The last Healey

As you've probably guessed by now, I am a self-confessed car geek. I pride myself on my knowledge of obscure cars as they are one of the few things in life I am really passionate about, so when I come across something I had never heard of before, curiosity always gets the better of me and I have to find out all about it. As my first car was a Mark 1 Ford Fiesta I naturally have a sentimental attraction to them and it always pleases me to see one, but surely everyone knows what a Fiesta is and it can hardly be considered even remotely obscure. How many of you are aware however that the Mark 1 was sold in the USA and along the way has a surprising connection with a famous British sports car manufacturer? I certainly wasn't until I recently stumbled across the car in question...

A Ford Fiesta but not as we know it

The Fiesta was one of several European models imported by Ford USA to fill small niches in their range, and although built in Cologne the US-market cars differed significantly from those sold in Europe. Instead of the usual 950cc or 1.1-litre Valencia engines, under the bonnet (or hood) sat the 1.6 Kent from the Escort and Cortina, strangled with emissions control equipment to produce a paltry 66bhp, and air conditioning was an option, something never available on European Fiestas. Externally, the US model took on a quite different and rather ugly appearance with round sealed-beam headlamps, side marker lights and the massive, hideous impact-absorbing bumpers mandated by federal law.

As a company, Healey couldn't really be more different from Ford. A small family firm run by Donald Healey and his son Geoffrey, it was known for manufacturing traditional British sports cars sold under the Austin-Healey and later Jensen Healey names. Think of Healey and you will probably think of either the cute little Frogeye Sprite or the Big Healeys of the sixties, so what have they got to do with American Fiestas? Read on and all will become clear...

A standard US-spec Mark 1 Fiesta. It ain't pretty...
(By Mr.choppers (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons)

The idea for this car came not from Ford or Healey, but from a Detroit-based company called the Marketing Corporation of America, whose founder Gary Kohs felt that a sporty Fiesta would make a good successor to the Mini Cooper in the US. Kohs managed to convince Ford to build a prototype and suggested Healey Automotive Consultants as the ideal company to develop it, being a name known and respected in America for sports cars. Donald and Geoff Healey were keen to get involved, and some time in 1978 a white US-spec Fiesta was delivered from Germany to Healey's workshop in Warwick and began its transformation into what we would now call a hot hatch.

Broadspeed Tuning set to work on the engine, removing all the emissions junk and tweaking it to a similar state of tune to the Escort Mexico, with an estimated power output of around 105bhp that was a significant increase on the standard Fiesta's pathetic 66. Externally, Healey fitted large Minilite wheels under heavily flared arches, square headlamps and a big front air dam before painting it in British Racing Green with extensive and rather gaudy yellow pinstriping, and the interior featured bucket seats and a roll cage. All these changes on top of the US-market differences meant the Healey Fiesta looked really quite unlike the familiar European model, and our own sporty version, the XR2, was very different in concept.

Flared arches and air dam hint at the car's Healey heritage

The car was tested by Road & Track magazine and given a favourable review, and toured all the major American motorshows in 1978-79, but intentions to produce a limited run were scuppered when Ford USA decided to stop importing the Fiesta. Although the Mark 1 continued in Europe until 1983 and then gave way to the Mark 2, in the US it was replaced for the 1981 model year by the new Michigan-built Escort, which had been developed as part of the same programme as the European Mark 3 Escort but ended up having very little in common with it. The Healey Fiesta remained a one-off and no other cars have worn the Healey badge since.

So what happened to the prototype and how come I saw it here in the UK near my home town? It languished at the Dearborn factory for a short time and was then sold on, passing through three enthusiast owners in the US and latterly being loaned to the Healey Museum in the Netherlands. The car appears to have come to the UK in late 2014 and now resides in Bedfordshire in the hands of a die-hard Healey fan who also owns the very first Healey car; it is UK-registered as YNF 650S and fully road-legal so it is driven to events. It was a surprise and to me a star attraction at the annual New Year's Day 'Vintage Stony' show in Stony Stratford: from a distance I recognised it as a Mark 1 Fiesta but with some strange and unfamiliar differences that needed closer inspection. At first glance it may look like an ordinary Fiesta that has been badly customised, but the information board provided the full story of this little-known final car to wear the famous Healey badge.

Those hideous bumpers were standard fit on all US-spec Fiestas and do nothing for its appearance

While there is plenty of information about the Healey Fiesta on the internet, inevitably given that it is an American car that spent most of its life in the US, these articles are written by Americans from the American perspective of the Fiesta being a rare imported novelty that was only sold there for three years, and there have been no major features since the car arrived in the UK. From the British point of view, where the Fiesta is a familiar everyday car that everyone knows, the American Healey Fiesta is even more unusual, not just for the Healey connection but also for the differences from European spec, and not something I had any knowledge of until now. Ask a British enthusiast what the last Healey was and they will probably suggest the Jensen Healey of the mid-seventies, but now you know the truth: it was actually a one-off hot hatch based on an obscure American version of a popular European supermini. Whoever would have thought of something so unlikely?