RS500 or 3dr Cosworth? What makes the RS500 so special. We compare these two iconic cars.

[Music] thank you all right guys welcome back to our next video as promised it's a comparison between the 500 and the standard three door so picture the scene it's August 1987. you spend your weekends up and down south and seafront blaring out the Pet Shop Boys and uh you fancy a new motor you've just seen this video or this advert on the TV [Music] or Mexico Sierra they said the car would break it hasn't done that and it broke the spirit of the opposition meantime the race leader [Music] the champion [Music] and you decide to add down to your local Ford dealership what you're presented with what looked like to identical cars now little did you know the rs-500s had just been homologated and are now in the showrooms so what exactly are the differences do you go with a standard three door which has been you know everybody has raved about it for the last two years three years or do you go with the RS 500 so I think we need a dodgy salesman to come tell us the difference right then Sunny so you fancy in the New York area I am but what's the difference and what's the cost the easiest bit first Sierra Cosi when it was released 14 995 nothing for a man of your saliva as I can see or you could pay the extra five grand 1995 and you could have the all singing all dancing RS 500. I think we'd best go through the important bits how fast is it which one's quicker that's the the worst question you can ask because there was virtually nothing in it there was three or four miles an hour difference top speed on the 500 but realistically because the 500 were so drastically detuned or its potential wasn't reached shouldn't I say there wasn't a great lot of difference in the speed so a lot of people struggled to see the extra 5000 quid that it cost you for the RS 500 because what we've got to remember when these were released these were done for a purpose to homologate the race cars so the race cars hadn't actually proven their worth yet nobody realized just how phenomenal they were going to be as a race car so realistically what did you get three extra five grand well in this video we'll try and go through it and show you right what we'll do we'll start with the the obvious bits that most people notice um visual differences should I say so the RS 500 obviously different from bumper now what most people think on the front bumper is it's just that cut out there that's the only difference well like it isn't and once we show you I hope it becomes more obvious what the difference is luckily with the three Dawn exit easy to compare so not only did it have that cut out which allowed for extra cooling for the larger intercooler which we'll talk about in a minute these cutouts here were actually made that much wider on each side so if we jump straight over to the standard Sierra you can see there where the number plate recess is the mouth openings we call and finish there and back to the 500 again you can see the number plate recess finishes but the the mouth's open wider so a difference not a lot of people noticed obviously again most people notice the grills these again were homologation only as everything was on the 500 and these were there simply to allow ducting so that the race cars could have a pipe that sat behind where the fog light went to Aid cooling to the to the front brakes so again there came but they didn't actually replace the fog light as such because when you bought the car the fog lights were in the boot in a box and they put them in there for you because a lot of people wanted put the fog lights back in and so you got them with the car obviously standard three dot came with the fog lights always there's a big difference or the one the expensive thing that most people notice is the front splitter you can see it's a plastic material rather than the rubber on the standard three door and instead of just coming straight down he actually has a lip on it and also returns right down the side of the bumper as you'll see there and comes up the side of the bumper as again if we revert back to the standard three door you can see it's just a smaller rubber but only comes down the front so that's the front bumper covered if we go to the back of the car we'll see the other main differences now what we've got here on the 500 the spoiler was basically all the same size and shape of what they did they added this extra lip on the rear here that's known as the gurney flap it's called that because the gentleman who invented it I believe it was an American in the 70s or something like that it was named after him his he invented it for an older race car and this has been carried on for years and years so we've got the extra lip there and then also we have the lower rear spoiler that was fitted as an extra on the rs-500 now these spoilers were fitted to some I believe European cars are standard but they had to put a cut out in the rear spoiler there to allow it to sit up to the leg of the middle spoiler now again there is a people think that that was just cut out with a Stanley knife it actually wasn't this is a special one-off spoiler with a separate part number so what we'll do we'll put a picture up for you to see so you'll see the extra part number but again unique to the RS 500 on the boat you say it says Sierra RS 500 cars with and on the standard Sierra it just says Sierra RS Cosworth something interesting to know if you see an RS 