Mk1 Ford Focus RS
Discussion
Alpinestars said:
MK1RS Bruce said:
They seem to be very sensitive to tyres and also geometry, it the geometry is off they don't behave like they should. I have been lucky with mine in that it was always excellent, will see how it drives when I get it back and if its not how I remember it thenI will take it and have the geometry set up as per the factory settings.
Geo is definitely a factor. But both cars were brand new so unlikely to be geo, and the tyres were OEM.
My current one was absolutely awful when I bought it, almost like the diff wasn’t working at all. And that was down to geo. I was convinced it was the diff.
I switched to Michelin PS3s when I got the car and it transformed it after those I went to Michelin Pilot Super Sports which were even better, thats what I would recommend for it if I was asked.
MK1RS Bruce said:
ZX10R NIN said:
Great thread.
Thanks Hopefully have some more pictures of it shortly, just the final parts of the interior to refit then a big clean and polish session. 
I went out past the bodyshop at the weekend to drop off another car for a little bit of work to be done so got some more pictures.
Even though I had the wheels refurbished before I started all this work, the guys at the bodyshop decided that they had lost their shine so they have painted them again.
Also got a couple more pictures of the car, its very close to being finished plan is to give it a road test this week and also get the alignment set up on it. The pictures don't really do the paint justice but not only is it super shiny the paint work is also flawlessly smooth.
think this rear view might be one of my favourite angles
Even though I had the wheels refurbished before I started all this work, the guys at the bodyshop decided that they had lost their shine so they have painted them again.
Also got a couple more pictures of the car, its very close to being finished plan is to give it a road test this week and also get the alignment set up on it. The pictures don't really do the paint justice but not only is it super shiny the paint work is also flawlessly smooth.
think this rear view might be one of my favourite angles
Max_Torque said:
The main thing most people don't know is just how close to being canned the RS was at a significant number of points in its rather disjointed gestation!
RS started as a "do the least you can to make it work" type project, contracted out to Tickford engineering by Ford UK. It had a small budget, and low targets and was as close to being a skunk works type project as is possible (like the Racing Puma for example).
However, during it's gestation two things became clear:
1) A lot more work was required to make a saleable car, as the changes required from the base car were becoming extensive
2) Ford Europe would no longer accept any car carrying the Ford badge to escape the entire, weighty and onerous, full sign-off requirements. In effect, even skunk works cars had to meet all the same targets for durability, sourcing, build, and even re-cycling as the mainstream product lines.
The original project being run by Tickford really got mired down, and when Prodrive bought out Tickford in 2001, they inherited a project in serious trouble, both failing to meet its targets and very late indeed. The project came a wisker away from being canned at that point, but Prodrive decided to push hard, hired a lot of really good engineers (it was when i came on board... ;-) ) and ramped up the effort 10 fold. Ford continued to move the goal posts, eventually requiring the vehicle to be built down the normal Focus build line (which caused massive head aches as the car actually was too wide to fit the line tooling, and hence was built without wings and bumpers and on standard wheels off the cooking models in order to fit the track) but the car matured and the additional attention to detail and requirement for full sign off certainly eventually resulted in a much better car than that which might have been produced.
For example, originally the car was to run with standard EEC5 engine management, which had no "turbo" variant in the ford "code library", and as such, boost control was farmed out to an external supplier (Pektron) with an 'add-on' wastegate control module, that was very poorely implemented and integrated, meaning early prototype cars were, frankly, awful to drive, with horrible spiky torque delivery, uncontrolled boost excursions and the ability to suddenly spin their front wheels at any time in any gear.... (which made them feel a LOT faster than they actually were). The original team was also really struggling to get the car to meet the reasonably new at the time, EU3 emissions standards. Some people were even saying that turbo cars could never actual meet the limits due to the thermal inertia of the turbo in-between the engine and the catalysts (proven to be total b*ll*ck obviously).
After a memorably management drive, the car was pretty much slated and the project very nearly canned, again!
It's savoir was a weird quirk of fate that actually tenuously involved another great name in fast ford history, that of Cosworth, the Northampton based firm, just 20 miles further up the M1 from Tickfords (now Prodrives) Milton Keynes engineering base. In 1996, that firm had build a turbo charged mondeo demostrator for ford, using the Zetec and EEC4 engine management, and some software engineer deep in the bowls of Ford US (Dearborn) had been persuaded to compile a Frankenstein like bit of code that effectively stuck the Magnetti Marreli base boost control code from the Escort Cosworth into the standard code that can run in an EEC controller, and having been used on the never-to-see-the-light-of-day mondeo turbo (the chassis was iirc, catastrophically incapable of dealing with the additional torque, and ford were (rightly) pinning their hopes on the V6 version as being more saleable in the fast exec market) that code was forgotten, until it was by chance mentioned in some ford senior meeting and became the RS's knight in shining armour, allowing the RS to finally get the boost and torque control refinement it so badly needed.
