HOW A TRUE RACING GEM WAS UNEARTHED – BY ACCIDENT
TVR Tuscan and British GT title winner Michael Caine is always on the lookout for a good deal. The motor trader – “I’m just a second-hand car dealer from Newmarket,” he often quips – is a man with a nose for a bargain.
But even he couldn’t have dreamt that he was about to unearth a piece of motorsport history when he set his heart on buying a Ford Sierra RS500. It was a pipe dream that he had held since he was a teenager, and when he was in a position to make that happen, he got way more than he bargained for. It is a story worth listening to.
The 52-year-old always had a hankering for the Blue Oval’s sporting products, and it started when his working life began.
Caine explains: “My first job was as a trainee car salesman at a place called Gilbert Rice in Cambridge, which was the official RS dealer for the area. I was there when I was 17, so it was 1988, which was prime time for the RS500.
“The car in the showroom that we loved and the one that all the
