- Timewarp condition 1979 Ford Escort RS2000 with just 17,000 miles is now for sale in the UK.
- It was parked up for 36 years because the owner was worried about it getting stolen.
- Price is a sky-high £94,195 ($121k); would buy one of MST’s brand new, 200 hp MK2s.
Prices for old fast Fords, like those for old BMWs and Porsches, have gone stratospheric over the past 15 years, and plenty of dogs have been resurrected to cash in on the boom. Not this Mk2 RS2000 though. It’s never been restored and looks like it’s stepped straight out of the showroom, but there’s a sad story behind its incredible preserved state.
The owner took delivery in the summer of 1979 but mothballed the car after only a couple of years because he was convinced thieves wanted to take it away.
More: Iconic Mk2 Escort Goes Back In Production, But Not From Ford
After returning to the parked RS one day in the early 1980s he found it surrounded by three men, and although he managed to get in the car and drive away, he was convinced he was being followed. When he finally lost the would-be thieves, he parked the Escort in his garage and left it there for 36 years.
An RS Owners Club member discovered the car in 2021 hiding under a thick layer of dust, its black paint and fishnet Recaros in perfect condition. It’s now up for sale in the UK with Peterborough-based KGF Classic Cars, but it’s no longer the blue-collar sports sedan it was when new. KGF wants a hefty £94,195 ($121k).
If you’ve kept an eye on the restomod scene over the last few years, you’ll know that similar money buys the MST Mk2, a brand new old-style Ford Escort built from a new shell and registered as a 2024 car. MST’s Mk2 looks like it escaped from a 1970s rally stage and has fat arches and a modern 2.5-liter Ford Duratec stuffed under the nose making around 200 hp (203 PS).
That car is like the spiritual successor to the flat-front BDA-powered RS1800 that won the 1979 World Rally Championship, but which was a rare beast on the street. This black RS2000 is what British Ford fans actually bought after watching Escorts sliding around on the rally stages, or on TV’s The Professionals (check out the video above).
There’s no exotic twin-cam Cosworth BDA under the hood, just a single-cam 2.0-liter Pinto hooked up to a four-speed ‘box, though Autocar’s period tests showed street version of the 109 hp (100 PS) RS2000 got to 60 mph (96 km/h) in 8.6 seconds versus 9.0 seconds for the 113 hp (115 PS) production RS1800, which was only mildly tuned, unlike the rally-spec RS1800s.
And only the RS2000 got that famous sloping plastic beak. The original owner opted to save a few quid by deleting the four-spoke RS alloys in favor of a set of 13-inch RS Mexico steelies, the spare of which still wears its original Pirelli Cinturato CN36, complete with red chalk markings.
There’s no doubt that this is top money for an old Escort, and way beyond any price we’ve seen attached to even the nicest examples of its contemporary rival, the Mk1 VW Golf GTI. But fast Ford lovers are a fanatical bunch. Would you take this timewarp original or MST’s retro rally-style flat-front RS?
