Features

Revoknuckle. You're going to hear a lot about the RevoKnuckle in the next 12 months. Sounds like a nasty biking injury, promises to revolutionise the handling of powerful front-drive cars. Might yet be given a snappier name.

Jost Capito, Ford's premier performance guru, is on the phone from Cologne, and he's getting evangelical. Surely you can't possibly shove 300bhp through the front wheels of a Focus and get away with it, I ask him?

Long pause. "The RS will change your mind. We haven't even reached the limit of what the front wheels can cope with yet. Have we raised the bar significantly? I'm convinced of it." Not that Jost has owned up to the magic 300 exactly.

We'll have to wait until the British motor show in a few weeks' time to find out precisely how much horsepower Ford's new WRC-bred street warrior is packing, but the company admits that 300bhp represents an 'aspirational' figure for its target audience. Anyone familiar with the Focus RS's predecessor, the brilliantly, wilfully lairy Mk1 incarnation, might query the number of sandwiches currently included in the Ford picnic. Enter RevoKnuckle...

"We've redesigned the front suspension," says Jost. "It's a double wishbone set-upand uses something similar to a MacPherson strut, only better. The knuckle is mountedto the strut, and now the strut doesn't move under load. It works in conjunction with a new Quaife limited-slip diff, and eliminates steering disturbance. To be honest, it's almost unbelievable."

Capito's glittering CV suggests that if anyone can circumvent one of the basic commandments of performance cars - thou shalt not exceed 230bhp at the front wheels without major shit - then he's surely the man. Fresh out of university in Munich, his first job was at BMW's M division, where he worked on the epochal E30 M3. At Porsche, he persuaded his bosses to push on with the entirely unshabby 964 RS.

Then he went to Sauber, where he helped cultivate a commercial engineering sensibility at the Swiss race team. This included developing a whole new engine for the Malaysian petrochemical giant and Sauber sponsor, Petronas. Knocking out a decent fast Ford ought to be a doddle after all that, but, as Capito acknowledges, his current job makes him a cardinal in one of our world's high churches.