Epic fail: the MkV Ford Escort

When it landed in 1998, the original Ford Focus was a game changer: a quantum leap for family hatchbacks. But what made it such a smash hit? The seamless collaboration of Ford’s UK and German development teams? The deep engineering integrity? No and also no.

The real reason the first Focus was so good? Because the MkV Escort was so very bad. Arriving in 1990, Ford boasted it had spent a billion pounds on its development. Must have been some very fancy biscuits in the Dunton meeting rooms, because they sure as hell didn’t spend it on engineering the thing.

The styling was as underwhelming as the engines, the MkV inheriting the pensionable CVH units from the previous Escort. The gearshift was in dire need of a blue pill. The handling was floppier still, Ford ditching the independent rear suspension of the previous Escort in favour of a simpler torsion beam setup. Epic Fail briefly owned an early Nineties Escort MkV, and vividly recalls its ability to understeer catastrophically into the verge, often on sections of road that didn’t obviously contain a corner.

The MkV wasn’t just bad, it was unexpectedly bad. Through the Eighties, everything Ford pumped out sold in staggering numbers: the MkIV Escort was the world’s bestselling passenger car, and represented one in every eight new car sales in the UK. For a long time, it had seemed the Blue Oval could do no wrong. The MkV Escort comprehensively dispelled that theory.

Reaction to the MkV was so vehement that Ford fast-tracked a facelift after just a couple of years, ushering in marginally less geriatric styling and new Zetec engines. It wasn’t enough to save the Escort nameplate. But every cloud has its silver lining: from the manure heap that was the MkV Escort grew the lovely, fragrant Focus.