Pre production / early tubular exhaust manifolds

[Mark Follain]

I'm sure I read somewhere a long time ago that our cars where originally supposed to have a tubular exhaust manifold but they had issues? Just wondering if anyone knows the full story? ie I seem to remember that some cars were actually built with them? and that you could still order them from ford? is that true..

Just curious really , be interesting to know.

[S1 RST]

I got one of those on my car. Afaik no cars were built with these to be sold through dealers.
Our cars were indeed designed to have around 250 bhp, as needed to be more than the former escort cosworth. Niw i know couple people working at Lommel Proving Ground and they all tell me the same thing. Very near to final production two cars were ran at full throttle for a bit (nothing you can achieve on a normal road) like flat out for +5 mins in high speed oval. One caught fire due to the manifold getting red hot and being very close to other components in the engine bay. The other car had the paint blistering of the bonnet due to same heat issue,
because production was getting very near it seems ford opted for the easy repair and using a cast log style manifold insteadof the nicer more power friendly tubular manifold, this at the loss of quite some power.
Also because being very close to final production, one or more batches of the tubular manifold wee already produced. Thee had to be scrapped, but how things wen5 early 2000's quite a few got away and ended up on cars

cheeRs Chris

[klausmoster]

Hi,

I had the pleasure of talking to a guy involved in the Focus RS development process some years ago at a Ford event in Germany.
I no longer know his name, but the story he told was the same. One Focus RS caught fire, so they had to reduce the power.
I bought one of those tubular exhaust manifolds two or three years ago but have not installed it yet.

[mrsimmers]

IMG_0815.jpg IMG_0813.jpg

I have one of the JEK fabrications FMS manifolds on my car.

These are a replica of what was going to be fitted as standard. They were all individually numbered, mine is 10.