This is a love story about a couple’s shared passion for comedic opera and a Sierra RS Cosworth.
It’s not often the music of Gilbert and Sullivan and Ford’s whale-tailed flying machine are mentioned in the same sentence, but they both played a pivotal role in bringing Phil and Mavis Holmes together.
It was 1996, and the pair, both members of the Ipswich Gilbert & Sullivan Society, were singing in a concert at Hintlesham, and got chatting.
Phil, who had bought his 1986 Cosworth eight years earlier, remembers: “We were just talking generally and I must have remarked about the car, and she said ‘you’ve got a Cosworth?!’
“It turns out she used to go out with a guy called Mad Adam who had a Cosworth, and she’d always wanted to have a go in another one. So I took it along to a concert and drove her home in it, and didn’t leave very early!”
“It was brilliant”
Mavis, the more sentimental when it comes to cars, recalls her reaction at the time: “I thought it was brilliant, it was the same colour, moonstone blue.
“He said ‘I’ll give you a ride in it’ and I’ve been riding in it ever since! I just loved it, and I’m likely to be the one that says you can’t sell it.”
Phil says Mavis often jokes that the car is “the reason we’re still together – don’t you sell that”.
By the time the couple were married in July 1997, Phil had a company car – a Ford Escort RS2000 – but it was the Sierra that took them on a honeymoon touring their favourite places in the UK.
“We went to places that were important to us,” says Phil, in a car that was equally important.
Starting in Wasdale in the Lake District, fondly remembered from Phil’s university years, they headed to Islay in the Hebrides – the island responsible for Phil’s favourite whisky – and then on to Skye, an island close to Mavis’s heart.
“One of the waiters was obsessed with the Cosworth,” remembers Phil. “I said ‘I’ll take you out in it’. A couple of sheep wandered into the middle of the road and I had to stand on the anchors.”
The final stop on the way home to Suffolk was the Yorkshire Moors – Mavis had previously lived in York – including a trip to Goathland where the TV drama Heartbeat was filmed.
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Iconic fast Ford
Arguably the most iconic fast Ford ever, the wild-looking Cosworth was the result of two years of development, a collaboration between Ford’s motorsport department and the engine builders with a rich history of engineering race-winning powerplants.
Ford’s relationship with Cosworth dates back to the 1960s, when the US giant funded the development of a 3-litre V8 for the Lotus F1 car, the resulting DFV engine winning 155 Grand Prix races over a decade.
Unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1985, the beating heart of the new car was Cosworth’s 2-litre, four-cylinder unit developed from the existing T88 Pinto unit.
An aluminium head was designed to fit the Pinto block, with two belt-driven cams operating 16 valves, and a Garrett AiResearch T3 married to an intercooler boosting power to 201bhp, enough to propel the car to 60mph in just over six seconds and hit a top speed of 150mph.
No wonder Autocar called it “an extraordinary vehicle” and an “automotive benchmark”, blistering performance (for the time) allied to the existing practicality of the Sierra design.
Homologation special
A production run of 5,000 was required for competition homologation purposes.
When Phil traded in his disappointing XR4x4 for a two-year-old Cosworth, he already had a long history of owning and rallying Fords, some quicker than others.
After writing off his first car, a Morris 1000, while studying on a one-year Post Office (PO) training course, he took on his brother’s mark I Cortina.
“It had mechanical problems and he didn’t want to be bothered to fix it, so I took it on and fixed it,” he says, the 1200cc engine eventually replaced by a 1500cc unit from a mark II.
It didn’t last too long, however, suffering a broken crankshaft on a visit to Phil’s friend Paul Collins, who he met on the PO course and would later team up with in road rallying events.
“The engine started making a noise like the exhaust had dropped off,” he says. “I drove another 50 miles to Southampton University, took the engine out, took the bed out of someone’s ground floor halls of residence and stripped it in the halls flat. I dumped the engine in the boot and left it at the halls, and someone had to arrange for it to be picked up for scrap.”
A mark I Capri with a 1600cc Crossflow engine followed, the car that got Phil into the burgeoning road rallying scene, amateur motorsport open to anyone with a driving licence.
