When Ford turned to Andy Rouse to spearhead its British Touring Car Championship ambitions in the 1990s, a return to the glory days of the RS500 seemed on the cards. It wasn’t to be, thanks to budget cuts, politics and sheer bad luck. But what it did take was two victories in the Super Touring category’s World Cup with Paul Radisich…

Rouse had started the Super Touring era with Toyotas, but that contract ran out at the end of 1992. “They moved to TOM’S,” he recalls. “Then Ford came to us with a late proposal to run the Mondeo in 1993.” Rouse would pilot one car, while the unproven New Zealander Radisich took the other slot. Radisich’s involvement came about via his friend Alan Gow, who was running the BTCC from Andy Rouse Engineering’s offices, and had worked for Rouse. “When the opportunity arose, it was like winning the lotto,” reckons Radisich.

The Mondeo would present Radisich with a new challenge – front-wheel drive; but that wasn’t the original plan, since Rouse had intended to run the rear-drive version. “The first RWD racing cars were too heavy so we convinced Ford to produce 30 lightweight bodies,” Rouse explains. “We changed to FWD, and with a Cosworth engine we became competitive – but it was already mid-season.”

The cars debuted at Pembrey, the eighth round of the 1993 BTCC. “That was the first time I’d raced a front-wheel-drive car,” says Radisich. “Other than the understeer and having to control your throttle, it wasn’t a big transition at all.”

Radisich would take three wins over 1993, ending up third in the championship. A key part of this was his flamboyant approach to riding the kerbs: “With a sequential gearbox and front-wheel drive, I found it better to balance the car with left-foot braking. I also shortened the track down as much as I could. I’d utilise every bit of the outside of the track as much as the inside, and the car took it. I’d be black-flagged every lap today!”

The car needed to be strong because of its heavy V6. “You could use any engine from the manufacturer of the car you were racing – the Mazda V6 was used in the Ford Probe,” points out Rouse. “The Mondeo engines weren’t high-performance enough.”

Cosworth couldn’t start on engine development until later in the season, meaning Rouse’s team built two engines in-house. At its peak, the 1993 car was delivering a competitive 295bhp, but the extra cylinders would become a technical hindrance. “When all the other cars [typically four cylinders] were being redesigned with the engine pushed right back into the bulkhead for better weight distribution, we couldn’t do that,” says Rouse.

A shift from Dunlop rubber to Michelin also played a part in late-season success. “At Brands Hatch I asked Andy if we should try the Michelins and we were instantly three or four tenths quicker,” says Radisich. The decision to switch was taken overnight: “Brands Hatch was the first race I won for Ford, and the first win for the Mondeo.”

Radisich was peaking in time for the 1993 FIA Touring Car Challenge, which brought 43 of the world’s best together at Monza for a two-race aggregate shot at international glory. It’s an event Rouse looks back on with pride. “We were not one of the highest-funded teams, and were up against factory Alfas and BMWs – we were as good if not better than them,” he opines.

While Rouse qualified ninth, Radisich landed pole: “I’d never been to Monza before. I loved the chicanes – and the car enjoyed them too. The tyres, car, weather, it all just came together in qualifying. We had a fast car, I was on the top of my game, and if you have those two things then you know you can do it.”

A huge section of the grid, including Rouse, were taken out in first-lap incidents. Radisich won the restarted race at a canter, despite carrying an injury. “I’d pulled a muscle in my forearm, and that was giving me grief more than anything else – but when I was out there it disappeared,” he states. The second race was much closer, with Nicola Larini’s Alfa Romeo just 0.6sec behind come the chequered flag. “Maybe I backed off on the last lap – I thought it was more than that,” laughs Radisich. “It was a tremendous race to win, and it put me on the map as a touring car driver.”

“I’d never been to Monza. I loved the chicanes – and the car did too”

The luck would turn over the winter of 1993-94. Despite the Blue Oval razzmatazz, and the expensive placement of Nigel Mansell in the car for the infamous TOCA Shootout, Ford’s financial commitment wasn’t where it needed to be. “Our 1994 engines were built by Cosworth’s road car department, not the racing side, so we took a step backwards – we had around 290bhp, but everyone else was past 300bhp,” reflects Rouse. “We had our own engine dyno, so we knew what we were getting from Cosworth.” Radisich’s positivity had evaporated by February, following a race in South Africa: “I called Andy and said we’re in a bit of strife – the Cavalier was so strong. Their tyre longevity was very good.”

In the end it was Alfa Romeo, not Vauxhall, that would emerge with 1994 BTCC glory, though not without controversy, which would open the door to aerodynamics entering Super Touring. However, that year’s champion Gabriele Tarquini has said that the Alfa 155’s real advantage was its front differential – something pioneered on Rouse’s Toyota Carinas. “We were the first to use a viscous diff, which was one of the reasons it was so quick,” Rouse says. Research would continue, leading to ARE pioneering a ‘combination diff’ – essentially a plated and viscous front differential all in one: “We took the idea to Xtrac, but Ford wouldn’t pay for it, so all the other teams ended up with our combination diff.”

For Radisich, it was a frustrating season: “When it came to the crunch we had too many reliability issues.” Engineer Alan Strachan adds that any extra power found by Cosworth didn’t improve things. “The more power, the quicker the car wore its front tyres out,” he recalls.

