Top Gear drives the fast Ford heroes
A history lesson, TG-style: Ollie Kew gets behind the wheel of Ford’s RallyeSport legacy
The Ford Focus RS – the new, 345bhp, widemouth frog one – will drift. That alone has made it a sensation, a hero – a game-changer, in fact.
But is it the first fast Ford that will waggle its tail on a roundabout? Erm, no. That trick was being perfected a good forty years ago…
Photography: Mark Riccioni
Advertisement - Page continues belowThis is a 1974 Escort Mexico, and though it says ‘RS’ on the 13-inch wheels, it wasn’t actually the full-fat performance Escort. The Mexico was a special edition to celebrate Ford’s victory in the London-to-Mexico 1970 World Cup Rally, and was both less powerful and cheaper than the Escort RS1600 of the time.
Its 1.6-litre engine puts out just 89bhp via a four-speed gearbox, delivered to rear tyres you could buy spares for at Halfords. This is not a quick car. It stretches the notion of ‘fast Ford’ about as far as it’ll go. But it is a light one, at just over 800kg, and that means a disproportionate amount of laughs for something that can be out-dragged by a VW Up. It has less grip on a cold road than Donald Trump has on reality, and because the suspension feels like it’s made out of trampoline offcuts, it isn’t at all fussed by potholes and drain covers than more modern, big-rimmed hot hatches.
Mind you, they don’t roll on a quarter-turn of steering either. Being in the Mexico is all about reveling in little details – the dainty four-speed gearshift clicking faithfully between the gates, the expensive, weighty feel of the metal door handles and window winders, and, yes, the brakes which exist more in your mind than in real life.
Funny though, isn’t it. What we love about the new Focus RS is that instead of chasing a mega Nürburgring lap time, or scoring a sub four-second zero to sixty spint, Ford’s given it a good amount of power, and good on-track credentials, but really spent the time, money and effort making it playful, when you’re not flat out. That’s some classic fast Ford DNA.
Photography: Mark Riccioni
Eleven years later, and things get a bit more serious. Ford, having got bored of taking the Escort to the world’s rally stages and winning multiple world championships, decides it fancies being a touring car champ instead. Fine: the motorway rep’s Sierra is an ideal candidate, apart from a small detail – it might take off.
In the Eighties, Ford’s streamlined ‘jellymould’ Sierra bodyshell was a revelation. If you think a BMW i3 or Toyota Mirai look a bit gawky nowadays, you’re barely halfway to understanding the horror that greeted the Sierra’s air-smoothed lines. Ford’s marketing men shouted this down with much talk about how the Sierra would scythe through the air like a stealth bomber, thanks to its low-drag shape. The inconvenient truth was that the shape created quite a lot of lift at relatively modest speeds. Not ideal for high-speed stability on say, a racetrack, dicing with the best of BMW, Mercedes and Alfa Romeo.
Ford was simply pragmatic about this, fitting a deep front air dam with a hole in the middle to cool the uprated 204bhp engine, and plonking the famous whale-tale wing atop the rear hatch, in a fairly successful attempt to stop the Sierra taking flight down the back straight. “Hold on a second there”, said the FIA, “you’ve got to make 5000 of these to sell to the general public”. And so, out of good old-fashioned homologation rules, the Sierra RS Cosworth was born.
This is a standard rear-drive version, to which Ford has fitted one mod: a roll cage. Why? Well, Ford set aside this particular Sierra to train test drivers in the mid-Eighties, as cars were simply getting so much faster and the suits wanted to be sure Ford’s men on the ground were as hot behind the wheel as everyone else’s. When you drive the Cossie, you can see why.
This is a seriously fast car. Not for the period, not in a quaint, Antiques Roadshow sort of way, but in a here’n’now, scare the tartan pants off a Golf GTI kind of way. The turbo lag is heroic, but once on boost, it’s got so much urgency and power, it’s like a BMW E30 M3 with a firework up its exhaust.
The driver-focused cockpit with the low-slung, beautifully supported velour seat and gorgeous slim steering wheel fit the quasi-M-car billing too. The really odd thing, though, is how a car that looks as shouty as Brian Blessed isn’t some lairy, bared-teeth widowmaker. Yes, the Mustang-sourced five-speed manual is a three-man job to find second with when cold, but there’s actually plenty of traction when the turbo comes out of hibernation, and the steering is detailed and alive in your hands. Cor, if only we had this much to thank the FIA for these days…
Photography: Mark Riccioni
Advertisement - Page continues belowThe Escort RS Cosworth looks to be much the same recipe. And that’s because it is. A two-litre, four-cylinder engine hastily bolted onto the back of a Garret turbo the size of a generous pineapple – the very engine that lives in the Sierra, here upped to 227bhp. Enough rear wing to qualify as a top-fuel dragster. And inside, enough graphic equalizer buttons to start an Ibiza nightclub.
