As the summer of 2001 approached, the four MCs and two DJs of Jurassic 5 dropped what would go on to be their biggest track, ‘What’s Golden’, a hip-hop ode to doing things ‘old-school’ and espousing their commitment to staying true to that very cause.
Superficially, that could come across as a carelessly literal and painfully tedious link to the Benson & Hedges gold hue that flows across the jelly-mould curves of the Sierra Cosworth draped across these pages. But if we dig a little deeper and consider the iconic Ford touring car in its current context, these two entities share a little more than you might think.
It’s been some 34 years since this Sierra first hit the track, racing among the Group A era on Australian soil. The motorsport landscape was a vastly different place, especially where these production-derived touring cars took to their tarmac battlefields in pursuit of glory. For plenty of motorsport pundits and students of touring car history, the argument for a ’golden era’ resonates. It’s an exclamation of ‘realness’, highlighting an era where touring cars echoed their showroom counterparts and were not simply a silhouette formula.
This ‘authenticity’ lives on in the form of Historic Touring Car racing. Car owners could be construed more as custodians rather than outright masters of their machines. Like the aforementioned hip-hop hit, the cars represent the way things were, and the
