So long as you stay out of the APC aisle at Pep Boys, I think fiddling with an Escort is fairly intriguing. Do whatever floats your boat regardless of what anyone else tells you. There is decent potential for a quick sleeper out of that Escort. A guy in the Ford Tech forum has a later model 4-door Escort (2.0l SPI) which is suprisingly quick for having hardly anything done to it. Think he is still piecing together a budget turbo setup.