500 that's never had any paintwork the RS 500 there was just added on it wasn't a unique new sticker they added the rs-500 and simply peeled off the RS there so when you see an RS 500 that's never been painted from you what you'll notice is that that rs-500 is a slightly different color giving all the Trade Secrets away here aren't we but yeah you can clearly see it when you see a car that's never had any framework and then the only other thing on the outside is the famous RS 500 pin stripe these again were fitted at tickford just a simple nice pinstripe with the RS 500 logo on the front wings all right so what you're saying is that it's an extra 5 000 pounds more and this Sierra Cosworth behind me now bear in mind currently in the UK on average I can buy a house for 29 000 pounds what I want to know is where is my 5 000 going because currently all I can see is a fancy front bumper and an extra rear wing well let's get into the real nitty-gritty follow me [Music] right then I don't know where to start I suppose what people think is the people that know a little bit about Sierra coswiss will tell you that it's just an eight injector Inlet manifold and a bigger Turbo so we'll start with them on the RS 500 as we said you've got eight fuel injectors you've got four on the top rail which is the same as a standard Sierra cars with but then you have four extra injectors that are mounted on the side of the inlet plenum which is completely different the whole Inlet Platinum structure is completely different than it is on a standard Sierra you've obviously got two sets of fuel rails to provide the fuel to them you have to Loop the fuel system to get the fuel down to the second Rail and then it's linked back at this point and what we run on the 500 is a much larger throttle body so the throttle body ID sorry OD is 76 millimeters which correct me if I'm only about 52 on the standard Sierra so you've got a hell of a lot bigger it's all body allowing a lot more air to get in to match with the extra injectors now one thing that most people don't realize is the second set of injectors on the road car is not connected they never were at factory and it's simply a plug that sits behind the battery like that that does absolutely nothing it is there again for what we call homologation purposes now what homologation means if a manufacturer wants to race cars motorbikes whatever it may be back in the day you couldn't build a one-off by car car it had to be a production vehicle so what they had to do if they wanted to run a slightly bigger car more horsepower Etc they had to build a minimum of 500 broadcasts to make the homologation and the homologated car had to have all the parts fitted to it that you could buy from the showroom fitted to the car that were going to be fitted to the race car so hence this road car had to have the eight injectors it had to have the wiring and the injectors had to be present but they didn't actually have to work but they had to be present so that's why theirs were never connected so that's the fuel side system don't I don't know whether it's probably easy if we show you jump to the Sierra here you can see there with only one set of injectors the second fuel rail is completely missing the actual Inlet plenum itself is a lot thinner because it doesn't carry the volume of air that is required for the RS 500 and it's got the smaller throttle body and the idle speed control valve is in a different position because now to turn that and relocate it on the RS 500 to get the same set of injectors in I think that's quite easy to see while we're on the three door you can see there this is a standard T3 quite a small turbo that was fitted to this standard Sierra Cosworth and the sapphire cos wrist was on the T3 on the RS 500 again if you wanted to run really big boost levels on the race cars so if they fitted the T4 Turbo now the difference here is this turbo can produce a 550 horsepower totally standard the little turbo on this on the standard Sierra you can't run big horsepower RV but it won't last very long that's probably good for 230 240 horsepower continuous use before it fails there's again 550 so a big difference there the water system on the two cars was completely reworked you'll see on the standard Sierra Cosworth there all we have is one Outlet one outlet pipe that goes to the top of the radiator and then returns back into the water pump and the RS 500 you can see there there's a completely reworked water system where the the return is back in through a much larger and much bigger capacity thermostat housing with a bleed nipple on both sides on the in and the out of that now the radiator was standard that was exactly the same but because of the difference in the thermostat housing meant all the water pipes are different they're not the same so that every single water pipe under this Bonnet is different to a standard Sierra cars with apart from the two at the back that go to the that's the word so they're the same every other one is different another big difference you can see is the Boost hoses now obviously again because of the bigger diameter throttle body they had to rework these 76 mil so a lot bigger and made out of a completely different material a lot lot more heavier Duty a lot more heat resistant and boost hoses all come with special part numbers on them you can see that one the other two were underneath so you can't see those but I think we all recognize them as RS 500 because