However, unlike the Sierra, the Escort Cossie is all-wheel drive. Just like the rally cars it homologated, and in direct lineage to the new, 4x4 Focus RS. Sounds like it’ll be a hot hatch from the gods.
Unfortunately, in this early, prototype car at least, the massive turbo still means massive turbo lag. And with an all-wheel drive system constantly causing friction, bleeding away power – no new-fangled part-time adaptive all-wheel drive gubbins here, y’see – the Escort Cosworth lacks a crucial ingredient in the fast hatch arms race. Speed. It feels quite sluggish, frankly.
The boost does arrive, of course, signalled by the fidgety boost gauge needle going all rigid and flinging itself due east like a desperate goalkeeper, a hoarse roar from the engine bay not dissimilar to a modern Renaultsport Megane, and at long last, a glut of acceleration. ‘Ah, here we go’, you think. ‘All I’ve got to do is slot this next gear in sweetly and we’ll be in the next county in no time. Next stop, the moon.’
Unfortunately, the gearbox isn’t very helpful in this regard. The five-speed mechanism flops about the gate flaccidly, and by the time you’ve nailed the swap, the turbo has nodded off. You can really see why the Escort Cossie has become such a hot bed for tuning. It’s in that unfortunate no-man’s land, right now, of not being old and ‘classic’ enough to be a true throwback, but too far off modern stuff to feel contemporary.
Later versions switched to a smaller, freer-spinning turbo.
Photography: Mark Riccioni
Driving the first Focus to carry an RS badge still feels a bit naughty. And not just because the two-tone steering wheel is a crime against anyone with a modicum of fashion maturity, or some eyes. The Focus RS has remained a controversial piece of kit. Although its recipe of sending big power through front wheels aided by a front differential is still being perfected today by the likes of Seat, Renaultsport and Honda, it’s fair to say Ford’s first crack wasn’t universally appreciated. People thought it wasn’t even finished.
The snatchy front axle, combined with 212bhp of whooshing turbo urge and a bespoke suspension set-up made the Focus RS a front-drive revelation on smooth, flowing roads and on tight circuits, but aim one down a moorland lane or British B-road and bookies would start taking odds which direction you’d arrive at the other end. Torque-steer and camber-following do not make happy, confident drivers, and the RS likes to keep its driver on its toes.
Once you’ve accepted that, the experience of driving a Mk1 RS is still flipping marvellous. Take too long revelling in the weighty, precise gearchange and the RS will attempt to lead you up someone else’s garden path. If you’re prepared to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in, and grab it by the scruff of the neck, there are few more frenetic, absorbing B-road hatches. And Ford wasn’t finished with the whole ‘big power, front-drive, ask questions later’ game either.
Photos: Jamie Lipman
I can still vividly remember the first clues about the Mk2 Focus RS drip-dripping into car mags and on the internet. The headlines screamed four-wheel drive at last, because the power figure being mooted – a ridiculous 300bhp – couldn’t possibly be the sole responsibility of just the front axle. At the time, Mazda’s 256bhp MPS and the 247bhp Vauxhall Astra VXR appear to have proved that north of 220bhp was a bit much for a front-drive car. So the new RS had to be all-wheel drive. Right?
Obviously, that was wrong. The RS put 300bhp through the front wheels. Drive it fast and feels like a properly weapons-grade car, not just in the unbreakable, indestructible-feeling 2.5-litre turbo engine, but the meatiness of its steering, kept in check by Ford’s ‘RevoKnuckle’ assembly, which separates the machinations of the driveshafts from the dampers, and does a sterling job at making torquesteer manageable. Again, a modern RS Megane shows it the way ahead, but for the time, and with some monster power on top, Ford’s heavyweight solution (the Mk2 RS is reportedly not much lighter than the new AWD RS, because of the leaden engine and front struts) deserves doffed caps.
With an extra cylinder to lean on, the Mk2 RS is a less frenetic piece of kit, though rowing about on the light six-speed gearshift almost makes you crave a few extra revs to chase out. I guess it’s that creeping influence of making these mega-hatches more livable. This Mk2 RS has far less road roar than the Mk1 I’ve just hopped out of, a superior pedal placement for amateur heel’n’toe heroics, and a tolerable low-speed ride. But it didn’t really need any more power, did it?
I realise, while belting myself into yet another Ford RS Recaro that’s set about three inches too high in the car, that this RS500 is the most powerful front-wheel drive car I’ve ever driven, and at 345bhp, is neck-and-neck for raw horses with the new AWD car. That should put into perspective just how batty this machine is. And though the engine rouses with no more pomp and flatulency than the standard car, it is deeply, deeply fast.
Torque-steer still isn’t a problem, but traction is, so how fast you arrive at every sliproad or braking zone is determined by how successful you were feeding in the power. Too brutal and you turn up with tyres in ribbons and late. Get it right and the RS500 feels like the closest thing to a European front-drive muscle car. Absurd, really. No wonder Ford had to give the new one rear-biased drift powers to top this.
Photography: Jamie Lipman
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