“I called Andy and said we’re in a bit of strife – the Cavalier was so strong”

That red flag was a nightmare for the other side of the ARE garage. “Memories of the 1994 World Cup?” Strachan ponders. “Carnage. Robb Gravett in our test car got taken out early on.” As it turned out, that was by Philippe Gache in an ARE-supplied Mondeo…

In many ways this bruising encounter was a portent for what would come in 1995. After the aerodynamics dramas of 1994, the British series permitted aerodynamic aids. Given Ford’s vast empire of motor sport knowledge, you might have thought this would help the ARE team. “We convinced Ford to bring over an aerodynamicist from NASCAR,” Rouse remembers. “He didn’t know any more about aerodynamics than we did.”

Ford was unwilling to invest in much wind tunnel time, so Rouse decided to take his own route, which worked out better. But Cosworth had returned BTCC engine development to its road car division. “A lot of emphasis was put on the aero package and there was a lot of optimism that it would help us a lot – but it didn’t,” says Radisich.

“At the end of 1994, we were thinking that the engine’s weight was a bit of an issue, and 1995 continued to prove that,” adds Strachan. “I had looked at canting over the V6 engine to try and push it further back, to try to get more weight behind the wheels. Ford was adamant that it wanted to run the V6 and not a four-cylinder – that was the start of the slippery slope.”

Kelvin Burt had joined the team after a one-off appearance at Silverstone in late 1994. That first experience was a shock to the system – like Radisich, it was the first time he’d raced an FWD car. “I thought there was something wrong with it – it was so unstable through fast corners,” Burt relates. “That’s not a slight on Andy’s car – all FWD touring cars were like that. You have to make it almost want to swap ends in the fast stuff if you want a neutral car in the slow corners. If you make it stick in the fast corners, you have massive understeer in all the medium and slow stuff. In the second half of the season I was more competitive; I had a few thirds and I had a win at Snetterton.”

For Radisich, the season had started relatively well, with three podiums and a win at Silverstone, but during the second half of the season he finished in the points just once, and retired from four races. By this point, rumblings from Ford of Germany were becoming stronger. “It was a fraught time because Ford had developed a Mondeo themselves in Germany – in Cologne,” says Radisich. Schübel Engineering had helped Ford get into Germany’s Super Tourenwagen Cup. “Ford of Germany was against us because we were a private team funded in the UK, not Germany.”

Things were already in a dire state by the time the team got to Paul Ricard for the FIA World Touring Car Cup, but Burt remembers the test day. “Andy disconnected the rev limiter, so it was pulling 9000rpm down the back straight, and it was quickest through the speed traps,” he grins, adding that the V6 was really only good at the top end. “It started to work at 8000rpm – so when we went from 8000rpm to 9000rpm, it was good. Where you needed mid-range, it wasn’t as good as a four-cylinder.” According to Strachan, Cosworth had saved the best till last. “Cosworth brought a 370bhp engine in the back of an estate car,” he recalls. “Whoever was fastest in qualifying would get it.”

• Engine Cosworth 2-litre, 24V V6

• Drive Front-wheel drive

• Body Modified production bodyshell with seam-welded safety cage

• Power 295bhp

• Transmission Xtrac 6-speed sequential

• Suspension (front & rear) MacPherson struts

• Weight 950kg

Come race week, it was Burt on top. “We thought we were in good standing, even with the limitations of tyre wear,” says Strachan, who engineered Burt’s car. “We’d been in the top five, and knew there was time in hand – and Kelvin got the engine.” Cue an aggrieved Radisich. “Paul tried to pull rank and get the engine,” remembers Burt. “Andy gave Paul a finger and then gave me the engine. It got shirty.” Radisich remembers it with a chuckle: “I was probably blowing fire, but Kelvin had qualified ahead – that was the reality.”

Strachan set about changing the engine, then headed to the bar with a Michelin staffer. “He told me he had been removing all the serial numbers and details from the tyres that had been fitted,” he says of their chat. “He said the stencil on the tyres used for race day was smaller than the ones for qualifying and testing. He said they had run out of the large stencils, so they only had smaller ones left to mark the compounds. I never thought much more of it. The BMWs had tyres with large identification stencils, and all the Fords and other Michelin runners seemed to have tyres with the smaller stencils.”

“It was a fraught time – Ford had developed a Mondeo in Cologne”

What Strachan found out a year later was that Michelin did not have enough World Cup tyres to supply everyone: “Michelin decided that BMW had a better chance of beating the Audis on their Dunlops. We were left with whatever remained – standard tyres. We couldn’t understand where the pace had gone.” The Audis went on to dominate and Burt was the first of the non-Audi/BMW runners in sixth place in the first race, before fading to 13th in the second. Radisich had a DNF in the first race; 17th in the second.

Rouse believed that ARE had the Ford contract for 1996, and was experimenting with a four-cylinder engine. In the end, the deal went to West Surrey Racing using Reynard-prepared cars from a Schübel shell. Burt, meanwhile, joined TWR’s Volvo effort for 1996. “I’d had a tip-off from someone within Ford that it was going to change and if I’d got alternatives, I’d be wise to choose one,” he explains. “I didn’t get it right either – I could have gone to Audi.”

While 1996 was a disaster for Radisich and team-mate Steve Robertson, Strachan believes that ARE could have cracked the Mondeo problem. “I wish Andy had gone, ‘I’ll build a four-wheel-drive, four-cylinder car,’” he says. “We needed Ford to do a short run of engines with a special cylinder head because the valve and port sizes were too small in the Mondeo four-cylinder engine,” reckons Rouse. “Ford weren’t fully committed, so we were always struggling to develop a car.”

Nevertheless, Rouse looks back on the time with fondness: “It was good business for us – we built a lot of cars and we won two World Cups.”

“To win the first World Cup as the dark horse was amazing,” reflects Radisich. “To do it again the second year in a car that wasn’t as strong as it was in 1993 was probably the most rewarding. It was everything you could want from a driving experience – everything just worked so well.”