of the color and but it's not just the color totally different setup all together now one thing you'll have heard everybody say on on Sierra calls with says they grow over the time I fitted an RS 500 intercooler what the difference is again on the RS 500 a massive huge front mount intercooler so it comes right up under the Bonnet Landing panel here and these full length of the car it comes right to the bottom of the bumper so the intercooler is full height of the front of the car and full width to about here behind the headlights they are to actually move the headlights slightly to get the begin to cooler in when these were fitted at tickford so there's one of the major big differences and I was obviously when you're running 550 Plus horsepower you need to keep them air temperatures down so that intercool is essential as opposed to on the standard Sierra all we've got here is a really really quite small you'll actually see well because the grill is missing out but you can see it only goes usually what four or five inches deep again work to put only good for maybe 250 horsepower maximum what else have we got the air box a lot of people again don't realize the difference on the air box because of the larger 76mm boost pipes the air box had to have a wider opening to allow for the bigger boost pipes but also what most people don't know is if you look there you can see the top of the air box is flat what they did they raised the air box lid I made it flat again for a lot more capacity here if you look back at the standard three door you'll see here where it's not level it's dropped down slightly it's not flush and obviously a lot smaller boost pipe fitted so that can't hold as much air as the rs-500 version you'll also notice the air intake on this Sierra here is different to the 500 as what we call a snorkel and this is the air intake pipe and you can see the width of it it basically slots above the intercooler and is spread halfway across to allow for a lot more volume of air to come in through the grill and be dragged in through this bigger snorkel to fill this bigger air box so again a unique item to the RS 500 the map sensor bracket that had to be reworked on the rs-500 because of them repositioning of the throttle body they had to move the map sensor further back so that a special unique bracket was made for the map sensor to allow that to sit in its non-standard position another thing to do with the turbo because of the heat that built up under the Bonnet of these cars with the huge turbo they had to redesign the heat shield and the media fiberglass a real thick heavy duty fiberglass material and made it bigger to sit further away than the turbo and also on the RS 500 you'll notice this big heat protection that stuck onto the back of the Bonnet that was done only on the RS 500s you'll see there on the standard three door it has nothing and you can see the difference in the much smaller turbo heat shield on there right then another couple of little things before we get into the money items you'll see there the rs-500 has this what we call commonly is a crossover pipe uh the dump I was in the same place and the 500s is on the standard three door on the three door this returns into the intercooler and then passes through the intercooler on the 500 what they did was put this link pipe in to make it a direct feed stream closer to the throttle body um so that's again unique to the 500. one other thing I didn't mention was the alternator now the alternator is a standard alternator but because of the much larger turbocharger it would hit the alternator so they had to lower that further down and they did that by means of what's commonly known as a drop bracket which is simply a piece of Steel with the holes relocated further down so that the alternator could sit approximately maybe three inches further down the number standard three door cars with right now something you're gonna have to set my word for because we can't see it in the car the main difference in an RS 500 under the Bonnet is the engine block now what Ford did was obviously they'd done testing on these engines and knew what kind of performance they needed to achieve and they wanted big numbers for the period which was 500 plus break horsepower they're done testing on the standard block in the standard Cosworth and it just simply couldn't take it the blocks would split and crack so they knew they had to beef up the engine block so on the RS 500 it's got a 205 block which is there's a 205 Block in the standard Sierra and this is where it gets complicated but the 205 Block in the RS 500 was a much stronger thicker wall block and one of the other the main difference is which you can't see when it's in the car is the core plugs on the core plugs on the 500 they're a lot smaller they're probably about half the size of the album The Standard 205 Cosworth block so unless you really really know what you're looking for very difficult to see the differences when you know you know so be careful if you're ever offered what you believe to be the genuine hour is 500 stronger block you need to do your own work on it what we'll do if we've got a block in the workshop we'll show you the smaller car plugs to give you some sort of help with that and the cylinder head again was unique to an hour is 500 the reason for that was on which we touched on the differences between the thermostats on the two engines well on the 500 thermostat it's called a three ball