One

One half of a pair of broadly similar Escorts (the other being a ‘sister’ build, Project Kuma), Project One drew upon our prior experience with these cars. As anyone who’s followed our progress in this regard for any length of time will attest, that experience includes the Escort we built for Gordon Murray. That car, probably our most storied creation, featured an independent rear suspension arrangement of Nat’s own design, Cosworth Duratec power, and a host of custom, understated modifications—many of which are not immediately obvious or easy to discern.

Project One and its sister car were by no means straight copies of the Murray Escort, however. Whereas the car we built for the ‘father’ of the McLaren F1 was restrained to the point of stealth, Project One was always intended to be more of a statement, albeit one still visually grounded in the era in which it was conceived: the 1960s. As such, visual alterations such as widened arches and girthier wheels were always part of the plan, as was a custom paint finish. In short, there was never any discussion about Project One wearing anything as understated or traditional as the ‘Old English White’ found on the Murray Escort.

Both Project One and its sister build, Project Kuma, have evolved around similar—but by no means identical—specifications. For instance, both make use of identically specified Sherwood Engines-built Cosworth BDGs, each mated to manual gearboxes sourced from the NC-shape Mazda MX-5. This setup (first attempted, then refined on the Murray build) has proven both immensely durable and ideally suited to the character of the cars themselves; ‘snickety’ and rewarding to use, yet never tiresome, even in traffic.

Also central to our experience building a car for the F1 legend was the suspension. The rear now employs a similar setup to the one Nat first conceived and fabricated for the Murray Escort. In effect, it is an inclined Chapman strut–type arrangement (as first seen on the original Lotus Elan), with a re-engineered rear end that makes use of readily available Ford and Land Rover components (Mondeo and Freelander, respectively). The result is a car with entertaining, readily exploitable handling characteristics, perfectly suited to the UK’s pockmarked, patched, and wholly unpredictable road surfaces.

Both Project One and Project Kuma emphasise time-honoured Mk1 Escort styling flourishes, albeit with distinctly different finishes reflecting their divergent paint schemes. Whether you prefer Project One’s moody, menacing blue-and-bronze palette or Kuma’s more playful white-with-pinstripe look is entirely down to personal taste; both have their supporters within Retropower.

Paint aside, both builds feature the sort of function-led modifications we specialise in. The most obvious (and certainly the most time-consuming) are the custom wheel arches, all four corners having been painstakingly formed by Tom and Sam, former Retropower tin-bashing legends, over the course of several weeks. To achieve this, we commissioned a quartet of hammer-form tools specifically for these two cars, each machined from solid high-density epoxy tooling board. These tools allowed us to craft bespoke front and rear arches, large enough to accommodate the widened wheels both cars run, while still retaining a purposeful appearance distinct from the more commonly seen ‘forest’ or ‘tarmac’ Escort arches.