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Sharing rally duties
After returning from Manchester University with a physics degree, Phil joined Paul working for the PO at Martlesham Heath, near Ipswich, the pair sharing a house in the town and also sharing rally duties in the Capri from the late 1970s.
In theory, road rallies, held at night, were subject to a maximum average speed of 30mph between control points but, as Phil points out, the reality was very different given the navigational difficulties.
“On one rally up near Thetford we averaged 82mph on one section and still lost time!” he says.
The dangers became all too clear when Phil was seriously injured in a rally in Suffolk in 1980.
“We’d entered a rally, and I’d ordered a new exhaust for the Capri but it was delivered for the wrong sort of car and didn’t fit,” he says. “Paul had an Avenger Estate, so he drove that instead, and I navigated.”
Whereas the Capri was prepared for rallying, with a twin choke Weber carb, a roll cage, spot lights and racing harnesses, the Avenger was a bog standard road car.
“We hit a patch of ice, fish-tailed down the road, pitched into a deep ditch and landed against a tree, which crushed the roof,” recalls Phil, his head taking a battering in the process.
“Thought I was dead”
“I was knocked out and Paul thought I was possibly dead. He released my seatbelt and I fell out, hit the water and came to.
“There was a house nearby but it was the middle of the night and we didn’t want to disturb them, so we walked a mile and half back to the previous control, soaking wet and in sub zero temperatures.
“It turned out the householder we were trying to avoid disturbing had been awake, had heard this enormous smashing sound and called the fire service. They hauled the car out of the ditch, but saw no-one in it and dropped it back in again!
“The ambulance drove around and found us at the control point, and I spent a week in hospital.”
The Capri bit the dust on a later rally, Phil hitting a car doing a three-point turn just after a bend amidships, paving the way for a Lotus-powered mark I Escort Twin Cam.
“We rallied in that for quite a long time, and Paul and I won the Noreaster Rally with it,” says Phil, before the road rally regulations changed, including a bar on twin cams, in the face of protests from the police and safety campaigners.
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Out of control
“It got seriously out of control really. People were running nearly full group 4 cars, especially in Wales.”
In a series of high-publicised fact-finding episodes, police revealed that some cars had been clocked at speeds of more than 120mph and, in one case, 150mph on country lanes.
“The numbers dropped considerably, and I did a few stage rallies with the Escort before I rolled it into a ditch,” says Phil. “I had every intention of rebuilding it but I didn’t and it rusted away in Paul’s garage for quite a long time.”
Phil continued rallying “in a less serious way”, regularly taking part in the Curtis Bennett Rally in Wales, buying an old car for the purpose, including an Escort Popular Plus, a Citroen GS (“not the world’s most practical rally car”) and a Cortina mark III estate in which he won the touring car class.
In 1985, Phil bought a Capri 2.8iS, a “fantastic car, but I just thought that there was higher tech stuff that I could get”, he says.
It was part exchanged the following year for the Sierra XR4x4, which turned out to be a disappointment.
“It was not a very nice car really, a Friday afternoon car,” says Phil. “The engine was not great and the suspension was too soft for my liking.”
So on November 26, 1988 Phil made the 50-mile trip to Brundall Motor Company, a Ford dealer in Norfolk long since replaced by a Co-Op.
“I started thinking a second hand Cosworth might be nice, went to Brundall to see what they had and ended up buying this one,” he says, trading in the XR4x4 and paying £15,995 in total.
Phil used the car, originally registered in North Shields, as his daily driver until the company RS2000 came along a few years later.
“It was a lot tauter than the XR4x4, not as wallowy and had a lot more power,” he says. “The biggest difficulty was persuading my then girlfriend she could still see out of the rear window!”
Magnet for joy riders
Unfortunately, thanks to a rudimentary security system that was purely standard Sierra, combined with the performance and desirability of the Cossie, it became a magnet for joy riders.
“I was slightly paranoid at times about it getting nicked,” says Phil, who had a narrow escape when visiting his girlfriend’s brother in Blackburn.
“We were woken up by people across the road who said they’d just stopped someone from stealing it.
