With the 7th episode of Ford’s Focus RS documentary upon us, we get to see a little bit of Goodwood action, to go with the very important sign-off test.
To start off, Ken Block had a great time in the RS at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. He thought that the car was very responsive and that the noise level and power delivery were also improved compared to other times he got to drive it.
It was very clever of Ford to get him involved in this process, since you can never have enough great racing minds when developing a sports car.
The real action, however, happened in Belgium where the development team got together in order to see if the car was production-ready or not. As it turns out, the answer was a clear ‘No’. Actually, the general consensus was that the car already had developed a personality and that it was really fun and easy to drift, but a couple of things were still missing as far as Product Development Chief Raj Nair was concerned.
After getting in the car, Nair was immediately appreciative of the car’s responsiveness (just like Ken Block was), and he looked like he had a lot of fun while in Drift Mode. Unfortunately he didn’t like the car at all in Normal Mode, even going as far as calling it “horrible”.
His verdict for the team was both positive and negative – pointing out that both Sport and Track modes were exactly what they needed to be, yet the steering felt very spongy in Normal mode. He was also unimpressed with the brakes, which unfortunately meant that the team had to go back and take another look at the car and figure out how to correct everything that Nair pointed out to them.
Next up is episode 8 where we’ll get to find out if the RS finally got the green light while being tested in the US.