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Ford almighty
© Steve SaxtyA few years ago, former Ford product designer Steve Saxty published a brilliant book called Secret Fords. It told the stories of the Blue Oval’s lesser-known European prototypes, one-offs and cancelled cars from the 1970s and 1980s. Now Saxty is back with Secret Fords Volume Two, which focuses on the nineties and noughties – including hundreds of fascinating photos, some of which we reveal here. Join us for a look inside Ford’s secret world.
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Ford GN34 supercar
© Steve SaxtyThe Ford vs. Ferrari battles at Le Mans in the 1960s might have returned on the road in the 1990s if this car had been built. Ford saw that Porsche and Ferrari were making serious money and wanted a piece of the action. However, the need to fund the first-generation Explorer won out and this stunning car went nowhere. It was left to Honda to shake up the establishment with the NSX, but the GN34, designed in Italy and built in France with a Ford-Yamaha engine, British chassis and German ZF gearbox, could have challenged the best.
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Cancelled Ford Escort
© Steve SaxtyThis unusual-looking car was the last Escort – but the world never saw it until now. The Escort of the early nineties was derided by the press and shunned by customers. This was a radically fresh interpretation, but it sat on the platform of the old car. The engineers and designers took a long hard look at it, then decided they needed more height for passengers and a new chassis. The result was a new Focus and Ford rebuilding its reputation.
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Ford Scorpio Facelift
© Steve SaxtyThe guppy-mouthed Scorpio facelift of the mid-1990s was derided by many, but the story behind it is more fascinating than the car itself. Ford’s new European design boss wanted to make something shockingly different with Ford’s facelifted flagship. This was Plan B, an attractive but far more conventional design. He got what he wanted when the grinning Plan A Scorpio was launched – and everyone was shocked. But not in a good way.
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Ford Focus Estate
© Steve SaxtyThe Ford Focus hatchback was a startlingly fresh design. Its creators wanted the estate version to be equally different and this was one of the options. It meets the brief of looking unusual, but that’s not what estate car buyers wanted. Instead, they were more interested in carrying dogs, kids and washing machines. Thankfully, this strange looking Focus was discarded in favour of a more conventionally styled estate.
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Ford Focus RS
© Steve SaxtyThe Focus RS was developed in secret by a small team of enthusiasts, working offsite away from the rest of Ford. This is the final sign-off model – a metal-bodied 1.6 CLX covered in clay and paint to look like the real thing. Ford always designs cars in silver as a neutral colour, but the production Focus RS was only made in blue. So this car was painted a different colour on each side for management to get a feel for how the final car would look.
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Four-door Ford Ka
© Steve SaxtyFord was so excited by the reception to the original Ka that it began planning a full range of models, not unlike the BMW Mini. Wild-looking estate Kas and more were mocked-up, but the strangest must be this Ka saloon with rear-hinged doors like a Rolls-Royce. The range of Kas only expanded to the StreetKa convertible and the world never saw this four-door concept.
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Ghia Alpe
© Steve SaxtyBack in the nineties, long before SUVs took over, we had so-called ‘soft-roaders’. This was the vision of Ford’s Italian studio – Ghia in Turin – to take on the Land Rover Freelander and Toyota RAV4. The brief called for ‘JCB toughness’, so the obvious colour choice was bright yellow. Sadly, when it was briefly unveiled as the Ghia Alpe in dark metallic green, it had lost all its digger-like toughness and just looked like ex-Army surplus.
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The Ford Puma’s big sister
© Steve SaxtyFord really struggled to find a shape it liked for the 1990s Escort replacement. This was an abandoned option – an attractive four-door saloon that looks like a grown-up Puma. But the designers wanted to move on in the late nineties, and this slippery-looking car was too generic. It therefore went no further, as the designers sharpened their pencils and drew the crisp-cut Focus.
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Ford’s Mercedes-Benz
© Steve SaxtyFord designer Gert Hohenester had a love for upmarket German cars. This was his dream gig, to design a Scorpio replacement based on the Mondeo. And it’s an attractive-looking luxury car – in a greatest-hits sort of way. The problem was that stretching the Mondeo so much would have cost almost as much as a new car, yet still be a Mondeo underneath. Instead, Ford bosses selected the little-loved Cougar coupe, and the long line of Zodiac, Granada and Scorpio was extinguished.
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Ford Mondeo alternative
© Steve SaxtyThe Mondeo took an astonishing six years to design. Delays came about because the American side of Ford wanted its own version and changed its mind at the last minute. The key was to get the four-door right and spin the hatchback off from it. This was the runner-up design; a punchy-looking four-door that has a distinctly BMW stance. That was too exotic for the Americans, so a safer-looking alternative went down the production line.
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Secret Fords
© Steve SaxtyThere is plenty more where these came from. Steve Saxty’s book, Secret Fords Volume Two, contains nearly 350 pages of never-seen-before cars. Get your copy at www.stevesaxty.com.