'The R500 era was best': why drivers loved Ford's 200mph touring car

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The choice of two iconic, bewinged Sierra Cosworth RS500s for Scalextric’s new touring car set wasn’t exactly a tough one. Has there ever been a better-loved or more dramatic tin-top racer than the Group A beast that ruled the British Touring Car Championship with an iron-clad dominance through the late 1980s?

Not only was the RS500 a great racing car, it was hugely successful too, winning an astonishing 84.6% of the races it entered. No other car scored an outright win in the BTCC for three years during its reign. The RS500 was so fast that for a while the championship took on the guise of a one-make series – at least at the sharp end of the grid, with the Duckhams car driven by Karl Jones and the Fina version raced by Gerrit van Kouwen featured in the Scalextric set just two of the charismatically-liveried versions to grace the UK’s tracks.

On seven occasions the RS500 locked out the top 10 race positions in the BTCC, and far beyond our national series it took significant scalps around the world too. RS500s won the Bathurst 1000 (on the road) in three of four attempts. And in the one-off World Touring Car Championship of 1987, it won four out of the six races it entered, proving its credentials against the world’s very best. It was comprehensively dominant.

So what made the RS500 so iconic? Let’s start with the obvious…

There were echoes of a Porsche 911 whale tail in that massive hatchback spoiler, which was designed to generate significant downforce to help glue the RS500’s rear slicks to the track. It was described in period as “functional”, but didn’t exactly prevent the cars sliding around. “It was fun to drive, with its massive excess of horsepower over grip,” says RS500 master preparer/driver Andy Rouse, “and its habit of leaving snaking black marks on the track when you accelerated out of slower corners.”

Inside, the cabins were a cocktail of thoroughbred competition kit and standard odds and sods from the Ford parts bin. Bodyshells were seam-welded to optimise stiffness, but the regulations dictated that the rear hatch had to be operational and could not be welded shut to make the car more rigid.

The result was a car that drivers simply loved, almost as much as the fans that lapped up the racing action…

For Rouse, the RS500 days were the best of times as he set the standard for car build and preparation. “We made something like 28 RS500s and they went all over the world,” he says. “We built more than 100 engines too and made and sent parts to Japan and Australia. Yes, the RS500 era was the best. We went all over the world racing cars at someone else’s expense, I had a factory employing 20 to 30 people and life was good, if hectic. We also did a limited edition road car at the same time as a spin-off from the racing, which worked well too.”

In 1990, Robb Gravett sensationally beat Rouse not only to the BTCC’s Class A title but also the overall crown in an under-financed, often plain white RS500 run by Mike Smith’s Trakstar team. Like his rival, it’s a time and a car that Gravett looks back on fondly.

“I was very fortunate to be racing at that time in those cars,” he says. “The closest thing to them is the Supercar V8s in Australia, but they were still not going as fast down the Conrod Straight at Bathurst. They were doing 185mph and we were doing 189mph.

“When I raced at Fuji, on my qualifying lap on ‘quallie’ tyres we touched 200mph on the straight. In a touring car.”

Replicating such antics is precisely why Scalextric’s Super Sierra Retro Race Set is bound to be a sure-fire hit with slot car racing enthusiasts.

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