How Ford put the boot into the Sierra

Back in 1987, Ford invested huge amounts into the Sierra Sapphire.

Remember it? The booted, four-door version of 1982’s ‘jellymould’? That car replaced the Cortina in spirit… but not in the eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Jones of Battersea.

To appease them, Ford changed every panel other than the roof. This saloon Sierra, alongside the five-door hatchback, was an 18-car range that would boost the Sierra’s share of the UK market by a boggling 8 percent.

Why? Because Ford would now be open to far more fleet car choice lists (back then, hatchbacks were a no-no for many fleets – can you imagine?!). This would see it increase market share, possibly closing to the 30 percent it held before Vauxhall and Austin-Rover got good.

(For comparison, massive recent gains by Ford have seen it edge closer to… 20 percent.)

Now, get rid of the big hole in the back of a hatch, explained top writer (the late) Jeff Daniels, and the car becomes stiffer. Enhanced, in the Sapphire’s case, by having a bonded-in rear windscreen. This meant the windscreen could also become bigger.

With a stiffer floorplan too, the ride had actually suffered, the engineers revealed to Daniels: there was now so (relatively) little flex in the chassis, so they had to take remedial action. By softening the suspension bushes, to soak up more grumbles at source.

Incidentally, the reason why Sapphires got fold-down rear seats – then, a rarity in saloons – was because of the hatchback roots. Ford chose not to fill in the gap in the rear bulkhead here, to save a bit of dosh…

Finite element analysis was in its infancy back then. I studied it at Brum Uni; even in 1997, we had to leave the computer running overnight to process. Lord knows how long it took Ford to do the Sierra’s mathematical model Ford refined on this iteration.

Meant they knew the exact force inputs, though, rather than having to predict them. Thus, the body engineers knew they’d get most benefit from floorpan stiffening, so upped sill strength, along with the crossmember running between them.

Ford’s level of detail extended even to the windows. These, revealed Daniels, were 15mm deeper, while the glass area itself was enlarged through squaring off the rounded corners of each window. Sounds simple: but ‘aint cheap. Ford saved cash by sharing the same doors on saloon and hatch, mind.

Much to the surprise of geeks, this – didn’t the Sapphire have doors that met the roof cleanly, rather than having a drip rail in the way, as on the hatch? They did indeed. But the doors were indeed identical. Cannily, developing the new body had allowed Ford to integrate the drip rail. The budget, nor the will, didn’t stretch to doing the hatch’s too.

There was one even more local change. UK Sapphire models got a tiny front grille, to differentiate them from the hatch. This wasn’t the case anywhere else in Europe – and meant yet another new set of tooling for our market alone. Blimey.

No wonder, really, that Ford forked out, to do the whole Sierra facelift/Sapphire introduction, £200 million. Big money back then. Eye-watering now. It also took no less than 1.5 million man hours…

Mind you, look at the detail of some of the things they had to do. Ford introduced a heated windscreen, for example. Great! Only, the switch for it took the slot previously reserved for the rear wash-wipe of the hatch and estate. There were no free ones left.

The engineers thus had to design an entirely new column stalk, just to accommodate a rear wash-wipe function.

Ah, how things were… mind you, as the Sapphire itself was a sticking plaster, maybe this shouldn’t be too surprising.

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