In the meantime, the new engineering team had been quickly getting the measure of realising the emissions and E-OBD requirements and the project was, finally, all pointing the right way and looking good!
The project finally moved out of its AP and CP phase (Attribute Prototype and Confirmation Prototype) and was looking rosy, when the final major disaster hit, which was what is called a major "thermal event" in the industry, and really means that something caught fire! That, as you can imagine made Fords legal team rather nervous. The actual fire occured on a prototype car doing durability mileage at Fords Lommel proving ground, and was caused by the tubular fabricated "bunch of bananas" exhaust manifold cracking, and setting fire to the plastic cam cover, that then got to the fuel rail and POOF, that's one car gone. The, unnecessary imo, knee jerk was to can that fabricated manifold and use a cast iron log manifold, which was more robust and also cheaper (by this point the bean counters were really, really, annoyed with the project spending any money they though was un-necessary.....). In fact, it later turned out the car that caught fire was also missing some important engine mounted heat shielding that would have rendered the crack as a non-event, but by then the damage was done. A poorly performing cast log manifold was hurriedly slotted into place and the engine recalibrated to suit, loosing around 30 bhp and 50 Nm, and resulting in the boost threshold climbing some 300 rpm.
The car finally made it to production, over 18 months behind the original schedule and a large amount over the original budget ( think around 100% over budget!), but it arrived to rave reviews and to some degree forced a lot of other manufacturers to improve their hot hatch offerings, and it can be argued that it ushered in the modern high performance "2wd Hot hatch" market. I look back now, probably with the benfit of rose tinted glasses if i'm being honest, and realise it was actually one major highlight of my career, even if at the time it felt a bit like a battle on most days !
What an absolutely brilliant read!RS started as a "do the least you can to make it work" type project, contracted out to Tickford engineering by Ford UK. It had a small budget, and low targets and was as close to being a skunk works type project as is possible (like the Racing Puma for example).
However, during it's gestation two things became clear:
1) A lot more work was required to make a saleable car, as the changes required from the base car were becoming extensive
2) Ford Europe would no longer accept any car carrying the Ford badge to escape the entire, weighty and onerous, full sign-off requirements. In effect, even skunk works cars had to meet all the same targets for durability, sourcing, build, and even re-cycling as the mainstream product lines.
The original project being run by Tickford really got mired down, and when Prodrive bought out Tickford in 2001, they inherited a project in serious trouble, both failing to meet its targets and very late indeed. The project came a wisker away from being canned at that point, but Prodrive decided to push hard, hired a lot of really good engineers (it was when i came on board... ;-) ) and ramped up the effort 10 fold. Ford continued to move the goal posts, eventually requiring the vehicle to be built down the normal Focus build line (which caused massive head aches as the car actually was too wide to fit the line tooling, and hence was built without wings and bumpers and on standard wheels off the cooking models in order to fit the track) but the car matured and the additional attention to detail and requirement for full sign off certainly eventually resulted in a much better car than that which might have been produced.
For example, originally the car was to run with standard EEC5 engine management, which had no "turbo" variant in the ford "code library", and as such, boost control was farmed out to an external supplier (Pektron) with an 'add-on' wastegate control module, that was very poorely implemented and integrated, meaning early prototype cars were, frankly, awful to drive, with horrible spiky torque delivery, uncontrolled boost excursions and the ability to suddenly spin their front wheels at any time in any gear.... (which made them feel a LOT faster than they actually were). The original team was also really struggling to get the car to meet the reasonably new at the time, EU3 emissions standards. Some people were even saying that turbo cars could never actual meet the limits due to the thermal inertia of the turbo in-between the engine and the catalysts (proven to be total b*ll*ck obviously).
After a memorably management drive, the car was pretty much slated and the project very nearly canned, again!
It's savoir was a weird quirk of fate that actually tenuously involved another great name in fast ford history, that of Cosworth, the Northampton based firm, just 20 miles further up the M1 from Tickfords (now Prodrives) Milton Keynes engineering base. In 1996, that firm had build a turbo charged mondeo demostrator for ford, using the Zetec and EEC4 engine management, and some software engineer deep in the bowls of Ford US (Dearborn) had been persuaded to compile a Frankenstein like bit of code that effectively stuck the Magnetti Marreli base boost control code from the Escort Cosworth into the standard code that can run in an EEC controller, and having been used on the never-to-see-the-light-of-day mondeo turbo (the chassis was iirc, catastrophically incapable of dealing with the additional torque, and ford were (rightly) pinning their hopes on the V6 version as being more saleable in the fast exec market) that code was forgotten, until it was by chance mentioned in some ford senior meeting and became the RS's knight in shining armour, allowing the RS to finally get the boost and torque control refinement it so badly needed.
