Vintage Thing No.61 - Ford Sierra XR4x4

This is my Ford Sierra XR4x4, parked without concern on a muddy verge at a speed hillclimb last year - well, in a muddy verge for it was so wet. This old car is a bit of a monster - impertinent hot hatches come by but I real them when it comes to Hamburger Hill on the A30. Their little four pot screamers may match my old V6 for power but don't have the torque. They're probably more economic to run though - 28 mpg is good for my monster. But it's a sophisticated monster. With its four-wheel drive, fuel injection, and anti-lock brakes, this 25-year-old car was very sophisticated for its day. Having usurped to be XR4i from the range of performance Fords, the XR4x4 was in turn superseded by the Ford Sierra Cosworth but it wouldn't go away. The XR 4x4 was too useful. It wasn't as highly strung as the Cossie and was a very good tow car. Its engine was relatively lowly stressed and was the ideal powerplant when the car eventually entered the twilight world of the old, fast and cheap. This is the kind of all wheel drive vehicle I like. It’s entertaining to drive, goes well, stops well and sticks to the road as if its tyres have just sprouted rubber suckers. It's not quite as fast as an XR4i due to the extra weight of the powertrain but it is much more sure footed. I bought mine from my neighbour just after I had been given an old Citroen. I asked tractor man Andrew - about whom you will have heard much already on this blog - if he would tow the car home for me with his Sierra XR4x4 and he replied, "If you give me 500 quid you can have it!" It would have been rude not to have taken up this offer and I haven't regretted it since. I've had to do a certain amount welding to it and re-sprayed it in the 11 years that I've owned it. I've let in new rear wheel arches and patched the sills. There were also some particularly awkward repairs to the chassis members close to the rear suspensions mounts where I had to drop the whole rear axle to gain access. It also rusted behind the sunroof so I chopped a good section out of a scrapper and welded that in. I don't do many miles on it these days but it is ideal for the long-distance journeys. It's only let me down twice, once spectacularly and once not at all spectacularly. The spectacular occasion occurred when I was driving up to Bristol for a Buzzcocks gig with the usual suspects, Gary and Rich. As we climbed Haldon Hill, just this side of Exeter, I boasted about what a strong running motor my XR4x4 was and a few moments later the engine died. We coasted all the way down the other side and I managed to weave my way through the traffic that we had just overtaken into a parking bay at the foot of the hill. I tried to start the engine again but Gary and Rich got out of the car. "Look at your exhaust!" they shouted and, in the cold twilight of an early February evening, there were the back box and tailpipe of my exhaust, glowing a cheerful orange colour. In fact, it was more of a cheerful yellow but it soon turned into an orange and then a seep red. "Bloody hell!" said Gary, "it's so hot it looks almost transparent!" Eventually, the glowing faded and it went back to its normal opaque state. I decided that this was probably not a good moment to let the others know that I had filled the petrol tank before I had picked them up. I opened the bonnet to see if there was anything obviously wrong with the engine. I couldn't see any immediate cause but it was obvious that there was a water leak. Closer inspection revealed that the rubber bobbins that carried the radiator had perished some time ago, allowing the radiator to fall into the deadly clutches of the viscous fan. Putting a brave face on developments, I decided that it was actually a good thing that we'd ground to a halt because if we'd continued beyond Exeter my lovely V6 could have been fried. Meanwhile, it was obvious we weren't going to make Bristol or see The Buzzcocks. I called the AA and they were literally with us within minutes. The AA man immediately diagnosed a blocked exhaust system. When he kicked the back of the silencer, small shards of some pale green ceramic material fell out. Somehow, the rubber exhaust mountings survived the intense heat, which must have been pretty localised for it only affected the rear box and tailpipe. I'd fitted an aftermarket high-performance exhaust system and the theory goes that the glass fibre sound absorbent material within the silencer had somehow become dislodged and blocked the whole system. We opened the bonnet again to see if we get the engine to run and Gary noticed a wisp of vapour curling up from the fuel distribution unit. "Look," he said, "there's smoke coming from your distributor." "That's not the distributor," replied the AA man. "That's the fuel injection system." I just kept quiet. It wasn't smoke anyway, it was steam from the punctured radiator. We couldn't persuade the engine to run so I came back home on the end of the pole line the AA van. Gary and Rich set up with a driver. I was on my own in my get car without heater. When at last I got home, the AA man suggested we tried again and the engine burst into life. No lasting harm had been done and whilst having the radiator rebuilt I poked a thin length of dowel up the exhaust but couldn't find any other obstruction. The exhaust lasted for