FORD WRC / 100 Years
March 13, 2026How often have you stumbled into something you DEFINETLY weren't supposed to find on Ebay? I'm not talking about things that are obviously illegal, i'm more so talking about things that were either supposed to be kept behind closed doors that just so happened to wind up in an eager seller's hands so it can get shipped to god knows who and get the holder some sweet dough OR something that's so unspeakably rare that waiting for unprompted listings for it feels like it'll be bestowed upon your grandchildren?
Well, i reckon that if there were global leaderboards for how often people have had that experience, i'd be in the top 0.001%. The amount of ridiculous shit i find on Ebay that was never supposed to be shared is so high that it probably makes up over 50% of my overall collection.
Today, we've got something that falls into the latter category. I was able to pick up two CD's published by the car manufacturer Ford in May of 2001. I'm not sure if these were sold in shops or directly handed to advertising agencies, as even though there are similar CD's to this that were circulating around the time, i found another listing for another disc that supposedly follows this same format and there was a distinct lack of legal text on my discs compared to theirs.
When i put the discs into my portable CD Drive i was fully expecting them to just be a folder filled with screenshots, as i've dealt with press discs like this before and that's what the majority of them are.
However, i was greeted with something a lot more special.
Not only was there a smattering of over 200 pictures between the 2 discs, but the first one also had multiple word doccuments that went into detail about specific aspects of Ford's WRC team around that time. And the best part? They weren't just screenshot folders like i was expecting from the seller's photos. They were HTM Websites that were designed to run locally off the disc. (No, i didn't make a typo. They used HTM instead of HTML.)
They didn't work right out the box however, and this was mainly due to a coding oversight by whoever made the HTM's. Back in 2001, very few HTML viewers cared about the capitalisation of their directories. You could type the exact same path out with the caps lock having a seizure and nothing would change. However, a few years later more and more HTML viewers and Operating Systems would make case sensitive files a standard.
These discs CLEARLY weren't made with these in mind, because there are multiple instances of the wrong capitalisation being used on almost every single page. Changing all of these by hand would have taken me literal days because of how many pages there were, but luckily for me the majority of the capitalisation errors favoured one type of spelling over the other and aside from a few index pages i was able to fix all of the broken redirects by using automated tools such as Replx.io who i can't thank enough for probably saving me an entire week of my time. I hope the person who coded your site gets gifted a box of Celebrations.
Now, with these HTM sites fully operational, instead of uploading them to Archive.org, i thought it would be way cooler to put these previously disc locked sites back onto the internet. So i decided to register as a NeoCities supporter so i could open up multiple sites, and now both of the sites are fully operational once again. You can find the WRC site here and the historical site here.
For the cherry on top, around 90% of the contents for both of these websites were previously completely lost. I checked every single one of them with TinEye and only around 20 of the photos from both of the discs had already been posted online. I guess it's a good thing that i uploaded them to NeoCities thanks to their built in AI blockers then.
So yeah, i hope you enjoy this little slice of WRC history courtesy of my insane Ebay pulls.
This page was made on Friday the 13th. Fitting considering how Cinematic Ford's downfall was that season.