In the meantime, the new engineering team had been quickly getting the measure of realising the emissions and E-OBD requirements and the project was, finally, all pointing the right way and looking good!
The project finally moved out of its AP and CP phase (Attribute Prototype and Confirmation Prototype) and was looking rosy, when the final major disaster hit, which was what is called a major "thermal event" in the industry, and really means that something caught fire! That, as you can imagine made Fords legal team rather nervous. The actual fire occured on a prototype car doing durability mileage at Fords Lommel proving ground, and was caused by the tubular fabricated "bunch of bananas" exhaust manifold cracking, and setting fire to the plastic cam cover, that then got to the fuel rail and POOF, that's one car gone. The, unnecessary imo, knee jerk was to can that fabricated manifold and use a cast iron log manifold, which was more robust and also cheaper (by this point the bean counters were really, really, annoyed with the project spending any money they though was un-necessary.....). In fact, it later turned out the car that caught fire was also missing some important engine mounted heat shielding that would have rendered the crack as a non-event, but by then the damage was done. A poorly performing cast log manifold was hurriedly slotted into place and the engine recalibrated to suit, loosing around 30 bhp and 50 Nm, and resulting in the boost threshold climbing some 300 rpm.
The car finally made it to production, over 18 months behind the original schedule and a large amount over the original budget ( think around 100% over budget!), but it arrived to rave reviews and to some degree forced a lot of other manufacturers to improve their hot hatch offerings, and it can be argued that it ushered in the modern high performance "2wd Hot hatch" market. I look back now, probably with the benfit of rose tinted glasses if i'm being honest, and realise it was actually one major highlight of my career, even if at the time it felt a bit like a battle on most days !
I felt like i was watching one of the heritage video clips they do on Top Gear reading that
GVK said:
Great read and always good to see max_torque's contributions.
Car looks great, enjoy!
Agree. It’s fascinating to know just what goes on behind the scenes and how difficult it actually is to put into fruition. Car looks great, enjoy!
For me the RS was the first mainstream hot-hatch that started the whole ‘track-day/hardcore-ish’ type FWD hot-hatch in that segment at least, with its fancy upgrades and looking pretty special inside and out.
The Renaultsport Megane 225 Cup and later R26/R26.R carried it on really made manufacturers look up and take note to what we have now IMO.
You could argue the JDM EK9/EP3 as well but they wasn’t sold in UK.
GVK said:
Great read and always good to see max_torque's contributions.
Car looks great, enjoy!
Agree. It’s fascinating to know just what goes on behind the scenes and how difficult it actually is to put into fruition. Car looks great, enjoy!
For me the RS was the first mainstream hot-hatch that started the whole ‘track-day/hardcore-ish’ type FWD hot-hatch in that segment at least, with its fancy upgrades and looking pretty special inside and out.
The Renaultsport Megane 225 Cup and later R26/R26.R carried it on really made manufacturers look up and take note to what we have now IMO.
You could argue the JDM EK9/EP3 as well but they wasn’t sold in UK.
Edited by Mike1990 on Friday 3rd May 12:05
So the car went for a test run and seems to be running fine, however once back at the workshop and up on the ramp it looks like the water pump is leaking.
Luckily managed to pick one up on eBay, wildly expensive but could have been more if I’d gone to Ford!
Plan is to get the old one refurbished so that I have a spare should I need one again.
Luckily managed to pick one up on eBay, wildly expensive but could have been more if I’d gone to Ford!
Plan is to get the old one refurbished so that I have a spare should I need one again.
MK1RS Bruce said:
So the car went for a test run and seems to be running fine, however once back at the workshop and up on the ramp it looks like the water pump is leaking.
Luckily managed to pick one up on eBay, wildly expensive but could have been more if I’d gone to Ford!
Plan is to get the old one refurbished so that I have a spare should I need one again.
Saw that for sale on eBay... nearly dropped you a message. Wish I had now!Luckily managed to pick one up on eBay, wildly expensive but could have been more if I’d gone to Ford!
Plan is to get the old one refurbished so that I have a spare should I need one again.
johnnyBv8 said:
More pics needed of car in its current state!
Heading out to see what’s still to finish tomorrow so will take a few more pics. Hopefully get the water pump in the next couple of days, then get it fitted early next week along with the last of the snagging items.
Expect the body shop will then give it a final polish! Quite exciting that it’s so close to being completed!
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