thermostat so it has three balls located in a triangle to mount that thermostat on on the standard Sierra Cosworth it's only got two a much smaller thermostat so the up to alter the water system in the head and also again for homologation purposes they knew that on the race cars they were going to have to open the inlet ports massively to get a better flow of fuel and Air in so they had to do it on the RS 500 Road car but if they'd done it all the way down the inlets the car wouldn't have run correctly in standard form so what they did the only machines a small amount just into the cylinder head to meet the size diameters they required but they didn't machine it all the way in so that the road car in standard form would still perform reasonably well but again you have to take the inlet manifold off to see that because also the inlet manifold is what we call dowled calm down so on the inlet manifold you've got two dowels on cylinders one and four that are drilled into the cylinder head and you've got the dowels into the inlet manifold that locate the manifold in the exact right position so all the parts line up perfectly but again you can't see that with with them the engine built up so I don't think we've missed anything there will be something no doubt something smaller we've missed but as you can see the differences are a lot more than people think it isn't just the turbo and the inlet manifold all the hoses into cooler air boxes brackets everything is different um so we hope that helps if you're looking for a 500 um do your own work and make sure you get the right one the only good thing with an RS 500 we won't show you this because this isn't our car but they have a unique chassis number and the chassis numbers have to fall within a certain range to be a genuine 500 chassis number um we will give you the range we'll put that down on the end of the video so you know the range to look for um and again that really is the only true way of identifying a genuine 500. now we've touched on everything externally we've touched on everything under the bonnet the only thing on the suspension wise it's different we hear all these myths about the the brakes are different they're not the suspension's different it's not the interior changes it doesn't everything is absolutely totally stock in that respect other than what we've told you about the only thing that's different is the rear Beam on the back now this confuses the heck out of a lot of people so I'll try and explain that as best we can so I've got a bracket here now on the Sierra Cosworth on the back rear beam the rear beam is a totally stock standard Sierra Cosworth item what they wanted to do if the race cars was allow a different geometry set up for the rear Beam for the rear arms they wanted to move the pickup Point 90 mil further forward so to get around that was a simple bracket that they made and this is it this is what is fitted to the rear beam on a Sierra RS 500 Cosworth you'll see that whole Lab all they did was took the nut off from the inner arm on the trailing arm they slid that bracket on they put the nut back on and then on the other side they put one little tack there as you can see where it's been broken off that tack was just basically to hold that bracket in place and what that did was the Met the homologation so that you could move that hole the mounting pickup Point further forward by 90 millimeters that's all that does you cannot use that bracket it is only a temporary fixed item just to make the homologation so when you look under the rear end of a Sierra RS 500 which people do to check its originality it should have that simple fabricated bracket bolted and tacked onto the rear arm would don't be frightened if it's not there because unfortunately like this car that this came off if you fitted an aftermarket exhaust system often especially with the Scorpions you couldn't get it on for this bracket one of the mounting arms on the rear uh the center section of the exhaust used to hit this so they simply took the nut off broke the weld took that bracket off either threw it in the skip or throw it in the or the car and did away with it so there are a lot of RS 500 genuine cars with that bracket missing but what we'll do to try and simplify it will now go into the workshop we'll show you underneath of a race car and we think that I'll explain this system a little bit easier no it's like then what we've got the bracket with us so what we're going to try and do is um give you some rough idea of how this works so this is a bracket we spoke about and it is located there on a standard rear beam so you can see there that's the mounting point for the for the rear arm on a race car which lines up with this bolt here the original mounting point for a standard cosmouth is somewhere here which is 90 mil further back from there so you can see where this has been cut and you can see where they've strengthened me there and where the fabricated this extra piece to move that further forward and that is purely the reason for this bracket to allow that to happen on the race cars so I hope that makes a little bit of sense out of what this bracket was for [Music] all right well I think I'm a bit closer to making the decision on which one I want to drive away but uh a few questions if you don't mind absolutely so first of all what colors if I go for a 500 what colors can I buy it in well unfortunately you stuck with exactly the same color combinations you