Ready For Love - Mk3 Fiesta

I fully support you doing this, I've been struggling with the main page of the forum lately which has felt a bit cluttered with meaningless dross, burying the more interesting articles. It's the time of year, it happens every year while we're waiting for show season to fire up again... anyway, for fear I too get bogged down in meaningless dross by whinging about it I'll veer back on topic.

The Mk3 Fiesta, particuarly the pov-spec ones, has all the retro hallmarks you'd want. Easy to work on, cheap to acquire, often owned by the elderly so tidy low mileage are still out there and just in that sweet spot where they're usually overlooked in favour of more popular models. They have the added bonus of being quite practical and economical if you're only able to have one car and make an ideal starter retro for that reason if no other.

A very, very brief look at Google Images demonstrates that people are already doing their own thing to these little hatchbacks and the variety of modifications is encouraging.

Like it or not, this style is also now old enough to be considered for retro resurgence. There's enough good examples of people building cars with flip paint, body kits and soft spoke alloys in ways that have benefited from the passage of time for it to look really quite good now.


If you want to take it that bit further, even wide body styles can work on the Mk3.


Take a bit of inspiration from another hot-hatch, the Lancia Y10, and combine it with a more contemporary love of carbon fibre and that staple of chunky Fiesta three spokes and you get this sort of thing.


Or go totally the other way. Who cares about shiny paint and appealing aesthetics when these cars are still cheap enough that you can just have fun with it and do something ridiculous?



The Mk3 Fiesta is ripe for the picking!

I don't think I have any photos of mine either.
I do also remember always wanting an SI with big bumpers, but I could never justify the expensive insurance on a such a cheap car.

Fuel filler rot, floor pans, sills, bulkhead rot... then there's the fact that they are just a cheap little disposable hack to most people and the Ka was a better proposition for some and they just stopped being visible. I'm trying to remember when I last saw one in the wild, I thought I'd seen one in December last year but that turned out to be a Mk4 when I checked my photos which is close, but no cigar.

******************warning the following post contains images of a bygone era that may alarm or cause distress****************



Still got my first ever car (well it was my mums until I modified it!) K reg 5dr 1.1 Fiesta LX on a carb. Loved that thing to death, spent thousands on it (in keeping with the trend at the time 2001)
Was rolling on 17" Wolfrace Dragons, body kit, custom lights, angel eyes, buckets, badboy bonnet, 4" back box, K&N, grooved discs, subs etc etc.



How she currently looks

In theory it was replaced by the Ax Gti but reality is I couldn't part with her so sold some bits off, transferred some to the Ax so now she sits in a lock up quietly on 106 rallye steelies with a rotten lower arch panel, full Si interior just waiting for some attention..... one day it'll be back on the road I believe. Was last driven on the road 2008 for work as my work car died!

My stepdaughters boyfriend, Mandingo, used to drive one of these. It failed it's last mot big time and he scrapped it for £50. This was about 2 years ago. Weird thing is, there used to be 2 in the same colour round here, both parking nearby, so I could never tell if it was his car or the other one if I was passing. Both disappeared around the same time. It's quite rare to see one now.

Good idea this, finding the rising prices of all the cars I like a bit depressing. Profiling some more affordable motors might help get some mojo back!
Whilst lots of the seventies stuff is getting pricey, some of the new cars I lusted after as a teen are crazy cheap now- 90s Beemers, 306 convertibles, etc etc they'll all be gone soon if no-one loves them now!

I was wondering, in my newly-discovered speedster lust, whether it could work on Mk3 Fiesta. That red convertible in the OP suggests it definitely would...

Not really a Ford guy but my wife had a green SI as her 1st car which we bought off a hood rat for £200. Was a good little car, loved the interior, great seats. Not very popular tuning wise but looked great with big bore exhaust and smoothed boot lid. Forgot all about it until a lad down the road got one in blue recently.

I've had a couple of Mk3s - an XR2i and an RS1800. They were... not good cars. Not by a long way.
(Just personal opinion, of course!)

Totally with you on their earned place in the retro firmament though, WillCarter. Plenty of similarly uninspiring cars have became desirable in spite of their flaws, and I very much appreciate a well done Mk3. There's a lot of beautifully put-together examples out there. And that quad-spotlight front bumper was one of the coolest things to emerge from the 1990s. I just, er, wouldn't want to live with a Mk3...