The Ford Motor Company succesfully raced a Touring Car version of the MKII Capri throughout the early '70s. The "Cologne Capris" were built, prepared and raced by Ford's Competition Department in Koln, Germany and proved to be formidable challengers in the European Touring Car Championships.

The cars were finally withdrawn in 1975 following the closure of Cologne operation during the '73/'74 fuel crisis. The final race was on September 5th of that year with Jochen Mass at the Nurburgring. Meanwhile, Ford continued to be represented in the ETC and DRM by the Zakspeed-built Group 2 racing Escorts.

But by 1977, with the MKIII Capri model in production, it was decided to reintroduce the model to racing. However, with Cologne now closed Ford were not able to build the cars 'in-house'. Thus, after after arriving at an initial concept themselves, the company contracted Zakspeed to construct the cars.

The new racing Capri was to be a somewhat different beast to the Cologne Capris.

The MKIII had two key aerodynamic characteristics, a long body and steeply raked windscreen. Ford felt this would enable them to build a car that could beat Porsche and BMW in the newly created Group 5 "silhouette" formula.

With Gr.5 regulations, only the silhouette of the car above the wheel arches had to be maintained from the production model. The engine should be based on the production line unit and located along the same axis. Aside from this, pretty well any other mechanical or aerodynamic modifications were permitted. This afforded Ford-Cologne's competition department Chief Engineer, Thomas Ammerschlager and Zakspeed team chief Erich Zakowski a great deal of scope to produce a true racing car from the ground up.