The Ford Focus RS: The Blue Oval’s best is a performance car for the people
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Ford finally brings its hottest hatch to the US, and it was worth the wait.
Jonathan M. Gitlin
Don't let the familiar name fool
you—the new Ford Focus RS is no mere shopping hatchback. Behind that
gaping front grill is a turbocharged 2.3L engine with 350hp (261kW) and
350lb-ft (475Nm) torque vectored to the road via all four wheels. The
wheel arches are blistered. There's a great big wing at the back;
there's a diffuser, too. And if that doesn't already sound like a very
special Focus, the new RS even has a "Drift" mode.
Despite all the fancy carbon fiber supercars
Cars Technica spends time with, I'd been looking forward to getting
behind the wheel of this vehicle more than just about any other. From autoshows to raceweekends to other Ford track events,
the car has taunted me, sitting static but resplendent in that
eye-catching Nitrous Blue paint. Our first drive was originally slated
for July, but scheduling conflicts at the Blue Oval saw that
opportunity bumped into late August. That delay is now a minor blip; the
RS was more than worth the wait.
Are there many more evocative letters one
could stick on a car to let the cognoscenti know something special was
going on? Spy "RS" on a Renault, Porsche, Audi, or Ford, and you know
the vehicle you're looking at has been breathed upon by that company's
raciest engineers. The fat will have been removed, the suspension made
track-ready. Tires will be wider, stickier, and have more power to put
down. (Only Chevrolet lets the side down by glueing those letters to a
quite pedestrian Camaro.)
At Ford RS stands for Rallye Sport, and it's a
name that goes back a long way. Back in the day, one of the best ways
for a car company to imbue an everyday shopping car with some pizzazz
was to take it racing. But motorsports demands more than the school run;
wider tires, aerodynamic appendages, altered suspension pickup points,
and so on. This was permissible with the proviso that a certain number
of road cars sold to the general public were so equipped, creating the
homologation special. And Ford's homologation cars were quite special.
Picking
a favorite is probably a function of one's age. And coming of age in
the early 1990s, my choice would be the Escort RS Cosworth. (Those a few
years older might get misty eyed at the mention of an RS500 or RS200.)
While the Focus RS isn't really a homologation special, it's this
lineage that the Focus RS hails from. There are so many legendary
ancestors in the family tree that the expectations are sky-high before
anyone gets as far as pushing the car's starter button. At least, that's
the plan. For all of Ford's RS hits, there have been misses. Take the
Mk 4 Escort RS2000, which was barely worth the name. Or the first
generation Focus RS, which promised so much and disappointed so many.
But we gave the game away in that opening paragraph—the new Focus RS
landed dead-center in a bright blue bullseye.
While it's the third generation Focus to wear
the RS badge, it's the first to cross the Atlantic. That's a testament
to changes in the prevailing tastes of American car buyers. We can
probably attribute that to video games like Gran Turismo,
as well as the success of Subaru's WRX and Mitsubishi's Evo on these
shores. But fans of traditional US muscle take note—if quarter miles and
trap times are your thing, look elsewhere, for there are better
vehicles to take to the drag strip. This car is instead about going
around corners as rapidly as possible—often sideways—and putting a smile
on your face while doing so.
Let's talk tech
The 2.3L EcoBoost four-cylinder engine is
closely related to the engine found in the current Mustang, but it
adds a low-inertia twin-scroll turbocharger, bigger compressor, and less
restrictive exhausts. There's only one choice of gearbox, and that's a
six-speed manual—no flappy paddles or dual clutch boxes here despite the
potential for faster lap times. As long as the front tires have
sufficient grip, the Focus RS will send them all its torque, but up to
70 percent can be diverted to the rear wheels (and 100 percent of that
to just one rear wheel should it deem that appropriate).
Unlike more conventional all-wheel drive
setups, there's no center differential; the three-piece propshaft that
runs to the rear drive unit is always turning. Instead, each rear wheel
is connected to this unit via an electronically controlled wet clutch.
Every hundredth of a second the Focus RS' electronic brain takes stock,
judging how to best distribute the available torque back-to-front and
side-to-side. That gives the system a particular advantage over a
mechanical limited slip differential: torque vectoring.
In a corner, the car will bias the torque at
the rear to the outside wheel in conjunction with braking the inside
front wheel. This induces an extra yaw motion above and beyond
what's already determined by the suspension geometry, steering input,
and slip angle. Understeer becomes a thing of the past, something I
rapidly discovered on track at Monticello Motor Club. It's particularly
evident in tighter corners, where you can turn in and get on the power
much sooner than seems natural.
Now, as you might expect for a car with
electronics controlling the drivetrain, there are different modes to
choose from. The throttle remaps, getting more linear as you progress
from Normal through Sport to Track. The torque vectoring becomes more
aggressive, traction and stability control becomes more permissive, and
the (conventional, valved) dampers increase dampening rate (these also
have a bumpy setting that can be toggled independently, a la Ferrari).
While we're on the topic, body control is
particularly good, as befits the reputation of Ford Europe (where most
of the chassis tuning took place). In fact, the cars have been brought
over to the US with no changes to suspension setup. The ride is not
quite limo-smooth—you'll feel expansion gaps and potholes—but it's not
back-breaking in Normal, and even on track (and in Track) you can ride
the rumble strips without immediately making a detour to the local
osteopath. Monticello's track includes a rather interesting left-right
combo over a crest, and the car never felt unsettled even when using
more of the hefty curbs than otherwise necessary.
A byproduct of all that electronic tuning is
the fourth drive mode, the one that anybody with a passing interest in
this car probably already knows about. That's right, drift mode.
Conceptually, it's quite easy to see how Ford arrived at the idea. After
all, the car knows its slip angle, steering input, yaw rate, and so on,
and it's already programmed to combine that data to vector torque—why
not go one step further and add a little electronic hooligan into the
mix?
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