do with the standard three door cars with you've got your Moonstone blue your black and your white now there is a bonus depending on what color you like because there were only there is not an equal number of same colors if you want a moonstone blue one you're going to buy the rarest of the of the law it was only 50 52 ever made in Moonstone blue the next to that is 56 which was the white cars which ironically there was only 52 made in white but we also had the original four prototype cars were also made in White and the prototype cars which was never heard of before were actually included in the 500 build so you have got four more white ones and then if you want the black one 392. okay so you mentioned obviously that this one's got the bigger turbo so am I gonna notice the difference while it drives on the road is this am I gonna need to drive this one harder and Revit harder to get the same performance out of it as I would do that one yeah you wear everybody going on about turbo or lag on RS 500 as well yeah it's their um the Boost doesn't come on to the syllable just over 4 000 revs and these start to boost just over sort of two to two and a half thousand so this picks up a lot quicker this is simpler and easier to drive there's no doubt about it than the laggy T4 but this is more fun once you go on the Home Road you get your foot down this keeps pulling as this runs out of steam this keeps pulling so this pros and cons to both it's down to personal choice really yeah and something else I was wondering um Parts you know if this Inlet plenum's there's only 500 of them if I need another one am I going to be able to get one obviously we're talking now hypothetically as though we were back in Period obviously when these cars were brand new you could still go to a far deal and buy anything off the shelf in reality today you're going to struggle to find the parts and if you do you're gonna pay a big big money for it I mean especially now that the rear series is of techno for these cars the story race Series has seen the uplifting values because everybody's building race cars again or replicas and they want they have to have the homologated power so you will pay through the nurse form all right so going back to 1987 which one personally would you buy I think back in the day when you could buy them both brand new it's a tough decision because like you said five thousand pound bought you a lot then this was when it came out a game changer no manufacturer had ever made a car in this car's price bracket that was as fast uh you know looked as as outrageous as what it did because we have to say that you know a lot of flock was made for the three door rear spoiler they had the Bonnet bench which was like one of the first cars Avatar vents in the Bonnet and these were just amazing cars absolutely and instantly iconic there's no doubt about it they were Radical they were just absolutely fabulous and they're still out of there there's no doubt about it there's still an absolutely brilliant car but obviously today the RS 500 people would slightly favor over a three door only because it's rare yeah it's got a build number it's it's only Built as 500 cars so collectors would probably go for that but saying that most collectors usually have both they want the iconic three-door Cosworth which has still got credibility today still iconic car and I think most people would like both but obviously value-wise the 500 it is a lot more money but saying that the three doors in good condition you still want to get a nice one for much less than 50 Grand yeah I mean if you look at the you know there's five grand difference between these in 87. it's probably somewhere around 20 000 pound difference now these have obviously climbed to a big much greater difference in today's money than what they were originally yeah they are but I think it's the same I think to be fair because that's a limited edition of the 500. it's in the same categories your Mitsubishi Eagles you know all your wide body 80s cars your Audis your lancers and and all that kind of thing the 500 that the Sierra was a a fabulous car the 500 juice tip toe over into that iconic 80s super car bracket really and I think that's why these demand the money now that they do it just because of that special edition in fact it's not because it particularly a much better car it's just the Rarity value to it where do you see the values going of birth cousin do you think the gap between the two will get bigger or do you think the Gap will go up evenly or I I genuinely believe and again this is nothing against the three door The Fabulous cars I genuinely do believe we will see a million pound RS 500 if I may I spoke years ago and said that we would say an hour is 500 maybe a hundred thousand pound and I got absolutely slated by people on the internet you're an idiot you don't know what you're talking about you're living you know you're too passionate about um 100 Grand today nobody bats an eyelid you know it a hundred grand does not buy you a perfect example Iris 500 anymore it buys you a good example not a perfect example we've seen one already settled for a few pound under 600 000 pounds did I think it would achieve that not now I I believed it would but I didn't think it would be this soon but I genuinely do believe we will see a million pound RS 500. I think these will continue to climb I think they will always follow the RS 500 because there's a place for them and I think