Top Car

60 TOPCAR.CO.ZA|January 2016

2016’s most wanted:FOCUS RS

WENTYTHOUSANDdollars. To

the Nitrous blue bundle of fury on

these pages that’s the cost of to oling

the brackets for a slightly thicker rear

anti-roll ba r, beca use nothing in the

existing Ford parts bin was suitable.

But moresignificantly, it’s the

difference between ‘a bar that’s going

to 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 to

make. ‘You don’t ask for $20000 in mainstream

engineering,’ he says with a laug h, ‘becausethat is a big

deal.’ But for the new Focus RS? Nothing was impossi ble.

Almost ev erything ab out this third-generation Focus RS

is extraordinary. Which is not the same as without

limits. As the man in charge is quick to point out, th ere

had to be a business case for everything he and his team

chose to do; spen ding that $20k there meant $20k less to

spen d elsewhere. But seriously – name another car that

has a four-whe el-drive system with a dedicated Drift

Mode? Ford has built one into a five-door family hatch,

given it 257kW and stuck with a manual gearbox. If we’re

currently in the midst of a mega-h atch war, this thing

looks like a serious escalation.

Can it possi bly be as good as the company claims? We’ve

spoken to both Johnson and Focus RS chief programme

engineer Jürgen Gagstatter, and cadged a passenger ride at

Ford’s Lommel Proving Grou nd in Belgium to try to find

out. This is the story of the hot hatch of 2016.

It’s been morethan three years in the making, and has

enjoyed support from right at the top since the start. ‘Raj

Nair really wanted this car,’ Johnson says; Nair is Ford’s vice

pres ident and chief technical officer. ‘He really wanted this

car. We probably wouldn’t be sitting here without him.’

This kind of cheerleading brings opportunities, but also

challenges. There was no way Nair was going to let Johnson

engineer the RS only for Europe, which would have been

easier , and cheaper, than taking it into America as well.

Instead, they had to figure out a way to make it work with

both US and European safety regulations, and then come

down a single production line in Saarlouis, Germany,

amongst every ot her European Focus. ‘This was very, very

difficult,’ he says. ‘Almost moving worlds.’

To understand the scale of the challenge, you have to

understand just how different the RS is to its ordinary

brethren – and that process starts with th e four-whe el-drive

powertrain. 257kW didn ’t emer ge out of the fog of war, so to

speak, as a frantic response to what Audi, Me rcedes and

Honda were up to ; it’s been the figure from the beginning.

But uprating the 2.3-litr e Ecoboost four from the 228kW it

produces in the Mu stang involved changing the turbo, the

cyli nder liners, the intake system, the exhaust and the

cyli nder head – the latter assisted by noneother than

Cosworth. The intercooler is physically the biggest unit that

will fit in a Focus, while the aggressive front bumper not

only contributes to the ‘zero lift’ aerodynamics target, it

features the largest possi ble cooling aperture and a grille

with greate r gaps in its mesh. Yet come the car’s debut at the

Geneva motor show in March, when the output was dueto