The backstory of how we ended up with this Escort;
A little over a year and a half ago, my buddy Kiefer and I started participating in some local Detroit Region SCCA RallyCrosses with his daily driver Protégé 5. The car was actually pretty competitive in the Stock FWD class, but it was pretty rusty and since it was Kiefer’s only form of transportation we figured it wouldn’t be wise to keep beating it to death in the dirt.
We had kicked around a couple different ideas for a dedicated RallyCross car, and one of the ones I had mentioned was the Escort GT. My reasoning was that they were cheap, light, durable, parts were plentiful, and the GT version was furnished with Mazda’s wonderful 1.8 DOHC BP engine. We’d made some half-hearted craigslist searches for cars, but never came across anything we were seriously interested in. That is until Kiefer went to one of our local pick & pull yards to find a less-rusty hood for his P5…
The particular pick & pull franchise has three different locations and all of them keep a couple complete cars sitting on the lot for purchase that are too nice to be crushed. On this particular day, Kiefer walked into the lot and was greeted by this abnormally clean example of an Escort GT.
The car looked complete and surprisingly didn’t have most its body panels missing (in SE Michigan that’s a very rare find). More importantly, it was an honest to goodness EGT with the all-important manual transmission. Kiefer gave me a call to let me know what he had found so I ambled down there to examine it more closely.
We were told that it had come in on a hook and that it needed an alternator and an engine mount. What the employees at the salvage yard didn’t tell us was that the alternator had been removed and that it was dangling behind the engine on top of the jackshaft. What they also didn’t tell us was that the front motor mount bracket was sheared in half. We gave the car a quick once-over and determined that the chassis was clean enough for RallyCross duty. It wasn’t a rusty pile, but it would definitely need some love down the road.
Thinking that this car might actually be worth putting some time and money into if we could get it running, we decided to return the next day with tools, a spare battery, and a lot of hope. Since it was in a salvage yard and Escorts are about as common as belly buttons in the pick & pulls around here, we figured it would be worth a shot to see if we could find a replacement alternator and the engine mount bracket we needed. After a few minutes of bumbling around we hit a gold-mine; another manual transmission EGT with a brand new remanufactured alternator on it!
We set to work tearing off anything we thought might be useful off the car and a little while later we had our new alternator, engine mount bracket, some nifty OE Escort mud flaps, and a couple other odds/ends. We took our treasures back to install them on the new car and immediately discovered why the alternator was sitting on top of the jack-shaft; there was not much room to drop it out of the car with the shaft still in the trans.
Not wanting to pop the shaft out, we decided that since the engine was already partially disconnected from the car, a little help from an engine crane could free up some space to get the alternator out. After a bit of juggling and grunting, Kiefer was successful in pulling the dead alternator out of the car, though he did get a bit stuck under the car. Luckily, I was able to grab him by the ankles and pull his 150 lb arse out from under it.
While he messed around getting the new alternator on, I got the new engine mount bracket installed and make sure that everything else on the powertrain side was good to go. The car seemed to have been reasonable well taken care of for most its life, but had recently fallen on hard times (I.e. the top end of the motor was actually pretty clean, but the oil that was in it was about as black as midnight in a coal mine). We must have been pretty entertaining to watch because half of the salvage yard employees and even some customers were watching us work on this thing.
With a new (to us) alternator installed, the motor properly mounted, and a fresh battery, we were ready to see if there was life on planet Escort. We got the keys, cranked the motor with the fuel injector relay pulled to make sure it built up oil pressure, and then crossed our fingers when we fired it up for real.
Success! The car fired right up, didn’t make any nasty noises, and actually ran quite well. We couldn’t take it on the road, but were able to take it around a part of the lot for a short test-pound. We determined that it stopped (eventually), steered, and well…worked remarkably like a car. We took it back to its spot, made the lot an offer, and after signing two checks totaling $1300 we had ourselves a RallyCross car. They didn’t even charge us for the parts we used to get the car running.
We couldn’t drive it home that day because it was a Sunday and the paperwork couldn’t be completed, so we came back the next day to drive it home. We knew the car wasn’t exactly 100%, but we figured it was good enough to make to 20 min drive home. I was the lucky one who got to drive it back.
The first thing I discovered about the car is that we hadn’t figured out was that the shift linkage was in pretty poor shape. This is very common with the BG platform Mazda’s/Ford’s as the linkage can rust out and, when it’s in really bad shape, drop through the floor. So finding gears in this thing was an experience. The next thing I figured out was that the blower motor wasn’t working. This was problematic for 2 reasons; one was that it was October in Michigan, so it was more than a bit chilly out. The other was that I had no front defroster, and the windshield was very foggy with only my body heat in the car. The last thing I figured out was that the brakes we a bit on the weak side. They stopped the car, but you had to apply a fair amount of pressure to get them to really grab.
Despite the car’s foibles, the journey home was actually pretty smooth. Once we got it there, we immediately set to work on improving what obviously needed attention. It got an oil/filter change, we swapped the transmission fluid, did some general cleanup, and started diagnosing some of the cars issues. Upon inspecting the HVAC system, we found that the bower motor resistor pack was completely fried. One trip to O’Reallys and $15 later (god bless econoboxes), we had a working blower motor again. We even discovered that the A/C worked!
All in all we were pretty satisfied with our purchase, but we were about to discover some interesting secrets hiding under the car’s somewhat sparkly exterior.
