Someone's Building New Ford Escorts for £300,000 Because The World's Gone Mad. A company called Boreham Motorworks has just announced they're building brand new Ford Escorts. Now, normally this wouldn't be particularly exciting news - it's a bit like announcing you're going to start making black-and-white televisions again. Except there's a twist: they want £300,000 for each one. Let that sink in for a moment. That's Ferrari F8 money for something that originally cost about the same as a decent kitchen. But before you start wondering if everyone at Boreham has been drinking industrial-strength coffee, there's actually more to this story than meets the eye. You see, this isn't just another restomod where someone's taken an old car and stuffed it full of modern bits while charging oligarch money for the privilege. No, this is actually a proper, ground-up new car, complete with a continuation chassis number from where Ford left off when they shut down Advanced Vehicle Operations in Essex back in 1975. It's like finding the lost final chapter of a book and deciding to write a whole new sequel. The technical details are properly serious too. You can have it with either a 180 horsepower fuel-injected Twin Cam 1845cc engine, which in a car this light is plenty, or - and this is where it gets properly mad - a 2.1-liter four-cylinder that revs to 10,000 rpm and produces 292 horsepower. That's more revs than an F1 car from the era when this Escort was originally around, in something that weighs about as much as your garden shed. They've also done all the things you'd hope they'd do with £300,000 of your money. The chassis has been strengthened more thoroughly than a boxer's jaw, there's proper coilover suspension, and a limited-slip differential to help you maintain some semblance of control when all that power tries to escape through the rear wheels. The 292hp version comes with a 5-speed dog-leg gearbox, which is the sort of thing that racing drivers love and normal people find about as user-friendly as an angry wasp. But then again, if you're spending this much on an Escort, you're probably not too concerned about popping to Tesco in it. They're only building 150 of them, which means this might actually be rarer than most modern supercars. It's certainly more exclusive than a Ferrari F8 or a McLaren 720S, though trying to explain to your neighbors why your classic Ford cost as much as their house might be a bit awkward. But here's the thing - in a world where every supercar seems to be going hybrid or electric, where everything has more computing power than NASA circa 1969, there's something deeply appealing about a car that's essentially just a very, very well-engineered version of a 1960s icon. No driver aids, no stability control, just you, a dog-leg gearbox, and an engine that revs to the sort of numbers that would make most modern cars explode. Is it worth £300,000? Well, that depends entirely on how much you value the experience of driving something that's both brand new and completely old-school at the same time. Well, I'm off to check if I can remortgage my house. Not for the car - just for the deposit.
