Thousands of Irish men found work building Ford vehicles in the UK in times past, and many will be interested in these specially selected pictures to be released each week.
In 1901, two years before the creation of the company that still bears his name, Henry Ford won his first race. The developments pioneered by Ford in motor racing have often translated into better production cars, with today's race cars benefitting from past experience.
This week's image is of the British-built Ford V8 Pilot taking part in the Monte Carlo Rally. With the standard car weighing in at nearly one and a half tons, the Pilot was hardly the ideal race car. But in an era before space-age alloys and super-strong plastics, it was the weight of the Pilot that made it robust enough to take victories in 1950 at the Tulip and Lisbon rallies.
Advanced engineering means that the power-to-weight ratio of the 2011 Ford Fiesta RS WRC far exceeds the Fords of 50 years ago, as illustrated by Jari-Matti Latvala taking to the air in the 2011 Rally Italia Sardegna.
