The GT70 was supposed to be Ford’s first mid-engined rally contender, to be joined by 500 homologation road cars, but a plethora of problems saw it stall at the testing phase -
. The key to success, the two men reasoned, was weight over the driving wheels, so Turner commissioned Len Bailey, one of the people who’d made the GT40 a race winner, to create a compact, agile mid-engined rally car using as many existing Ford parts as possible.
In just a few months a pair of prototypes had been built, the second of which was unveiled at the Brussels motor show in January 1971. Called GT70 the new car was built around a steel frame clothed in fibreglass panels, under which were suspension bits from the Taunus and Cortina, brakes from the Zephyr, the ZF gearbox from the GT40, and the 2.6-litre fuel-injected V6 from the Capri RS2600. The plan was to sell at least 500 road-going versions.
Two, actually, because the GT70 had an even bigger problem: it wasn’t very good. Testing proved that the structure simply wasn’t stiff enough, which did the handling no favours. On top of that, the interior was cramped and hot, the engine access was poor, and star driver Clark was so dismissive of this awkward and uncooperative machine that he compared it to a camel.
Nor did the GT70 have great prospects as a road car, not once Ford’s accountants had estimated that the complexities of low-volume build would mean a showroom price of £5000 at a time when a Jaguar E-type V12 was a little over £3000 and didn’t come with Cortina suspension. As the strikes of the early ’70s created a cashflow headache, the GT70 was an obvious place for Ford to save money and the project was culled in early 1973.
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