This Fully-Built '82 Ford Escort XR3 is the Ultimate European Restomod Project

At least, that's the quintessentially American way of building a restomod. But that's not to say Europeans can't build them, too. In fact, they have their own unique way of doing things. Just check out the latest creation from Tolman Engineering in the town of Marton in Warwickshire, England, if you want proof.

Ordinarily, Tolman Engineering specializes in restoring antique European sports cars to their former glory. Cars like the classic Lotus Elite, Peugeot 205 GTI, and the ultra-rare, Lotus-tuned Talbot Sunbeam have all been guests of honor at Tolman Engineering's home shop in England. They also work on the odd modern machine every now and then, like a Ferrari 458 and a Triumph Daytona racing bike. Safe to say, there isn't much built on the European continent that could legitimately stump the team working at Tolman Engineering. They're just the people who could take a timeless classic 1981 Ford Escort XR3 and make it look wicked once again.

As Ford's direct answer to the Volkswagen Golf GTI and the above-mentioned Peugeot 205 GTI, the Escort XR3 was one of the finest vehicles that Ford Europe ever devised. With a 1600cc four-cylinder engine under the hood, the Escort XR3 was faster than a Golf GTI in a straight line, although it wasn't quite as potent as the VW in tight corners. That's right, you can take the Ford out of America, but you can never take the American out of a Ford. From a certain point of view, the Escort XR3 was a bit like Europe's idea of a muscle car.

So many of these XR3s were modified up to the gills, turned into Escort RS Turbo clones, or left to rot in farms and inside sheds, rusting back into the ground from whence they came. Such was the condition this particular Escort XR3 found itself in when the car rolled into the Tolman Engineering for the first time. After 18 months of toil and sifting through countless boxes of new-old-stock Ford parts, what we see here before us is perhaps the most comprehensively restored Escort XR3 that exists in the United Kingdom at the moment.

"We truly enjoy finding ways to improve modern classics through our Tolman Edition program,” said Tolman Engineering's leading man, Chris Tolman. “We have to be more innovative, drawing on different networks and ways to find the harder to find parts and reproducing or restoring the ones you simply can’t buy. But it’s really satisfying to restore a car to factory specification, hunting down the near-impossible-to-find parts and ensuring it looks like we remember them." Congrats to Chris and his team on a positively phenomenal job well done.