Supercar servicing for Ford owners

The company that has enjoyed a long association with Ford Australia managing race teams and building performance passenger cars and utes has now diversified into fixed-price servicing for Fords sold new from 2015.

Two facilities – branded Tickford Enhancement Centres – take care of the vehicle servicing for customers located in Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney premises, at Unit 7, 145 Powers Road, Seven Hills, has only opened recently.

According to the company, the service is carried out in accordance with the owner's manual for the car and pricing starts from $440. Bookings can be made by phone (1800 842 536) or online.

Tickford will service the following vehicles: Mustang, Ranger, Everest, Raptor, Focus, Mondeo, EcoSport, Endura, Escape and Transit. Even though Ford Australia was still in the business of building the Falcon and its derivatives in the northern suburbs of Melbourne until October 2016, the locally-built large car is not one explicitly listed by Tickford on the company's service schedule. Maybe the Falcon (and Territory SUV) fall under the umbrella of 'Other'.

Tickford has enjoyed a long association with Ford Australia, beginning with its tweaking of the EB Falcon S-XR6 in the early 1990s. The company's involvement with Ford and the Falcon continued through the 90s and blossomed into FTE ('Ford Tickford Experience') with the introduction of the 1998 AU Falcon.

Following the replacement of the AU Falcon with the BA model in 2002, FTE morphed into FPV ('Ford Performance Vehicles'). By this time Tickford – a UK company with a history that predated the development of the motor car – had been acquired by Prodrive.

FPV continued building performance Falcons (and the F6X based on the Territory) until 2012, when Ford acquired the intellectual property of FPV from Prodrive and began building performance Falcons in-house. It was a prelude to Ford's 2013 announcement it was closing its local manufacturing bases and ending production of Falcon and Territory.

During the period Prodrive was building performance Falcons under the FPV banner, it was also running Ford Performance Racing in the (formerly V8) Supercars category. FPR was disbanded in 2013, by which time Prodrive had on-sold Tickford, but the historic name recently made a return as a company enhancing Ford Ranger and Mustang models.