A friend of mine ran one of these in the late eighties, Moonstone Blue like the car sitting in Annecy, and I remember the specific noise it made pulling away from a toll booth outside Lyon: a soft turbine whistle, then a shove in the back that rearranged your idea of what a family Ford was for. That was the trick of the 1986 Ford Sierra RS Cosworth. It looked like something the rep in the next lane might drive, then it wore that ludicrous whale-tail spoiler and left him for dead. Ford unveiled it to dominate touring car racing: a three-door hatchback with a turbocharged 2.0-litre four producing 204 horsepower, rear-wheel drive and an enormous rear wing.
Homologation, and the honesty of it
The whole car existed to satisfy a rulebook, which is why I trust it. The brief was a rear-wheel-drive turbocharged saloon capable of winning Group A championships while satisfying FIA homologation requirements of 5,000 production units. Cosworth took the faithful old Pinto block, added a 16-valve twin-cam head and a Garrett turbo, and the resulting YB engine has since passed into legend. In total 5,545 cars were produced, of which 500 were sent to Aston Martin Tickford for conversion to the RS500. The bodies were built at Genk in Belgium, the styling handled by Lothar Pinske, and that outrageous aero earned its keep: the huge wing negated the standard three-door shell's positive lift, and the nose intake fed air to the intercooler.
To drive, it is all of a period. The T5 gearbox is deliberate rather than quick, the steering has real weight to it, and below about 3,000 rpm the engine is quietly gathering itself before the boost arrives with that characteristic old-turbo suddenness. Nobody who has felt it forgets it. You sit high, the cabin is grey plastic and honest, and the whole thing feels like a racing car that agreed, reluctantly, to carry your shopping.
What this one is, and what to prod
The Annecy car is the one that matters, the original three-door, in manual, showing 51,000 km and described as a German import in good order, which fits: Germany was always where the tidiest survivors clustered, and TÜV discipline tends to flush out the horrors. At 37,900 EUR it sits well below where clean three-doors have settled, so scepticism is the correct posture rather than excitement. At 35-plus years old, rust is arguably the single biggest threat, and critical areas include the sills, especially under the B-pillar, the rear inner arches, front inner wings and boot floor. Many cars have had repairs of wildly varying quality hidden under filler and fresh underseal. On the engine, internal corrosion leading to head gasket failure is common, so look for coolant leaks on the exhaust side and signs of overheating, and probe the wiring loom, which is prone to melting near the bonnet vent. These were also famously crashed and stolen when new, so provenance is everything.
The case, weighed honestly
Values across Europe have firmed considerably as the fast-Ford generation reaches the age where it can finally afford the poster on its childhood wall, and a genuine three-door with documented history is squarely in that current. The trouble is the word "genuine": a repainted, welded, re-shelled example can look magnificent in ten photographs and be a tragedy on a ramp. Before anyone parts with money, this one needs a body specialist's inspection over a lift, a compression test, and a forensic reading of the service file and matching numbers rather than a stamped book. Get all that right and you own a piece of Group A history that still, forty years on, makes a rude noise leaving a toll booth. Get it wrong and you own the world's most expensive Sierra.
