For as long as people have been tuning old Fords, there’s been an enthusiasm for shoehorning in different motors with the aim of achieving more power and more Saturday night kudos. Once upon a time, it was de rigueur to bolt an Essex V6 into a Mk1 Escort or Cortina; Pintos went into 100Es, YBs into Mk2 Escorts and, more recently, Zetecs and Duratecs into everything. And while all this has been going on, there’s a polarising issue at the heart of it all that drives a division between concours purists and horsepower junkies: swapping in engines from rival manufacturers. The huge number of classic Fords on the scene running Vauxhall XE and Honda F20C motors demonstrates that a lot of enthusiasts are totally cool with this manner of crosspollination, although there’s a hardcore of die-hards who will always feel that any form of non-blue-oval engine is complete anathema.