“They’d chiselled through the door skin to get the lock out, and the neighbours heard them banging a steel pick into the steering lock to get the steering lock off. They interrupted them and they ran off, but I needed a new door skin.”
The Cosworth engine has proved bulletproof throughout its 75,000 miles, the only problem outside routine maintenance a misbehaving throttle sensor replaced for £150.
Having met and married Mavis, the couple found themselves with more vehicles than they needed, and the Cosworth ended up barely turning a wheel for 10 years from 2005.
“There’s a limit to how many cars you actually need,” says Phil. “Mavis had got a Subaru, I had got a company car and a motorbike.
“There needed to be a lot of shuffling them around on the drive just to get it out for a short trip for the sake of it, and I just got out of the habit.
Barely driven
“Then once you’ve not used it for two or three years, it’s obviously going to be a lot of trouble to use it anyway. It was barely driven between September 2005 and January 2015.”
The Cosworth spent part of the time standing in a friend’s field as a house extension put the garage out of action for about a year.
“It got a fair amount of abuse, and grew algae standing in the field,” adds Phil, who graduated to chief technology officer at BT Technologies (formerly the Post Office) before moving to Motorola and retiring in 2007.
For the first eight years of his retirement, Phil was consumed by other passions, including amateur wildlife photography, travel, music, and working with the Citizens Advice Bureau.
But in 2015, something stirred in Phil, and the Cossie was finally recommissioned for the road.
“I remember just thinking ‘oh my god, I’m really going to have to get the Cosworth back on the road, it’s stupid having it just sitting there’, and just decided I would,” he says.
“I got a local garage in Felixstowe to come up with a trailer and a big starter jobby, cranked it over and it started. It moved so the discs weren’t rusted, and I drove it on the trailer, they gave it a full service, drained the old petrol and put fresh in.
“It was running on three cylinders for a bit, but from then on it’s always started and run quite reasonably.”
Remarkably original
Apart from that replacement door skin, the Cosworth is remarkably original, an aftermarket stainless steel exhaust the only non-standard part, and only blemished by one tiny dent where Phil dropped his push bike on it.
Kept off the road in the winter, Phil, now 63, plans to take the Cossie on one major road trip each summer, with any plans to sell the car he’s owned for more than 30 years very much on hold.
“I plan to keep it, put a tankful of petrol in it, and organise an expedition to use up that tankful,” he says, last summer taking the car to Brighton with a friend and his McLaren.
Despite his friend driving an up-to-the-minute supercar, it was the Ford that grabbed the attention.
“I found secure parking in Brighton for the Cosworth and the McLaren,” says Phil. “The guy who ran the parking said ‘McLaren, anything else?’ When I said Sierra Cosworth, he said ‘wow, you’ve got a Sierra Cosworth?!’
“And when we were coming back from Brighton someone driving a really old Toyota leaned out of his window and went ‘yay’.
“I would say that if you came up behind someone on a dual carriageway sitting in the outside lane they would move over a lot more easily for the Cosworth than any other car I’ve driven.”
Relatively low mileage
The value of fast Fords has rocketed over the past decade, and Phil wouldn’t have trouble finding a buyer given its originality and relatively low mileage.
“If I had been driving it as much as in the early days it would have about 180,000 miles on it and it might be difficult to shift,” he says.
“I’ve more recently been interested in its value, just out of scientific interest. I look at auctions and there was a really dusty, dirty looking barn find sold at Anglia Auctions for £44,000.”
With no children to pass the car on to, Phil admits there will come a time when he has to start thinking about selling a car that holds so many memories.
“I will have to divest myself of my worldly goods at some point, but it’s not one of the plans yet,” he adds.
In any case, he’d have to get past Mavis first.
“Mavis is more attached to it than I am,” he says. “It means something to me, but it’s not a fundamental part of my being.
“She started her driving in a Beetle and will quite often say ‘I loved that little Beetle’. That’s never a phrase you would hear from me about a car.
“I’m more likely to say ‘oh well, that’s another one written off, drop the keys down the drain and go and find something else’.”
Maybe he doth protest too much? After all, that moonstone blue Cossie was the matchmaker that brought he and Mavis together…