the people who haven't got the money that 500 demand are more than happy to have a standard three door without a shadow of a Down yeah so one of the other things that gets mentioned quite a lot is that these cars were built by tickford they were right did they work on the Aston Martins and stuff like that that's correct tickford was a specialist vehicle builders and Ford approached tickford and asked them to do the conversions because not a lot of people realize that all RS 500s actually left the factory exactly like this car as a standard three-door Sierra cosmouth the reason for that is Ford had obviously done a lot of development work in the background and realized that they needed to build these cars to get the touring cars at the front of the grid and it was virtually impossible because the three door was actually coming to the end of its program its end of its build and the Sierra Sapphire because he had already been developed you know it was due to go into production so what do they do they can't really revamp a full Factory to make a limited run of 500 cars so the approached tickford and said will you build these cars for us tickford agreed so what basically happened and this is the reason for why there's an odd number of colors of cars because originally when the program was talked about all the RS 500s were in fact gonna be painted silver so that they were completely separate and unique to all the other Sierra Cosmos but the they quickly looked at the calculations and said we cannot possibly import 500 more body shells into production to build them silver on the line it just wasn't feasible so they decided to pull all the last 500 cars that were already in the factory that were already in build they left them a standard three door Cosmos and they basically just said right from the last card they currently forward 500 cars minus a couple that were already built as the prototypes that car is the first of the 500 production run from that car backwards they all go off to then they're transpired to tickford onto loaders as standard Radars and were converted by tickford Motors the engine were taken out all the Bodywork changes were made they did every single conversion on the car to turn it into an RS 500. I think some of that we've not mentioned yet is that the 500 was all solely road cars a lot of people think that a lot of the 500s became race cars yeah they do yeah good point um the race cars were not built out of road cars the reason for that is basically the only thing you would have used would have been the body shell and the engine you wouldn't have you and the intercool and pipe work so what race cars were always built out of Ford Motor Sport parts so Ford Motor Sport produced a lightweight body shell with no sunroof in it ready for teams to buy go and put in the workshop same weld it put a roll cage in it and all the group Parts the specific suspension past everything were all available through an RS dealer through a major deal you could go and buy everything so none of these that we know of would ever converted into full-blown group areas cars and I think the reason behind that is because obviously at 20 000 quid we've touched on it was a lot of money back in 87. you could build probably two a third of the car for that budget anywhere so for the amount of Parts you wouldn't use it wasn't worth it nothing last question that I'm obviously interested to wear on is as of now today where do you think these cars belong do they belong out on the road do they belong out in showrooms or people's collections where would you like to see these well I think we all like to see him on the road don't we there's nothing better than to see one on the road but I do fully understand people who buy them as collectors items when you're paying a hundred plus for a car it's difficult to use ain't it I I think that as the values rise we will see less and less of them we're starting to see less and less of the standard three doors now very rare you see him on the road and unfortunately as values rise I think we'll see less and less of them yeah but that's the way it is unfortunately yeah okay well I think that kind of rounds up our video today does it I think so if anybody has got any questions that you know we haven't covered anything we've missed by all means drop it in the comments and we will try and answer it for you but I think we've done our best to try and ensure the differences between the two cars and hopefully you might have learned a thing or two with a better look right well I think I've made my decision and I'm going to take that one in give us your money right well that's it then guys thanks very much as usual for tuning in um we'd really do appreciate it and hopefully you'll join us on our next video that Steve's already on with editing and putting together which we believe will be quite a big one on the paint process for the the race car we're building um so yeah keep a look out for that one and uh thanks again for watching we'll see on the next video yeah and one last thing I forgot to say was we would like to thank Kim um for allowing us to use his three door Cosworth and Conrad for the use of his RS 500 without the use of these cars we couldn't do these videos so thanks very much guys we appreciate it

Channel: Paul Linfoot

Views: 73,664

Keywords: #RS500 #Sierra #Ford #Cosworth #Tickford

Id: eWVgEHiImsk

Length: 37min 41sec (2261 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023