Monday, 6 July 2026. Welcome back to another instalment of Cardle of the Day, the series where we play the daily puzzle over at Cardle and then spend a few hundred words celebrating whatever car the algorithm decided to throw at us.
If you haven’t played Cardle before, here’s the short version: each day, one car is hidden behind a heavily cropped photograph. You get up to five progressively wider reveals, and at each stage you can either take your guess or skip through to the next clue. It sounds simple, but it isn’t always, especially when the first clue looks like that.
Today’s puzzle was a proper test. Clue one offered almost nothing, and as the next clues opened things up, I quickly realised it was going to be one of those “argh, of course!” ones. By clue three, I knew the brand and possibly the model, but it was clear I was never going to get the trim level right. Someone please get Dave here.
It was clue five that finally gave the game away, at last. And while pretty much every single element about this car was reused for something I remember from back home, this model specifically was new to me: the Ford Fiesta XR2.
I only knew of XR3s until this moment
The XR2 arrived in 1981, slotting into the original Mk1 Fiesta bodyshell with a 1.6-litre Kent crossflow engine producing around 84 bhp. It wasn’t the most powerful hot hatch of its era, but it was light, nimble, and attainable – the perfect Euro hot hatch formula. Ford priced it to sell, and sell it did.
The second-generation XR2, based on the Mk2 Fiesta and introduced in 1984, is the version most people picture: the flared arches, the deep front spoiler, the alloy wheels that looked enormous by mid-eighties standards. It became a fixture of British car culture in a way that’s difficult to overstate. By the time the Mk3-based XR2i replaced it in 1989, the XR2 nameplate had already earned its place in the popular imagination.
The XR2 occupies a particular kind of nostalgia. These were cars that got driven hard, insured expensively, and loved fiercely by a generation of young drivers who couldn’t afford anything more exotic. Clean examples are now genuinely sought after, and the values of well-preserved Mk2 XR2s have climbed steadily as the cars approach their fortieth birthdays and people (like myself) gravitate more and more towards hot hatchbacks. See you tomorrow!
