Ford's factory rally efforts began in earnest in 1978, entering the season with the Escort RS1800. Hannu Mikkola won the season-ending Lombard RAC Rally that year, and the team built on this form to win the 1979 World Rally Championship with Mikkola, Bjorn Waldegard and Ari Vatanen sharing victories in the Escort RS1800. Ford then stepped back from official factory participation for the 1980–1985 period, focusing development resources on the Escort RS 1700T, a programme that was cancelled in 1983, and subsequently the RS200.
Ford returned to WRC competition in 1986 with the RS200, a four-wheel-drive car powered by a turbocharged Cosworth BDT engine producing around 450 bhp. Swedish drivers Stig Blomqvist and Kalle Grundel led the works effort, but the season ended in tragedy when a RS200 driven by Joaquim Santos in Portugal left the road and killed three spectators. Ford withdrew from that event. Group B was banned for 1987, ending the RS200's competitive life after just one season, with Ford finishing fifth in the manufacturers standings.
The post-Group B era began with the Ford Sierra XR4x4 and Sierra RS Cosworth, neither of which proved a match for four-wheel-drive rivals. Results improved gradually through the late 1980s under drivers including Stig Blomqvist, Carlos Sainz, Didier Auriol and later Francois Delecour. Auriol gave Ford a memorable victory on the 1988 Tour de Corse in a Sierra RS Cosworth. In 1992, with Miki Biasion and Delecour driving, Ford accumulated 94 points and finished third in the manufacturers championship, their best result to that point in the post-Group B era.
Ford introduced the Escort RS Cosworth for the 1993 season. Delecour won the 1994 Monte Carlo Rally and Tommi Makinen took a second victory in Finland that year, giving the car a promising competitive record. Budget constraints in 1995 led Ford to contract their rally programme to RAS Sport of Belgium for that season rather than fielding a full factory effort. In 1996, Carlos Sainz joined on a full works contract and won the Indonesian Rally, but the ageing Escort RS Cosworth was approaching the end of its competitive life.
The 1997 season brought the Ford Escort WRC, now prepared by the M-Sport team in Cumbria rather than Ford's traditional Boreham facility. Sainz drove to third place in the drivers championship, and the team finished second in the manufacturers standings. The Escort WRC was replaced by the Ford Focus WRC for 1999, with Colin McRae joining as lead driver. McRae won the Safari Rally on the Focus's debut, becoming the first Ford driver to do so, and immediately followed with another victory in Portugal. Though reliability issues prevented a championship challenge that year, the Focus WRC proved the platform for Ford's most successful period.
Marcus Gronholm joined for 2006 from Peugeot, and alongside Mikko Hirvonen delivered Ford's first manufacturers championship since 1979, benefiting from Sebastien Loeb's mountain-biking injury mid-season that allowed the team to build an unassailable lead. Ford defended the constructors title in 2007, with Gronholm pushing Loeb to the final rounds of the drivers championship before the Finn announced his retirement from WRC. Hirvonen and Latvala continued the team's competitive form into 2008 and 2009, with Hirvonen finishing just one point behind Loeb in the 2009 drivers championship in one of the closest title finales of the era.
The 2011 season saw the Ford Fiesta RS WRC replace the ageing Focus. Hirvonen won the Swedish Rally on its debut, but the car proved unable to match Loeb's dominant Citroen outfit, and Ford finished second in the manufacturers championship, 27 points behind the champions. In 2012, Latvala and Petter Solberg drove the works Fiestas but the Blue Oval could again only achieve second in the manufacturers standings. At the end of the 2012 season, Ford announced it was ending its sponsorship of the M-Sport team, concluding a 17-year partnership and bringing down the curtain on Ford's factory World Rally Championship involvement. M-Sport continued to compete with the Ford Fiesta platform under Qatar sponsorship from 2013.
Across their decades of WRC involvement, Ford's factory team won two manufacturers championships (1979 and 2006) and came close to several more. The team helped establish several drivers' careers, most notably Colin McRae, who became the first driver to score 25 WRC victories while with the team, and the Escort RS Cosworth became one of the most recognisable rally cars of the 1990s. The M-Sport operation Ford built up in Cumbria went on to achieve further success independently, eventually returning as a factory-backed entry under the Ford Puma Rally1 in 2022.