Motoring: Ford Focus

Bloody hell, the noise! If you were stupid enough to close your eyes at these speeds, you’d swear you were in a fighter plane. When you put your foot to the floor, the turbo sucks in air, spools up and releases power like you just hit the afterburner. This car is brilliant.
This car is an instant classic that will go down in history for resetting the benchmark in so many areas. This car is… a Ford Focus.
Of course, this is no ordinary Focus. It’s the wildest, most powerful and most advanced version ever to terrorise Australian roads—it’s the Ford Focus RS.
Inspired by the Focus World Rally Car, the RS packs a 2.5-litre, five-cylinder, turbocharged engine that pumps out a staggering 224kW of power and 440Nm of torque. But the really impressive part is that all of this performance is transmitted to the tarmac via the front wheels.

FRONT-WHEEL POWERHOUSE
Never before has a hot hatch had so much power going through just the front wheels and still been any good to drive. Plenty of manufacturers have tried to achieve such a thing, but all have failed.
That’s because so much power overwhelms front tyres that are already busy trying to do the steering and the majority of the braking work. The end result is the driver has to wrestle with the steering wheel every time he tries to pour on the power; or torque-steer as it is infamously known in the business.
Getting the suspension and steering set-up perfected to eliminate torque-steer is the holy grail of car engineers around the world. Up until now, there have been only two cures: less power or all-wheel drive. But Ford’s crack squad of engineers at Team RS refused to compromise.
“Front-wheel drive was our preference all along,” says Dirk Densing, Team RS chief engineer. “All-wheel drive systems add cost, weight, inertia and, consequently, fuel consumption. Compensating for the significant weight of an AWD system requires dynamic compromises we preferred not to make.”

RALLY GOOD IDEA
The answer to their conundrum came from Ford’s Research and Advanced Engineering Team that had helped develop the suspension on the Focus World Rally Car. They had already developed a system for diesel engines called RevoKnuckle, which worked to minimise torque-steer.
Without descending into too much technical detail, RevoKnuckle is a complex set-up that uses two joined pieces of suspension to provide a seemingly contradictory combination of control and flexibility at the same time. The bottom line is that it works. As you exit a corner and nail the throttle, the RevoKnuckle allows you to feel just a gentle tugging on the steering wheel as all 224kW are unleashed.
Without the system, a hot hatch with this much power would throw you into the nearest tree if you dared give the accelerator a prod.

ALL-ROUND PERFORMER
But RevoKnuckle is just part of what makes the Focus RS such a great car. The knock-on effect of sticking with front-wheel drive is the most brilliant and direct steering of any hot hatch, or just about any car for that matter. The steering is so quick to respond that you need to readjust your brain after you’ve been driving other cars.
Before you get to the corner, though, the strong brakes will bite hard and pull you up with ease. And they keep doing it again and again. Then there’s the engine. Aside from sounding like it belongs in an FA-18, it pulls so hard and fast that the car accelerates like a jet. There’s a slight hesitation as the engine inhales
the air it needs, but then the turbo spools up and the power is unleashed with a bang. How well does it handle corners, you ask? Well, it outperformed Ford’s GT supercar around the company’s proving ground.

GOING FAST
Of course, this level of performance requires a look to match and the Focus RS is one of the most in-your-face hot hatches. The bodykit looks as if it was pulled straight from the World Rally Car. There are big flared wheel arches, vents on the bonnet and flanks, and that huge rear wing. Subtle is not a word that comes
to mind when describing this car. While the Focus RS is fantastic to drive and pleasing to the eye, there is a catch—the price. Even though the car is based on a rather plain and ageing hatchback (the interior is a bit of a let-down), the added performance means you have to hand over $59,990 to get your hands on it.
If you can find one, that is. Ford Australia brought in just 315 examples of the Focus RS, to help justify the price and to provide appeal to collectors. And it worked—almost all of the cars are spoken for, with some already headed for storage, to be rolled out and auctioned to the highest bidder in years to come.
Which is a travesty, really, because a car as good as the Focus RS deserves to be driven. And driven hard.