Ford Sierra XR4i | The Brave Pill
Not as exciting as a Cosworth, but not as expensive either
Performance Fords have recently been given the magical superpower to defy the rules of deprecation, to the extent that this week’s Pill is a Sierra XR4i that is being offered for slightly more than it cost new in 1983. Which on one level is clearly ludicrous, yet at £14,990 it is still cheap for a decent-looking example of a nostalgia-heavy fast Ford.
Okay, so fast might be stretching the point a little when applied to the two-door, three-window Sierra – a car that always managed to look considerably quicker than it actually was. But we’re living in a world where low mileage Escort RS Cosworths are changing hands for six figures and nicer examples of the once generic Fiesta XR2 are being offered for north of twenty grand. Against that logic this rolling slice of the early eighties doesn’t seem outrageously expensive.
The XR4i is actually the second Sierra to become a Pill, the debutant being a Sierra Sapphire RS Cosworth back in 2019. That car was a shabby example in need of work, but was being offered for what now looks like an even more enticing £14,000 – representing the bottom of the market for any Cosworth variant at the time. These days even the rattiest and tattiest RSes are into the £20s, and that rising tide seems to have lifted lesser examples like our Pill.
The story of the Sierra’s creation has been oft-told, but could be summarised in the company’s slightly perverse decision to combine ultra-modern design with very traditional underpinnings. The Sierra’s slippery shape was frequently likened to a jelly mould – ask your mum – with its lack of a radiator grille between its faired in headlights regarded as being pretty radical by the standards of the time. As was the fact it launched with a hatchback rather than a saloon boot. But while it made the Mk5 Cortina it replaced look like a stack of boxes, underneath the spiffy new Sierra shared much of its predecessor’s mechanical package – weedy Pinto engines and rear-wheel drive. This being at a time when most rivals were turning motors sideways and using them to turn the front wheels.
If the regular Sierra was daring, the XR4i was the equivalent of rappelling down the walls of the Iranian embassy. Ford had launched the vanilla car with the choice of both three-door and five-door hatchback bodystyles, but the three-door was intended as an ultra-cheap base model. That meant there was reluctance to use the same body for the range-topper, so the decision was made to create a new Frankenshell that would combine the five-door’s rear quarterlight with the longer doors from the three-door, requiring the use of a small extra window between the two.
This task of applying the styling dust to this lash-up was given to a young British designer called Peter Horbury. He later rose to become design boss of Volvo (on two separate occasions) and is now in charge of Lotus - but back then he was cutting his teeth on Sierra variants. He later admitted he took inspiration for the rear window treatment from his favourite car of the time, with the combination of the new mini window plus blacked door pillar giving a half-decent impression of the Porsche 928. If you squint. The XR4i was also given a twin-element biplane wing, because eighties, with this making precisely zero downforce, but helping to reduce drag – from the regular Sierra’s already slippery 0.34 C-o-D to just 0.32.
That’s because the XR4i needed all the help it could get if it was to muster a top speed that would impress Ronnie the Rep as he perused the magazine road tests. Prior to its arrival the most powerful car in the range had been the 2.3-litre ‘Cologne’ V6, which made a modest 112hp. The XR4i was upgraded to the 2.8-litre V6, as seen in top-spec Granadas and the Capris, with this making 148hp. Thanks to the aerodynamic efficiency this was enough for a 130mph v.max – considerably more than even the front-drive Cavalier could manage. But the Sierra’s 8.4-second 0-62mph time was less impressive for contemporary reviewers, as was the engine’s thrashy soundtrack.
None of this mattered to seven-year-old me. I can still remember when one of our neighbours got a red XR4i sometime in 1983, and I immediately decided I had to be best friends with his son so I could get closer to the car. The son was younger than I was, and supported Manchester United, so this was a big ask – but it was worth it to be able to ogle the Sierra up close. I even got to experience occasional journeys in the back, squinting past the extra pillar and through the bronze-tinted glass which, if memory serves, was marketed as having some relationship with the glazing of the Space Shuttle.
