Ford will return to the World Rally Championship with a full factory works team in 2028, 16 years after withdrawing from top-flight rallying.
It will compete in the series as a manufacturer, as it did from 1978 to 2012, in partnership with Cumbria-based M-Sport, which has been running the Ford World Rally Team as a privateer with technical support from Ford.
The return to WRC fills one of very few gaps in Ford's global motorsport coverage. Its participation in Formula 1, the World Endurance Championship, the IMSA Sports Car Championship, the Dakar Rally, Nascar and more makes it one of the best-represented mainstream manufacturers on the global racing scene.
This also comes as Ford channels its rallying heritage in the design and dynamics of a new range of European-market cars, which is set to include successors to the Fiesta and Focus, which played such a pivotal role in Ford's historic rallying success.
Ford said the "performance and technical skills required to compete in WRC will help shape" this new line-up of road cars and reiterated that they will "blend off-road DNA with rally-bred heritage".
Importantly, the company added, building experience in engineering rally cars will help its road cars to "master the perfectly imperfect roads of Europe".
Ford's European boss Jim Baumbick said: "You can't fake it on Europe’s roads, which is why a car’s responsiveness and handling matters. The WRC is the ultimate proving ground for control and driver engagement, and that is the exact spirit and lessons learned we are injecting into our next generation of passenger vehicles.”
Speaking to reporters ahead of the announcement, Baumbick emphasised Ford's ambition to tangibly link its road and rally car development programmes - not just for engineering reasons but also to bolster the enthusiast credentials and characters of its customer models.
"For Ford, we talk about 'rally-bred', but this is not just a marketing buzzword. Our general view, our philosophy, is that we're going to make a promise to our customers to wire in the emotion, the soul, the responsiveness and capability that rally brings, and we need to prove it in the places that matter most," he said.
