and they’re always expensive,” says Brian McIntosh, owner of this sparkling blue four-door, and that’s a case in point. If examples with an extra set of entry points are more abundant, then that’s what you use. And it certainly hasn’t held him back from building a fairly stunning example of the breed. It’s not as if he has to make any sort of apology for it, it vociferously speaks for itself.

“I bought this car a few years ago as a standard 1300 automatic,” he recalls. “It was copper bronze with a tatty vinyl roof, a few dents here and there, and a couple of thumbnail-sized rust holes.” We’ll just give you a moment to compare and contrast the levels of rust you’d find on equivalent, unrestored UK cars. Brian, you see, lives in New Zealand, and they haven’t really acknowledged rust over there. It’s something that happens to other people in colder, saltier countries.

“The car had spent its first 32 years with one family in Central Otago, on the South Island, which has a dry climate — great for the preservation of old cars,” he explains. “I wasn’t particularly looking for a project, but my mate Sean Double spotted it for sale and knew I would be interested. He was right!”

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