Timing belt OEM FORD or Gates

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a Gates timing belt.

Gates makes the best timing belts.

I have the gates kevlar belt. It's great.

Just had a Gates one put on, no complaints here. One note to mention is that the water pump pulley seems to sometimes not seat on to the shaft perfectly. When mine got done I noticed that the pump pulley wobbled around excessively. The shop took it back, removed the belt, retorqued and all was good. The technician said that weird lining up with a pump pulley is a Honda thing, never knew that fiestas had that too.

i have a blue gates belt on my m20, its a good belt

I’ve always worked on Miata’s, but I’ve never used anything other than gates timing belt and water pumps. Only time I’ve had a gates timing belt fail on me was due to my own fault in which the belt was rubbing on the timing covers until it got caught and ripped a chunk out of it. Even without that chunk it still ran and drove fine while revving the engine 1000rpms past its intended revlimiter.

I've been using a Gates belt on my weekend toy for the past 5,000 hard, abusive miles with no catastrophic failure. I did have their water pump fail internally in under 1,000 miles. Replaced with Subaru OEM.

If it has been done they are actually a good engine when working fine. Plenty of torque and good on fuel. It’s just the reliability of them that’s the major issue. They switched to a timing chain from the wet belt from 2018 for a good reason. The 1.2 turbo engines from PSA are also wet belts and also switched to a chain around 2023. They are a terrible design and simply not going to be economical to maintain properly as the car ages.

Personally I use the gates blue racing T-belt, I've had a belt snap prematurely and it was within a few months of owning my e30. Belt was only 4 or 5 years old too.

One this I did notice. Your belt is a gates t240, when I bought my truck the previous owner had that belt, and I found issues with it. The proper belt for mine is a gates T154. 154 being for 92 and earlier and 240 for 93 and up.