The original Focus: Part one

(In a rare prescient moment, my original Focus drive story contained this line: ‘Ford Focus: even the name sounds like it could go straight into the Ford line-up.’)

Designer Taru Lahti’s Focus is a complex, eclectic, and hugely imaginative symphony of shapes, textures, materials and forms, subtly formed; a masterpiece of creativity, at the same time both predictable and avant-garde. It teems with fascinating details that are never unpleasant or awkward. By any criteria, the Focus is an astounding piece of design.  

How did such a startling concept car come about? 

In June 1991, Ford’s senior management in Detroit directed Tom Scott, head of International Design Operations, to look at designing a new roadster for Europe and possibly America. 

Seven different designers – three at Ghia, the remainder at Ford’s Dearborn, Cologne and Dunton studios – began working on themes for the sports car in August 1991. Ford hoped that by mixing cultures it would get a global view of where sports car design was heading in the next decade. The target was the 1992 Turin show’s design forum. The designers knew the show car was going to be built on a shortened Escort RS Cosworth platform, so it would be a fully functioning car offering an exciting opportunity, singularly rare within Ford.

Taru Lahti, who already had the radical 1991 T-drive Ford Contour concept car in his portfolio, was given three weeks to come up with some ideas. Jack Telnack, Ford’s design boss, so liked the originality in the 24-year-old’s sketches that on September 15, 1991, Lahti arrived in Italy to work at Ford’s Ghia studios. He was supposed to stay for three months. 

In early 1992, when I first saw the Focus, Filippo Sapino, who ran the Ghia studios in Turin, explained, ‘We didn’t want just another sports car. Not a supercar but a compact, powerful roadster with real character. And we didn’t want to lose sight of the possibility that it could go into production.  

‘There were no real reference points, except perhaps the Corvette and the Cobra, for there aren’t too many rivals in the class we were considering. The Cobra was our thought starter because it has a confident, strong shape. We knew we didn’t need yet another sleek arrow-like wedge, but a muscular shape that puts a dress over the driver to make a nest.’ 

Lahti, working in one-tenth scale with his Swiss army knife, captured the essence of his curvaceous sketches in clay models, including the one in my office.  

‘Detractors say it’s playing with toys, but I like the way you can hold up a one-tenth model and turn it around, look at the plan view and side view to get a real idea of the proportions,’ Lahti explained.  

Each proposal was then blown up to a 40 per cent clay scale model on a computerised scan mill, while 40 per cent scale line drawings were used to check the packaging of the drivetrain and interior. During this process the front and rear overhangs were reduced. In a parallel development, the interior was done to scale, based on Ghia chief designer Claudio Messale’s design. 

From here a full-scale model was built, with Lahti’s design on one side and Nico Tonello’s proposal on the other. 

In October, during an intercontinental conference call, Telnack, Scott and Graham Bell, the American designer in charge of cad-cam design at Ghia, choose Lahti’s design, the most daring of all seven proposals, to be built as Ghia’s concept car for the Turin show. Lahti stayed on at Ghia for another nine months.

Concept finally finished, it was time to show the press. 

‘There’s not a straight line on this car: it’s almost as if there’s no front, no side and no back, just one organic form,’ an animated Lahti explained his creation, pony-tail swinging. 

‘The Focus is a new language of shapes. I’ve taken forms from the human anatomy. It’s like skin over bones, the skin over the structure of the Achilles tendon. There are soft sections, but others are pulled tight to give tension to the whole car.’ 

Is it, I wondered, a piece of science fiction or some kind of exotic fish with bizarre nostrils, tiny eyes, midget wings on its snout and scalloped fins on its duo-tone tail? From its asymmetrical air intakes to the circular exhaust pipe that’s part of a spark arrestor in the centre of the tail, the Focus was a styling revolution. 

In profile, the relationship of the cockpit with the rear wheels suggested the engine was amidships, because the rears were so far back, and there was so little front overhang. The body swelled behind the cockpit and then spilled down to the tail. The side panels were simple, to maintain interest in the top surfaces which merge into the cabin. The taillights and turn indicators a series of 14 tiny, different-sized circular lights on either side of the car.  

Ghia wanted the interior to be a blend between the crudeness of a Ferrari F40 and the sterile Honda NSX. Sally Wilson Erickson, the British designer in charge of trim and colour at Ghia, insisted that Messale’s inventive design be finished in natural materials wherever possible.

Today Sally, now chair of the College of Creative Studies Graduate Program in Colour, Materials Design in Detroit, remembers, ‘I don’t think any of us were ready for Taru’s highly innovative, disruptive approach to the appearance of vehicle exteriors, interiors and colour, materials and finish. Looking back, what we were doing at Ghia, in a collaborative, fast-paced-non-linear way reflects the disruptive culture of today’s start-ups.

‘Led by Tom Scott, Taru and Claudio were let loose to design without boundaries (other than the package) resulting in a radically different form that looked like, in Taru’s words, skin over bones.

‘I simply listened to Taru, whose conviction came from influences in art, design and culture. My role was to listen to the designers and use colour, materials and finishes to express their concept. Choosing a neutral grey exterior is a good example. The colour’s job was to be as invisible as possible so that attention concentrated on the forms and details. 

‘We wanted an F1 feel about the cockpit so that everything was close to the driver, with the richness of natural materials,’ she said. Boat-like wood veneer covered the floor, various leathers for the brown and tan seats deliberately looked like saddles, hand beaten-polished steel flowed from the doors on to the top of the dashboard, down the console, across the hardtop’s hinged cover and spine-like down the centreline of the tail.

Read part two