Despite inspiring passion in small boys, the XR4i was not a huge success and didn’t get to live for very long. In 1985 Ford launched the pleasingly literal XR4x4, which combined the 2.8-litre V6 with an all-wheel drive system, but switching (in Britain) to the more conventional five-door bodyshell. The two XR4 variants were sold alongside each other for a few months, the more practical 4x4 quickly replaced the two-door. Then in 1986 the original RS Cosworth arrived to the sound of a heavenly choir, but using the conventional ‘two light’ two door shell with a single rear window. Ford later brought back the XR4i name briefly for a five-door model with a wheezy 2.0-litre engine. America also got the Merker XR4Ti which combined the European extra-window body with a 2.3-litre turbocharged four-pot.
In Blighty the XR4i got cheap quickly, with a fair number suffering the indignity of being given ‘Cossie look’ conversions that removed the extra rear pillar. Although insurance costs for the XRs were steep, they were less ridiculous than they were for the RS. By the early years of this century XR4is were well into banger territory and the number of survivors rapidly plummeted; How Many Left reckons that 3,000 made it through the millennium, but just 380 were still on the road in 2005. By last year only 140 were still taxed, with another 700 on SORN. That is just a third of the number of surviving RS Cosworths.
Our Pill looks sparkly clean for its 129,000 miles, but is definitely no concours queen. The front bumper seems to be slightly distorted on the near side, the effect exacerbated in the pictures by the slightly wonky coloured trim inserts. The rear bumper is also visibly lower on one side, and the nearside taillight is cracked – something that would have cost £10 at any scrapyard to put right 15 years ago, but may well now be alarmingly expensive. The grey fabric interior is also showing the grime of wear, a surprisingly amount in the back. Enzo the hamster hasn’t been able to dig a registration out of the database – its punchcard got chewed by the Difference Engine – but the dealer selling it promises two inches of history and “family ownership from new.” A matching set of Pirelli P6000s on the pepper pot alloys is a good sign.
Although considerably leggier, this XR4i is definitely more exciting that the two other Sierras also being offered for £14,995 in the Classifieds, a 1.6 Laser estate and a 1.6 GL. This one has nearly as much power as both of them combined, which surely means it has to be twice as good.
Note to Shed; it was Johnny Rep, back then, Johnny.
Always remember being slightly amused when I met the ‘real’ Johnny Repp (a friend of my dads Dutch pal), of Netherlands football fame in Amsterdam and having to bite my lip to prevent me asking if he drove a Taunus or Ascona
Never owned an XR4i, but had 2 4x4s and a Turbo Technics 4x4 which felt quicker than my first 3dr Cosworth due to its huge torque.
We can giggle at the performance figure now but for a mainstream car it was fairly quick back in the day to be fair…
Buying a car for the Festival of the Unexceptional is getting very expensive.
The sheer variety and choice we had from so many different manufacturers was the like of something we will never see again, and there were mainstream cars available that were genuinely exciting. Today all we have is the choice of which shade of grey we want our Korean or German SUV to be in.
You can still buy great superminis, that are light years ahead of the Fiestas and Metros of the 1980s. And still good value if you adjust for inflation.
You can still buy excellent family hatchbacks like the latest Honda Civic, or the Golf/Octavia. Far safer and more reliable than anything in the 1980s, and performance/refinement on a different level.
The latest hot hatches offer performance that was unimaginable 20 years ago.
BMW still make some excellent saloons and coupes, buried within their model range.
Porsche, Lotus, Alpine all still making great cars.
Yes there are lots of SUVs/crossovers on the road today, but there are still plenty of good cars available to buy if you look for them.
Memories were :
It went back twice for a new gearbox.
Those pale grey seats got very dirty very quickly
It had quadrophonic sound. 4 speakers (count them, 4) controlled by a dash mounted joy stick.
Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man album on repeat in that bad boy Ford branded cassette player.
Radio options were either MW or LW
A friends dad had one in blue, I loved the thing, he even allowed his older son to use it when he turned 17, mental cool to see a 17 year old back then driving a car like that!
Yes, it was considered the poor man's cosworth at the time given these were still on forecourts when the cosworth rolled out, but was still a very cool thing to a kid!
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