The Ford Focus RS? It's back at the prison yard, its work-release program suspended after it shanked a guard and went drift mode across the warden's lawn. This is a car that inks its own tats, and some of them are on its face.
It's not that we don't appreciate the Focus RS, a car built to satisfy a hard-core niche of driving enthusiasts, the ones who know who Kalle Grundel is and daydream about importing a Lancia Delta Integrale. We love that there's a Focus with 350 horsepower and all-wheel drive. But sometimes more is just more. The Focus RS is a contestant on The Voice who sings at 126 decibels. It's a Gillette razor with seven blades. It's Joey Chestnut eating 25 pastrami sandwiches in 10 minutes. Oh, we're definitely impressed. But you can be impressed by Joey Chestnut, we suppose, without necessarily wanting to marry him.
Those staffers who've flogged the Focus RS on racetracks found that the mean streets of Michigan bring out a much different side of the car's personality. In the context of 10Best testing, which includes roads that are paved entirely with frost heaves, the Focus's playful brattiness turns ugly. Over bumpy sections of the 10Best loop, the suspension feels as if it's made of pogo sticks. The optional Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, which help the RS deliver 1.04 g's of grip, hunt and wander on rutted pavement.
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Its Recaros were evidently molded around Popeye's longtime **girlfriend, Olive Oyl. One driver likened the tilted-back seating position to a dentist's chair; another gratuitously invoked the word "coxswain." If your Lululemon pants are stretched near to transparent, you'll certainly want to find a different car.
Drift mode, the RS's most curious performance feature, represents the conundrum presented by more for the sake of more. Yes, we want to encourage engineers to indulge their whimsy, especially when they're explicitly endorsing juvenile tire-smoking behavior. And yet . . . drift mode produces understeer as often as it does sideways antics. Meanwhile, when we tried to kick the tail out the old-fashioned way-a dose of revs and a clutch drop-the instrument cluster flashed the panicky message: "All-wheel-drive system not available." This is a message that we've never seen in, say, a Su*baru or an Audi. And it underscores the fact that the Focus RS's all-wheel-drive system is a retrofit, installed to cope with all that more under the hood. It can't always do it.
The truly great cars, the 10Best winners, are of a piece. The Focus RS gives you no peace. But hey, it's not like Ford tried to build a holistic driving machine or sweat the nuances. What it set out to do was inflate the Focus with nitromethane vapors until it was within a millimeter of popping. Mission accomplished. That approach makes for an interesting car, and a special one. But not one of the 10Best.
Text Source: Car and Driver
