Serious bang for your buck with the ferocious new Focus RS

[Ford Focus News]

The Ford Focus RS launch in Spain used deserted out-of-season roads, the Valencia race track and a huge, empty car park where we could do big smoky donuts and drifts.

It's a bit different in the UK, especially in the hideously overcrowded south where everybody appears to hate each other when they are behind the wheel.

Y'see the Focus RS is a very fast car. In fact, it's so fast from (any) point to point that if Heisty McHeistface, the legendary armed jewel thief, rang me up and asked me to be his getaway driver for his next blag, I'd choose this car for the job. It ticks every box.

Not only is it stupidly fast in a straight line – its sixth-gear acceleration from 70mph has to be experienced to be believed – it can cope with any kind of road, any kind of surface and any kind of corner.

After all, true-fast isn't just a set of performance figures, is it? When they have scrambled the police Eurocopter, your mirrors are full of flashing blue lights and it's raining cats and dogs, true-fast is about maintaining stratospheric momentum.

That intelligent four-wheel drive and four stupidly sticky Michelin Pilot Sport tyres produce enormous grip in every plane – braking, cornering or powering hard out of slippery hairpins.

If you've got a jowly face, there's enough G-force to alter your looks. The Focus RS has a button by the gearlever to scroll through different maps. Not sat-nav maps but engine and suspension setting maps.

More expensive cars have this facility, not normally a thirty grand car and the difference between the settings is pronounced.

Race track setting gives you hairtrigger throttle response, a snapping and popping exhaust (on the over-run and when you lift off the gas for up or downshifts) and suspension harder than kryptonite.

In fact, this setting hardens up the suspension so much it wasn't until I gave a mate a lift that I realised how much weight he'd put on.


His moobs jiggled around like an unsupported Katie Price atop a trotting horse. But that's British roads for you. In terms of road conditions, we're a fourth world country not a third.

In Spain, on their billiard table surfaces, 'race track' felt positively luxurious. For the UK, 'normal' setting is about as extreme as you want to get. Unless you're being chased by the old bill with a boot full of swag, that is.

As much as I adore the Focus RS and the ridiculous value it offers performance fetishists, I can't own one. Not living where I do in the crowded south.

You can never stretch its legs without feeling like you're being held up or pissing people off. Normally I'd consider moving to Europe – maybe desolate central Spain – to fully enjoy the full spectrum of the Focus RS's WRC-DNA capabilities.

But I feel that after June 23, that decision might not be without its own risks. The Scottish Highlands it is, then.

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FACT FILE: FORD FOCUS RS

• Price: £31,000
• Engine: 2,261cc four-cyl, turbo
• Power: 350PS
• Torque: 470Nm
• Top Speed: 165mph
• 0-62 mph: 4.7 secs
• Economy: 36.7mpg combined
• CO2 175g/km
• For: Driver-aid un-crashability
• Against: Lack of empty roads
• Sum up: Performance bargain of the decade

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