Top Car

60 TOPCAR.CO.ZA|January 20162016’s most wanted:FOCUS RSWENTYTHOUSANDdollars. Tothe Nitrous blue bundle of fury onthese pages that’s the cost of to olingthe brackets for a slightly thicker rearanti-roll ba r, beca use nothing in theexisting Ford parts bin was suitable.But moresignificantly, it’s thedifference between ‘a bar that’s goingto change the whole character of the car’ and a compromise.So says vehicle engineering manager Tyrone Johnson,explaining that it wasn’t a compromise he was prepared tomake. ‘You don’t ask for $20000 in mainstreamengineering,’ he says with a laug h, ‘becausethat is a bigdeal.’ But for the new Focus RS? Nothing was impossi ble.Almost ev erything ab out this third-generation Focus RSis extraordinary. Which is not the same as withoutlimits. As the man in charge is quick to point out, th erehad to be a business case for everything he and his teamchose to do; spen ding that $20k there meant $20k less tospen d elsewhere. But seriously – name another car thathas a four-whe el-drive system with a dedicated DriftMode? Ford has built one into a five-door family hatch,given it 257kW and stuck with a manual gearbox. If we’recurrently in the midst of a mega-h atch war, this thinglooks like a serious escalation.Can it possi bly be as good as the company claims? We’vespoken to both Johnson and Focus RS chief programmeengineer Jürgen Gagstatter, and cadged a passenger ride atFord’s Lommel Proving Grou nd in Belgium to try to findout. This is the story of the hot hatch of 2016.It’s been morethan three years in the making, and hasenjoyed support from right at the top since the start. ‘RajNair really wanted this car,’ Johnson says; Nair is Ford’s vicepres ident and chief technical officer. ‘He really wanted thiscar. We probably wouldn’t be sitting here without him.’This kind of cheerleading brings opportunities, but alsochallenges. There was no way Nair was going to let Johnsonengineer the RS only for Europe, which would have beeneasier , and cheaper, than taking it into America as well.Instead, they had to figure out a way to make it work withboth US and European safety regulations, and then comedown a single production line in Saarlouis, Germany,amongst every ot her European Focus. ‘This was very, verydifficult,’ he says. ‘Almost moving worlds.’To understand the scale of the challenge, you have tounderstand just how different the RS is to its ordinarybrethren – and that process starts with th e four-whe el-drivepowertrain. 257kW didn ’t emer ge out of the fog of war, so tospeak, as a frantic response to what Audi, Me rcedes andHonda were up to ; it’s been the figure from the beginning.But uprating the 2.3-litr e Ecoboost four from the 228kW itproduces in the Mu stang involved changing the turbo, thecyli nder liners, the intake system, the exhaust and thecyli nder head – the latter assisted by noneother thanCosworth. The intercooler is physically the biggest unit thatwill fit in a Focus, while the aggressive front bumper notonly contributes to the ‘zero lift’ aerodynamics target, itfeatures the largest possi ble cooling aperture and a grillewith greate r gaps in its mesh. Yet come the car’s debut at theGeneva motor show in March, when the output was dueto