Capri RS3100 auction ending

A 1974 Ford Capri RS3100 is sitting in a live online auction right now, and the window is short: Evoke Classics lists it as lot 1420 with anti-sniping rules that extend bidding by 2 minutes if a bid lands in the last 2 minutes. This is not just an old Capri with stripes. Evoke says it is one of 250 RS3100s built, finished in Olympic Blue, showing 57,226 miles, and described as having had a full nut-and-bolt rebuild by a marque specialist. The reason collectors care starts with one word: homologation. In 1970s touring-car racing, manufacturers had to build a road-going batch of cars before the racing version could use certain parts, so companies made short-run “street legal” specials as a ticket into competition. Ford built the Capri RS3100 to answer BMW’s 3.0 CSL in the European Touring Car Championship after the earlier Capri RS2600 had stopped dominating. Supercar Nostalgia says Ford approved the uprated Capri on September 25, 1973, and shaped it around a bigger engine and a spoiler package that could unlock more aggressive race-car specs. The road car itself was a lightly disguised rules document. The Ford RS Owners Club says the RS3100 used an overbored Essex V6 at 3,091 cubic centimeters, made 148 brake horsepower, hit about 124 miles per hour, and reached 60 miles per hour in roughly 8 seconds. The part everybody remembers is the rear spoiler. The Ford RS Owners Club says the RS3100’s ducktail was not decoration but a stability fix developed for motorsport, which is why the car looks like a Capri wearing race gear even when parked. The production run was tiny even by special-edition standards. The Ford RS Owners Club says all 250 were built at Halewood in November 1973, while Supercar Nostalgia says Ford only needed 100 evolution-type cars for homologation but commissioned 250, all in right-hand drive. That timing made the car rare and awkward at the same time. The Ford RS Owners Club says the new Mark Two Capri was already close, the 1973 oil crisis had hit, the price was nearly £2,500, and 50 unsold cars were later exported to Australia in 1974. The racing paperwork is still traceable. The International Automobile Federation historic database lists the Ford Capri RS 3100 under homologation number 1660, Group 2, with a homologation date of March 2, 1974. That is why an auction like this gets attention fast: you are not looking at a common Capri in a loud color, but at a road car built so Ford could go racing, from a run of 250, now offered as a rebuilt example through a live sale with the clock already down to the final stretch.