Ford Escort Alan Mann 68 Edition 2025 review – the ultimate reborn classic fast Ford?
The latest product of Boreham Motorworks’ continued restomod work with the Escort is the 795kg Alan Mann 68 Edition. It’s fabulous.
I’m fairly familiar with Ford Escorts (yes, I still own my Mk2, and no, it’s sadly not in danger of seeing a rally stage any time soon), but I imagine my expression on getting into the Alan Mann 68 Edition for the first time was similar to that of the DH of my school on re-entering his study after someone had snuck in and rearranged his furniture – just enough to be unsettling. While much of the interior is instantly, pleasingly recognisable, the seating position is somehow all wrong.
Or rather it’s all right. Usually you either sit a touch too high and close but with a good grasp of the wheel, your feet well-placed on the pedals, or you sit nice and low but with the wheel at a slightly odd angle. I’ve never found it quite perfect, until now.
In this very special Mk1 Escort, the steering rack has been moved four inches forward and the steering column travels between clutch and brake pedals before passing through the engine cross-member. Combined with possibly the most deeply dished three-spoke steering wheel I have ever seen and a nice, low bucket, you have a sports rather than saloon car seating position. Legs stretched out and arms bent, just so. It sets the tone and tells an immediate tale of just how different this Escort is.
This is the first car that we’ve been able to drive from the new Boreham Motorworks, which is due to launch a ‘Continumod’ (a portmanteau that they seem to be in the process of trademarking) Escort RS road car later this year and then a new, modern RS200 next year. Impressively, the company has the full backing of Ford and it is part of the DRVN Automotive Group, which is allied to DRVN Advanced Engineering.
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The latter is a rebrand of Penso Consultancy, which has a wealth of experience in not just the automotive but also the defence and aviation sectors. Its engineers were responsible for big projects like the Jaguar C‑X75 as well as more specific pieces of work like the Bentley revolving dash and the huge active wing on the AMG GT Black Series. Suffice to say, Boreham is not a one-man band in a barn (and I say that with no disrespect to OMBIBs).
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But to understand this particular car we need to go back even further. In the mid- to late-1960s, Alan Mann Racing was a hugely successful outfit that might best be described as Ford’s competition arm in Europe. It was a bit like M-Sport today. It ran Ford Falcons in the Monte Carlo Rally and Shelby Cobras in the European rounds of the World Sportscar Championship, gave the Mustang its first competition victory and took Cortinas to multiple titles.
After the GT40 failed to win Le Mans at the first attempt in 1965, Alan Mann Racing was tasked with developing a lightweight version as one of two options for ’66. Ford eventually went with the other option, the more powerful, robust 7-litre MkII of course, and Alan Mann Racing ran two of those in the ’66 race with Graham Hill leading for the first five hours. In other words, the red and gold cars were a very big deal 60 years ago.
Which brings us to the Escort. In 1968, when Ford launched the Mk1, Alan Mann Racing was told to make it into a Group 5 race-winner and renowned Ford chassis engineer Len Bailey was brought in to help. Amazingly, despite the fact that the Escort would go on to be a very successful rally car in relatively standard form, the chaps in Byfleet took the new car, ripped it apart and basically started again.
As well as repositioning the steering column, the front suspension was also totally changed. Look in the arches and you will see a sort of deconstructed MacPherson strut, with a sliding pillar and then the separate coilover spring and damper unit (Koni two-way adjustable in the modern car) at a greater angle inboard of that. Both are attached to an intricate lower arm and there is a tie-rod for adjusting caster. Many of the mountings are actually taken directly from the GT40 that Bailey also worked on.
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One of the most eye-catching things from an aesthetic point of view is the beautiful brazing on the lower arm. It was done by Jim Rose (another GT40 veteran) on the original cars and, despite now being in his eighties, he’s doing it again for the new ones.
At the rear of the car there is still a live English axle, but vastly strengthened and with oil feeds, an oil pump and oil cooler. There is also a Watts linkage but, unlike on all the rally cars I’ve seen, it’s underneath, with the pivot pin as low as possible to reduce the roll centre. Oh, and no leaf springs here, instead there are torsion bars (originally sourced from a Morris Minor!).
Add in some wider wheels and disc brakes at each corner, wrap it all in the first Escort bubble arches, pop an 1840cc Twin Cam under the bonnet and voila! An Escort easily capable of taking Frank Gardner to the British Saloon Car Championship back in 1968.
Amazingly, Alan Mann Racing built six of these Mk1s in just three months in ’68. I suspect it took slightly longer for Boreham Motorworks to disassemble the most famous of those six – Gardner’s championship-winning car, AMR4, registration XOO 349F – scan every component and create an exact CAD model in order to reverse-engineer the 24 new examples.
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The car you can see in the photos is the prototype build before the customer cars go into production, but walking into the garage at M-Sport on a bright spring day it looks pretty perfect to me. The red and gold colour scheme came about when Alan Mann was having trouble distinguishing his Cortinas from all the others (shells were only available in white or red). Nobody knows if there was any significance to the gold, but seeing it sparkling in the sunlight, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was purely for aesthetics.
