It
may have had a difficult birth, lacked development, and ultimately failed on
the rally stage, but the GT70 is a wonderful, exciting oddity with a great tale
to tell.
Ford
GT70
On
the way back 1970 Monte Carlo rally, when Boreham’s team had been thrashed by
Alpine-Renault and Porsche, Stuart Turner and Roger Clark invented the GT70. “I
knew that we needed a special car,” Stuart Turner later recalled, “but I didn’t
know where we were going to get the money, or how we were going to make the
cars”. Although the other cars which dominated rallying — Porsche 911,
Alpine-Renault and Lancia Fulvia — were different in detail, they all shared
the ‘engine over driven wheels’ layout. Turner, ex-BMC rally boss, knew all
about that layout.
Turner,
however, wanted a new Ford to be an ultra-powerful rally winner, so because
they were proposing an ideal car, he and Clark settled on a mid-engined
machine. When Turner got back to Boreham, the lobbying began, and before long
that powerful character, Walter Hayes, approved the building of six prototypes.
Approval
came quickly, and what was known as the GT70 was designed by Len Bailey. Len
had worked on the GT40 and Wyer’s Mirages. His track record included the Alan
Mann Escorts and the F3L, and he was a more sophisticated level of designer.
For world-class rallying, the new car had to be compact and strong. Working
totally alone, Bailey designed a new coupe, with just rallying in mind. With a
ground clearance of 6 inches it was really too large and too heavy for racing.
Henry
Ford II saw the original silver prototype first, and at the end of 1970 it was
an open secret in the rallying world. The V6-engined car was finally unveiled
at the Brussels Show in January 1971, where Ford suggested that 500 would be
built to secure Group 3 homologation. Turner and Timo Makinen then drove the
prototype to spectate on the Monte Carlo rally, which caused the crowds to go
wild.
Engine
swap
Ford
GT70 engine
Bailey
had been told to provide space for every possible Ford engine, but the
still-new 16-valve BDA unit was an obvious choice. The car had a
simple-to-build, steel platform chassis, with the engine behind the seats,
driving the rear wheels through a ZF 5DS25 gearbox. Cortina Mk3-based front
suspension, disc brakes, and steering were all used, allied to a racing-type
wishbone rear suspension. The choice of a steel tub was for rough rally
strength, and the body skin panels were in glass fibre.
The
styling and the shape of the car was pure Bailey, and Bob Howe confirmed that
wind-tunnel was only used after it had been finalized. The interior was
cramped, really too small for a potential rally car where helmets, maps,
jackets and other bits have to be carried: engine bay serviceability was poor.
Experience soon showed that the cockpit also got very hot when the engine was
being worked hard! The original fascia layout was not a success, and would
change considerably in the next two years.
Farmed
out
After
Bailey had designed it, how could prototypes be built? Boreham did not have the
technology to tackle the job. Accordingly, Ford chose an enterprising
individual who was already doing a lot of sheet metalwork for Boreham, Maurice
Gomm of Fairoaks, and it helped that Bailey was actually working from Fairoaks
at the time. Bizarrely, the bodywork clay model was completed in another Gomm
factory in Hastings, on the third floor of a derelict Victorian tenement. To
get it out, a window had to be removed, the whole car being slid down a ladder
to get it to a truck.
Ford
GT70 on road
