Single-seaters are a nightmare for recording audio, so I'm really pleased you can hear what this car actually sounds like on the video. From the driving seat, the whole experience is dominated by the thrumming and chuffing going on behind your head. Wearing a crash helmet it's loud. Without it actually hurts.
The Formula Ford EcoBoost project is without parallel among mainstream car manufacturers. It's yet another example of how the Ford Motor Company declined a government bailout and made cars people like us find fascinating.
Driving it on the road feels wonderfully ridiculous
Making a Formula Ford road legal doesn't so much require ingenuity as patience, an eye for detail and cash. Extracting 202hp from
a 1.0-litre motor
, fitting it and the assorted piping into a Formula Ford and then having Nick Tandy do a
7min22sec lap
of the 'ring is a little more difficult.
I drove this car a few days after shooting the Morgan and the Caterham. They provided a perfect reference point because they demonstrate, through degrees of silliness, that there's visceral motoring and there's visceral motoring. The Morgan is harsh after a Caterham, the Formula Ford is on another level altogether.
The steering rouses the veins in your arms, the ride is solid, the sensation, on the road, is one of doing something you really shouldn't be doing. When of course it's completely legal. I absolutely love this trend - it's anti-hypercarism; a celebration of low mass and sensation over outright speed.
Will Ford build any? It might well do. The price could be around £80K, which is nuts by most standards, but perhaps not so silly judged against the flyweight marketplace given how special it is.
Suffice to say, the kids who race these things must be whippet fit. And Nick Tandy? He needs a wheelbarrow for his spuds.