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Originally Posted by KA
The one-offs are one of the things I've always found interesting in touring car racing, and there were quite a few of them over the Group A period. The Mark 3 Escort you mentioned- if that's the car that appeared at Bathurst 86, then I think it was an ex-BTCC car- the Mk3 in RS1600i and RS Turbo form was fairly common in Group A in the UK and Europe
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Yes, the RS1600i was the car to beat in the 1600cc class for the first few years of Grp A, certainly in Britain, and was usually up against various Golf GTi's across Europe, before the Corolla GT16 and FX model came in.
Later there was an extremely rapid PG Tips backed Honda Civic but it only ran for one year before Grp A was replaced by supertouring in Britain at the end of 1989.
Other interesting and less prolific British series Grp A cars, in terms of numbers at least, that were around at the same time as the Supra were the Opel Monza in the big class, Graham Goode's Datsun/Nissan Bluebird Turbo and John Morris' VW Scirroco, neither of which reached their full potential I suspect due to the lack of readily available funding and homologated bits.
John Morris later leased or bought one of the Celica Supra's to run in 1986 but IIRC it only entered a couple of rounds and didn't qualify for the Silverstone TT that year.
Also in the middle class class were the amazing Metro Turbo's which certainly did receive the right bits, but didn't go onto achieve the class success they most surely would've because of ARG's withdrawal mif way through '84.
There was also a Mazda 929 that ran in Holland and some ETC events which would also have been in the upto 2500cc class.