Overrated: Ford Focus RS

This was still a good six months before it was due to go public – I was shooting it for an internal promo film – hence the car cover that had been placed on the passenger seat with a big hand-written note next to it instructing me to ‘please use this whenever the car might be seen in public.’ I remember finding that deeply exciting at the time.

So I climbed in, fired up, remembering the John Miles mantra, doing my best to engage car tester Zen-mode for the first 50 yards, which on this occasion did literally involve driving the RS across a car park. What followed was a peculiar few seconds during which I became confused, disappointed, amazed and blown away by the car, all pretty much at the same time.

I was blown away by it because the noise it made on start-up was hilarious, a quite ridiculous cacophony of bangs and crackles that, at the time, seemed entirely fantastic. Nowadays, of course, far too many cars are programmed to deliver a burst of sonic mayhem when they fire up from cold, but this was the first time I’d heard such a din from a mere hot hatch and the child inside me thought it was magnificent. But from the moment it began to move the RS baffled me, and the further I drove it the more bewildered – and eventually fed up with it – I became. After 50 yards I was perplexed by it. After 50 miles I’d already begun to fall out with it in a fairly big way.

All by itself the sheer harshness of its ride was enough to put me right off the car; and the more miles I did, the more irritated I became. By the time I reached Darlington that night I could not have been more ready to climb out. Its engine boom had given me an almighty headache on the A1, and although it clearly went like stink in a straight line, I thought the 2.3-litre turbo engine’s delivery was oddly uncouth. Its steering also seemed to contain too much weight purely for the sake of it but precious little feel and its gearchange was rubbery, the clutch strangely dead in its response.

Worse still, the chassis had nowhere near the sparkle I was expecting. For all its speed, there was somehow remarkably little zip to the car, and I walked away from the RS that night wondering what was going on. Had Ford dropped a whopping great you-know-what with this car? Were its tyre pressures set wildly wrong or something as obvious as that? Or was it just me; had I simply had too long a day, and maybe I would think differently about it the following morning?

The next day and well rested, I drove the RS across the Yorkshire moors in the most beautiful conditions. I also drove it around Croft with a fresh mind and a strong curiosity to see if my first impressions of it were right or wrong. And yes, I’d checked the tyre pressures at the first garage I could find the following morning. Sadly, not much had changed.

True, the RS felt very fast and impressively secure across the famous Blakey Ridge road. The way it could control its mass over that road’s notorious surface imperfections was mighty impressive, as was the sheer speed it could generate across such difficult terrain. In some ways it reminded me of a junior Nissan GT-R in the way it could tighten its line under power in the middle of a corner.

But it still didn’t feel anywhere near as connected as I wanted it to. It was nothing like as fluid as the original Focus RS. There was also too much bounce to the chassis. It felt rubbery in its damping where the Mk1 – and to an extent the less capable Mk2 as well – had both been more incisive. And when I got to Croft and drifted it for the cameras, or tried to, once again it was oddly unsatisfying because, despite Ford’s claims, the RS wouldn’t actually do a proper throttle-on drift. Instead you had to bung it into corners to get the rear end to break away and then just hold on. As soon as I got back on the throttle the nose would pull itself straight and the drift would end, no matter which drive mode was selected. That annoyed me at the time because the car wouldn’t do what Ford claimed it could on the tin.

For the next two days I drove the RS in all sorts of weather, on all sorts of roads and did manage to connect with it at times. It was nutcase fast, no doubt about that, and on smoother roads it did have some flow to it. The brakes were also immense, and over a jump we’d filmed many cars on, many times before, it achieved so much air that the shot never even made it into the final film because it was deemed too outrageous for the public edit.

But when I handed the RS back, three days and almost 1000 miles later, I didn’t ache to keep hold of its keys. Maybe I’d wanted to like it too much. Maybe the hype got the better of me. Whatever the truth of it, I left the RS back in the car park at Dunton wondering what the rest of the world was going to make of the RS when it went public a few months later.

When it did, I was dumbfounded by how well it was received. The press declared it to be one of the great hot hatches of the era, and even when the car was subsequently assessed back in the UK the verdict was pretty clear; the Focus RS was king of the hill, even if its ride was a touch on the hard side.

Well not for me it wasn’t, although I never got to write as much at the time because I was working for Ford back then so quietly avoided being involved in any of the magazine assessments.

It’s not that the third-generation Focus RS was a bad hot hatch. In many ways it was, and remains a deeply impressive one. But no way should it ever have been declared one of the greats. The Mk1 Focus RS? That was different. It was a spectacularly brilliant hot hatchback, genuinely one of the best there’s been. But the latest and last RS never got near matching its original predecessor despite, or perhaps even because of, the hype that surrounded it at the time.

Second opinion, by Dan Prosser

I first drove the Focus RS at Ford’s Lommel proving ground in Belgium, on the infamous Track 7 handling circuit. That’s the one that doesn’t have gravel traps but run-off beds filled with tiny rubber pellets, meaning if you fall off the car lands lightly, completely undamaged – a zero-consequences test track. But it was a very short drive and I don’t think I learned much at all.

Next time was a few months later at Circuit de Valencia and on the kitchen worktop-smooth roads in the hills above. The car I drove that day certainly would drift for the camera, the rear end looping around in big arcing drifts if you stayed on the power long enough, but after a few runs something overheated in the four-wheel drive system, presumably the clutch packs, and the car wouldn’t send power to the rear axle any longer.

That afternoon, on those flawless mountain roads, I thought the car was brilliant to drive and I said as much.

Back at home a little while later? I was not blind to the car’s foibles, like the seating position that mounted you absurdly high in the cockpit, or the ride that was too lumpy on our roads and the engine that was too flat. But for me, once you really got moving, the toughness in the suspension began to make more sense, the springs and dampers containing the car’s mass while still absorbing most of what the road surface flung at them.

It was in second and third-gear sweeping turns that the Focus RS really blew me away. It had this habit of rotating about its middle on turn-in and through to the apex, making the car feel perfectly neutral, working each axle equally hard. One time, after a few runs for the camera, I saw how much rubber had been smeared into the road surface by the outside rear tyre. Not much good for tyre wear, but from behind the wheel it felt fantastic.

So I still have a soft spot for the third-generation Focus RS. But I concede it was overrated by the press – I remember one magazine cover line screaming ‘Greatest hot hatch ever!’ which it demonstrably was not. Ford knows a thing or two about creating great hot hatches, but it knows plenty about generating hype, too.