Parental Photos Matt Woods GUIDANCE

There’s a fairly solid case to be made for the late 1980s being among the most exciting and innovative periods in the history of top-tier motorsport. Back then car makers thought little of committing to multi-million-pound motorsport programmes, propped up by lashings of tobacco megabucks and the overwhelming belief in the age-old mantra of ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.’

One man with a better appreciation for the era and all it entailed than most is Chris Spooner, son of the founder of famed Ford Motorsport specialists, Gordon Spooner Engineering, and a man who began his professional association with fast Fords bang, smack in the late 1980s.

“I was serving my apprenticeship with GSE back then which largely consisted of messing about with the glut of RS200s leftover from the