Why is it that one particular past love affair might never totally fade from memory?
A highlight for me at the Unique Cars team’s end-of-year lunch just before Christmas was catching up with Uncle Phil and Higgo for the first time in a while. Phil’s new-found interest in Porsche 911s surprised me – I had him tagged as a rusted-on Boxster man. Then, while we were all putting the world to rights with earnest discussion – well, something like that – Higgo nudged me. Bursting out of his phone’s screen was an action shot of a bright red Mk I Twin-Cam Escort exiting a corner in anger. It grabbed my attention.
Higgo knew it would – he remembered me grinning like a loon in the office a while back, immediately after my first day out in a little Twin-Cam Henry in over 40 years.
I had ferried a car between Melbourne and the Dandenong Ranges for a photoshoot involving John Bowe putting a bunch of Euro/Brit hotties through their paces for a Unique Cars feature. I scored the keys to a mint Twin-Cam Escort, my sentimental favourite from my Ford Aus days during the muscle-car era.
Driving back from lunch, I began wondering why Escort Twin-Cams still press my buttons. There’s no doubt they were potent little performers in their day thanks to their Lotus Elise-derived powerplants and precise handling. On reflection, however, the Peugeot 205 GTI I had years later would have blown one into the weeds, and for that matter my wife’s current 2005 Toyota Corolla shopping trolley would give one a run for its money, in a straight line at least …
Here’s the closest I got to an answer: Prior to muscle cars, what most knockabout enthusiasts like me were actually doing was driving slow vehicles fast. The amount of blood, sweat and tears we put into eventually coaxing our affordable chariots over the Holy-Grail line – showing 100 miles-per-hour on the speedo – was huge.
As well the effort I devoted to enterprises like pulling off a sub-18-hours solo-drive from Melbourne to Brisbane (in a hotted-up ’56 FE Holden panel-van) was significant – achieved on the old mostly two-lane, bypass-free Hume and Pacific Highways that included creeping over the Murrumbidgee at Gundagai on a long and rickety plank bridge and using the Harwood Island ferry at Maclean to cross the Clarence. We were faster than our cars …
Then the apple cart was totally upended by the muscle-car era that offered us accessible cars that were way faster than us. Many of them would still be in third as the speedo surged contemptuously past the 100 mark. No sweat …
Very sweaty though was the prospect of doing justice to 300-plus horsepower and 1.5-odd tonnes of GT Falcon, GTS Monaro or R/T Charger if you attempted to muscle one competitively through a sequence of tight bends. That was a task for drivers with talents beyond those of everyday enthusiasts like us.
However the Twin-Cam Escort was different. Although it needed all four cogs to crack the ton, it pulled it off enthusiastically with more to come. While the exhaust and induction sound-track was no match for the volume of angry thunder out of a V8 GT Falcon, it was superbly entertaining. But here’s what really mattered: The Escort flattered the talent of anyone fortunate enough to have a go at punting one enthusiastically. The first time you got behind the wheel you felt right at home, and you soon felt you had been driving one forever. No shoving heavy gear levers or tugging heavy steering was required, just subtle control inputs that produced precise, immediate and predictable responses.
And it wasn’t all down to it weighing little more than half a GT Falcon. Its inherent balance, plus numerous refinements including a dollop of negative camber up front enabled any reasonably talented driver to pitch one into bends with justified confidence.
Significantly, while Twin-Cam Escorts were also in reality faster than us, they allowed us to believe the opposite. Therein, I suggest, lies some of its enduring appeal.
When you look at their values, it seems I’m not their only fan. In 2013 Morley wrote in Unique Cars: “If you can find an unmolested Twin-Cam now, you’ll pay big money, and we heard of one for sale recently at around $30,000 which, in 10 years’ time, will probably seem like a bargain.”
Spot on Dave – my eye-rolling reality check regarding Twin-Cam Escort values came a few years back when someone mentioned $75,000 …
Photography: Unique Cars archives