1986 Ford XR2

This car has been restored not once, but twice. There is detail in the car’s history folder of a considerable program of works in 1999 when the shell was stripped, repaired and re-painted, but another 20 years on the car needed doing again.

It was in the possession of the vendor’s friend on the Isle of Wight. He’d started the work but conceded he wouldn’t get round to finishing it, and sold it to Doug, our vendor, as an ongoing project. Doug committed to another body restoration and much more besides, with the work performed by another friend on an informal basis, which means there are photographs of the process but no official bills and receipts in the file.

It’s now in mint condition, wearing its original shade of red and sporting an excellent interior sourced from another car. Doug has decided to sell it as part of a major downsizing to his collection. As he says, he has too many cars (into double figures) and it’s going to be last in, first out.

He drove it up from the Isle of Wight to our premises in Oxfordshire and was delighted with how well it went, romping down the outside lane at speeds we shouldn’t mention but feeling quite relaxed in that high fifth gear. It’s on the button, with an MoT until March next year, and just needs someone new to enjoy it.

It looks a lovely paint job, this, with all the right black XR2 exterior trim to contrast with it. The shine is clear, even and reflective, as you’d expect from a car only recently out of the paint shop.

The panel gaps and door fit look good, which is to say ‘slightly better than Ford managed when these were new’. Indeed, it all looks at least as good as new, right down to the smart new numberplates, windscreen wipers (front and rear) and the immaculate lamp lenses and reflectors. The pinstripe along each side and rear ‘Fiesta XR2’ decals are not present.

The pepperpot alloy wheels have been refurbished and fitted with new Yokohama A539s in the correct 185/60 HR13 size. And that’s about it…everywhere you look, it’s as minty as a bottle of Crème de Menthe.

If the outside looks new, we’ll say the inside looks just a year or two old. The seats and doorcards are in excellent shape but if you’ll look closely you’ll see that the driver’s right-hand bolster is showing a tiny bit of wear. Indeed, it may have had a repair to the seam.

Elsewhere, it’s almost perfect. The 60-40 split rear seats look unused and the carpets are clean and neatly fitted everywhere. That other bugbear of 1980s Fords, broken plastic trim that’s hard to source, is no issue here as the dash features no cracks, splits or other damage to mouldings and switchgear.

Everything works, says Doug, bar the radio-cassette which is merely resting in the DIN aperture and never got wired up. It’s an Ebay find of the right sort of era but Doug never got round to testing it, so its condition is unknown. One very mid-Eighties feature to enjoy is the little digital clock in its ceiling-pounted pod, just there between the sun visors.

In the boot, the carpet lining is in good nick but drooping away from the inner wing on either side – an easy fix if you want to be neater. Underneath the boot floor is a spare wheel well containing another refurbished pepperpot alloy. This area, like the rest of the shell, is wearing a nice coat of red paint and looks sound.

Before we start it up, come underneath and have a look at this – it’s all as smart as the topside of the car! A great deal looks to have been renewed, including the exhaust and fuel tank but also handbrake cable, pipes, brake lines, bushes, gaiters and so on. Suspension and steering components have been refinished in black while the Fiesta’s shell wears the same red as the topside, here sprayed over a protective stone-chip or underseal product.

The engine bay is beautifully presented in the way you only get from stripping everything out, painting the structure and reinstalling it all. Both paint and stickers are there in the right places and once again, it feels like peering at a new car.

Sure enough, it starts like one and revs eagerly, though the rev counter on the dash is a little temperamental and the fuel gauge has been reading correctly one moment, then dipping again, suggesting a loose wire somewhere. But the car drives very nicely and eagerly, steering and stopping as it should.

There is an old service book showing stamps up to 1996, when the car had covered 78,600 miles. We assume the dash cluster or speedo internals were replaced with a second-hand unit as part of the 1999 restoration, because by the time it was MoT’d in 2007 it was showing just 44,907 miles, which has since risen (supported by old MoTs) to just under 57,000.

As mentioned above, there are no bills or receipts for the recent work but there is a printed list of the jobs from 1999, supplied by the garage in Lancashire that performed them. As well as this we have sundry receipts for service items dating between then and now. There is a collection of old tax discs, two keys and a few recent MoT certificates, included the one from March this year that saw the correction of various small failures to do with headlamp aim, indicators etc.

An RAC Vehicle History Check performed this year reveals a reassuring column of green results, so it seems there’s nothing nasty lurking in the car’s past.

Beware: buy this car and everyone will want to have a go. Not just a go in the passenger seat, but a turn behind the wheel. It has that irresistible grin-factor that’s been ironed out of modern cars almost entirely.

That, and our estimate of £8000 to £12,000, makes this car amazing value. And while we can’t add up exactly what was spent on the recent restoration, anyone who’s had a car restored will know that you couldn’t get another one done for this price.

What would we change? Hardly anything. We might add the pinstripe and rear decals, then wire up the radio-cassette, fill the tank with petrol and start using it. Because it’s this car’s useability that really makes it an attractive buy: you wouldn’t leave an Escort Twin-Cam in the supermarket car park, you wouldn’t commute through city traffic in a 3-litre Capri and you wouldn’t use an Anglia for a three-hour motorway run, but the XR2 will do everything without stressing you out. After all, what good is a classic car you never use?

Viewing is always encouraged and as stated this car is located at THE MARKET headquarters near Abingdon; we are open Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm and to arrange an appointment please use the ‘Contact Seller’ button at the top of the listing to make an appointment. Feel free to ask any questions or make observations in the comments section below, or try our ‘Frequently Asked Questions’.