about another two years but gradually succumbed to the rust since all the paint had been burned off it by the heat. When I say that no harm had been done, I am, of course, forgetting the psychological damage to my travelling companions. Gary now refuses point blank to travel in any of my cars anymore. It's so sad. I think he's missing out on a lot. The other occasion when my car let me down was far more convenient. The clutch cable broke outside my local motor factors who had the right part in stock and I was able to borrow their phone to someone the AA. Failed-or-repaired-daily is how the motor trade interpret the name of Ford. This can either be interpreted as a comment on reliability or on the ease of maintenance -- it's one of those bottle half empty, bottle half full issues. I'm sorry to say, however, that as far as my Ford Sierra is concerned, the ability to be repaired daily is dwindling rapidly. Some years ago, Ford decided not to support its older models like the Sierra and the supply of parts from main dealers and mainstream motor factors has dried up. Thank goodness for the internet and Ebay! While quite happy to emphasise the Ford heritage when it comes to selling new cars, Ford, like any other mass manufacturer, doesn't actually want their old designs to stay on the road. The executives at the blue oval see every old car as the loss of a new car sold. There are specialists for the Cosworth range but so far I haven't found anyone as committed to keeping the XR4 range on the road. My car has had a Cossie grille for much of its life. The story goes that it was specified by its original owner about 18 months after he’d bought it new. I think this is a great improvement. The standard XR4x4 looks too bland for my tastes. I suppose you can have too much of the aero look and this little grill gives the car a lot more expression. It's like a little smiling mouth. My XR4x4 is about as sophisticated a car as I need. I like the ABS, the four-wheel-drive and the fuel injection but I am not sure about the power windows or the electric mirrors. The electric mirrors have seized up due to lack of use, for and the only one who drives my car, and sometimes the power windows go down but don't come back up again, typically after I've loved to enable me to adjust the mirrors. The upholstery is very hard wearing although it still smells of wet collie, although my neighbours dogs died many years ago. There just a small hole on the seat seat where some bastard squirrel tried to bury a nut in the squab. How the squirrel got into the car is a mystery. I expect to find its mummified remains any day now. If the XR4x4 has any weakness its second gear in the Type 9 gearbox. I first heard about this when I was having an exchange box fitted to my Triumph Dolomite Sprint back in the late 80s when the XR4x4 was still a comparatively new car. Chatting to the mechanics, I discovered that the temptation to people to rev the engine away from roundabouts in second was too much to bear and the high torque of the engine would eventually cause this year to fail. They had an XR 4x4, in gleaming Diamond White, awaiting collection after being fitted with a replacement box and when I asked them what they thought of the car's performance they intimated that he was in a different league from anything that they had tried previously. I never had any trouble with second gear but the cast iron casing created a lot of internal condensation in the moist Cornish atmosphere. The trouble started after a particularly wet touring holiday around Wales when I had to take the car paddling in water that came over the door sills. The next time I came to check the oil level in the gearbox, all I found inside was a vile brown foam that oozed out of the oil level plug as soon as I unscrewed it. I ended up taking the gearbox out to drain it completely but, after a few years, the bearings became so growly I replaced it with a different box. By that time I had been offered the hulk of an engineless Sierra 4x4 estate, which I picked clean, but if I ever have to replace it again I shall fit an MT75 gearbox, which is a much stronger design. In fact, recalling the occasion when I refitted the gearbox back into the car brings to mind another incidence of mechanical mishap. Having worked on the car all weekend, come Sunday night I set off for a shakedown run with my friend and neighbour, Kirk. All systems would go and we were tooling down a country lane when suddenly everything stopped. The engine died and the headlamps went out and we coasted gently to a halt. Fortunately, the AA were just a phone call away and when eventually they found us, in the middle of nowhere, we discovered that, when I’d re-fitted the engine, one of the cables to the battery was close enough to the exhaust manifold to create a dead short. It was quite touching but it was close enough for the spark to jump across the gap and suddenly drain the battery completely. The AA man said that he would be very surprised if the ignition system had not been ruined but once we'd charged the battery up again with his special gadget my old car started again without any problems and never looked back. I suppose we were lucky not to have a fire - there seems to be a recurring theme here - but I should point out that this was not the fault of my car but the nut behind the wheel.