Second Hand XR5

Hey. My mates looking at getting a second hand XR5. Apart from the usual, what should he look out for?

Cheers

On a standard XR5, the clutch, gearbox and diff should be fine. On a car with a few performance mods clutch slip may be a problem. Best way to see if it's ok is to drive it on the highway say at about 90kmh, put it in 6th and give it full throttle. It will be fairly obvious if the clutch starts slipping in this scenario. I think I have only ever heard of one or two gearboxes ever having failed and one of those was during motorsport use. If anything is going to break on them, it is ususally a driveshaft... but only from abuse.
 
Some of the earlier XR5's had dodgy power steering hose clamps which sometimes failed... this was a standard fix Ford performed during a regular service though.
 
Another issue some earlier cars had was noisy driveshafts, where there was some play between driveshaft splines/CV joints. Many would have been fixed by Ford etc.
 
All in all they are very good cars with very little in the way of common issues, but there are always exceptions to the rules and you do hear the odd one off case of something failing on a car for no aparent reason.
 
As mud said, if you want to find out more about the XR5, probably best to jump on to fordxr5turbo.com, as there is a stack of info on there.