BLACK & BLUE

In an era when WRC success made a real impact on showroom sales, Subaru and Ford launched bruising rally-bred machines that would become performance icons

- SIMON HUCKNALL

Ford and Subaru's works rally teams enjoyed great World Rally Championship success in the 1990s and noughties, and were responsible for creating two of the wildest and most potent turbocharged road cars on the market. But they appeared in showrooms for very different reasons.

Whatever your allegiance to a particular manufacturer in the world of rallying, you'd have to be an anti-Ford diehard to deny the success of the Escort during the 1970s and early '80s. The works RS 1800 roundly trounced its opposition until the all-wheel-drive might of Audi's quattro became an unassailable obstacle to rivals with only one driven axle. But that winning streak, while it lasted, allied to the then mainstream popularity of the sport, made a bluechip business case for production-car spin-offs such as the Mexico, RS 2000 and RS 1800. Within a few years, would-be Björn Waldegårds were everywhere on British roads.

But nothing lasts forever, and coincident with the launch of an all-new front-wheel-drive Escort platform in 1980, Ford's works rally team instead started to focus its attention on the Sierra RS Cosworth and mid-engined RS 200, and it wasn't until the end of the decade that, with a new Mk5 production car imminent, Ford turned again to the Escort as both a potential WRC contender and a high-performance road car.

At around the same time, David Richards' Prodrive group had become the de facto works team for Subaru, rapidly scoring rally successes initially with the Legacy and then, from 1995 onwards, the more compact and agile Impreza. Three drivers' titles and three manufacturers' titles followed, and that exposure spawned a voracious appetite among enthusiasts for more hardcore versions of the already quick Impreza Turbo and later WRX production models.