A track is not the "natural" environment of this type of car. Cars designed for rallying perform best on roads with irregular surfaces and important level variations. These cars have important suspension travel in order to deal with these situations. As you can see in the pictures and movies below the car, when driven on a track, displays significant body-roll which negatively affects its cornering limits. All the same it is able to score very good times mainly due to the very efficient corner extraction phase and excellent traction.

On street-legal Pirelli PZero tires the car is 2 seconds slower (average speed 105Km/h) around the track than a tweaked Porsche GT3 (average speed 108Km/h) also on street-legal tires. The Escort could beat the GT3 with a more accurate suspension adjustment...