There is a slight air of apprehension in the garage as I walk round the car, and the reason why becomes obvious when I discover that I will be just the second person to drive it. I won’t be the first Henry to get behind the wheel, however, because the man who has done all the set-up and testing is Henry Mann, son of Alan. Quietly spoken but friendly and funny (as well as an experienced historic racer) he is one of those people who quickly give you confidence that the car will somehow be right on the money.
After adjusting mentally to the perfect driving position, you flick on the red-covered master switch, followed by the fuel and ignition toggles on the little panel to the left of the wheel. Give the various whirring noises a moment, then it’s simply a case of pressing the small, black concaved start button.
Wow, it’s noisy. It’s easy to forget what a total lack of sound-deadening means if you haven’t been in a race car for a while, but the Twin Cam sounds like it’s right in the cabin with you, angry and aggressive like a quartet of hornets fighting in a metal drum. It has an aural magnitude you might not expect just from reading the 1.8-litre four-cylinder’s specs on paper.
As such, you need to remember not to be shy. Give it more revs, more noise than perhaps feels natural as you let in the weighty clutch. Positivity is something that should apply to all your inputs in fact, because there is obviously no power assistance for any of the controls, so you are totally connected. At just 795kg dry, you have a car that will respond instantly and with a lovely lack of inertia, so it feels light in its movements, yet at the same time there is also a lovely weightiness and tactility to the way you make it move.
An exploratory lap to get some heat into the fluids reveals a sweet shift in the four-speed Bullet ’box. The long lever and small top makes it look a little delicate, but there is no vagueness. A straight-cut ’box would be fractionally quicker and take more abuse, but I like the ease of synchro, and the simple H-pattern layout means there’s very little to think about.
The Twin Cam definitely likes revs, with 4000rpm feeling almost like the floor for sweet running, but it’s not peaky and has plenty of torque to lean on. Equally the red line at 8500rpm feels about right and, although there are tales of cars going higher in period, there isn’t a sense of frustration or an artificial cap. Indeed, something about the note and feel of the engine at around 8000rpm (where it makes its maximum 202bhp) makes it easy to know when to shift up without keeping half an eye on the tachometer.
What a sound, too. The induction bark of the four Weber-fed cylinders is genuinely one of my favourite soundtracks. It is gruffer and more prosaic than those with more pots to play with, but it’s got a musicality all its own and somehow feels friendly. Certainly none of the folk who wandered over from Dovenby Hall during the day complained about the decibels or the disturbance.
And I did put in quite a lot of laps during the day. Some because of the photography requirements, but plenty more just because I was enjoying myself. The trademark Escort balance is sometimes seen as almost too forgiving, too easy, but I love it and despite all the suspension changes this still feels like an Escort.
It’s running a bit firmer in ride than the original cars would have, but you can still lean into layers of resistance through corners, particularly at the rear. Chuck it into a lovely third-gear corner a little early and it naturally sits into its suspension on the outside at the back. Pick up the throttle as you pass the apex and you sense the extra energy, then ride the tyre up over the kerb at the exit and you feel the bulbous sidewall of the little Dunlops deform.
It’s obviously not got the brick-wall braking of a modern racing car and there is more of a squeeze in applying pressure to the pedal, but that suits me fine. Pushing hard in a couple of big braking areas, it feels a bit trickier to judge where the limit of the Dunlops is longitudinally rather than laterally, but there’s no scrappy locking, just a realisation that you’re going to sail a little deep into the corner. There is a fabulous, long, second-gear hairpin in the middle of the M-Sport test track that rises through its length, and the AMR68 feels perfect through this. You ride a left-hand kerb over a shallow crest with a slightly floaty feeling in third gear on the way in before braking deep and changing down.
The steering is weightier, the rim more resistant to turning than in other Escorts, but it means you have more grip to push against and there’s bags of feel from the front. And almost as soon as the nose moves towards the inside of the turn you feel the rear rotate behind you and the steering goes a little light. If you want the swing to stop, do nothing. If you want to maintain the angle or increase it, pick up the throttle and you’ll find you can easily balance the slide with steering and throttle all the way through the corner, with the off-camber profile on the outside of the exit egging you on to a final flourish of oversteer. Utter bliss.
It’s certainly something that would be interesting in a wheel-to-wheel scrap and there should be plenty of those if the owners of the 24 cars use them as intended. You can spec the 68 Edition as a perfectly period-correct replica, but I suspect most will choose to have a cage and the smattering of other modern safety equipment needed to get an FIA technical passport and make it eligible for historic racing. This will also allow them to be used in the races that Boreham Motorworks has planned and which will be included (along with factory set-up and support) in the price of around £300,000. Imagine the very successful 911 2.0L Cup, but for Escorts.
Yes, the inevitable initial instinct is that it seems like a lot of money for an Escort, and in some ways a BDA-equipped MST Mk1 (as featured in evo 319) looks good value by comparison. But, once again, this is not just any Escort, and I think that the official Blue Oval blessing, the rarity and the Alan Mann history all add quite a bit to the kudos and appeal.
The driving experience is certainly up there with the most memorable I’ve had for a while – and that bodes well for the other products that Boreham Motorworks has in the pipeline.
