FOCUS WRC MK1

Hard as it might be to believe, the original Focus WRC celebrates its 20th birthday this year, so we thought it high time we look back at one of the most significant competition cars in Blue Oval history…

Looking back at the rally career of the mighty Mk1 Focus WRC.

Competitive as it doubtless was, the Escort WRC was never intended to be anything other than a stopgap for Ford, a means of ‘holding the line’ while its replacement could be fully developed. That car was of course the Focus, the most important rally car yet built by Ford and also something of a quantum leap forward in terms of WRC car design.

Launched to much fanfare and a media

blitz at the dawn of the 1999 season, the Focus WRC was intended to do everything its predecessor had been unable to, something reflected in both its spec and the team charged with developing and rallying it. Malcolm Wilson’s M-Sport concern had been handed the reigns of Ford’s rally operation with the Escort WRC, but it was with the Focus that the fruits of the relationship really became apparent.

The new car groaned under the (figurative) weight of Cumbrian know-how and Dearborn money. It was compact with short overhangs, both of which would become hallmarks of a new breed of World Rally Car. The Zetec was relocated as advantageously as the rules would permit, now mounted 20mm rearwards and canted over by a full 25mm. The transversely mounted Zetec sent its drive through a full 90 degrees to a longitudinal Xtrac six-speed, an attempt by Ford to get as close to a

50:50 weight distribution as possible. (They eventually settled on 52:48)

Quite how seriously Ford was taking its rallying at the turn of the century was reflected in the man chosen to lead its charge, a certain Colin McRae, then at the apex of his powers. The £10 million, twoyear deal was then the most expensive in rallying history and marked the Scott as one of the UK’s best paid sportsmen, and he would in time be joined his old sparring partner, Carlos Sainz.

The career of the Focus WRC, at least the Mk1, can be neatly divided into two. There’s the first-generation car campaigned from 1999 through to the midway point of the 2003 season, and one known by pretty much everyone as the Focus ‘Evo.’ The latter was campaigned until the arrival of the Mk2 Focus in 2006. That’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of revisions made before the Evo’s introduction, but it’s undoubtedly true that the latter car constituted the biggest alterations since the original car’s homologation.

We could of course devote an entire issue to the career of the first gen Focus WRC but seeing as doing so would rather annoy those not of the bobble hat and Thermos persuasion, we thought it best to pinpoint some of the car’s most iconic moments. And as any rally fan will confirm, there were more than a few of those.

1999 was very much a season of two halves for Ford and McRae, with both joy and frustration in equal measure. The early season brought impressive pace and some truly spectacular results, not least overall victories in Portugal and the legendarily gruelling Safari Rally. This proved to be something of a false dawn however, and from the mid-season onwards, McRae’s title ambitions were slowly undone by maddeningly poor reliability gremlins.

The addition of Carlos Sainz bolstered Ford’s challenge from 2000 onwards, though neither he or McRae had an answer for Peugeot or Gronholm’s pace, and it was only in 2001 that both McRae and M-Sport were able to mount a real title push. A hat trick of wins on the bounce in the middle of the season rather cemented the Scot as one of rallying’s true greats and ensured he was able to sustain his title ambitions into

the autumn months.

Then, Rally GB happened. McRae went into his home rally with a lead over ‘best of the rest,’ Richard Burns, meaning all he had to do was finish either just ahead or just behind the Subaru man. This being McRae, he couldn’t, and the image of the Focus cartwheeling out of the rally and out of the championship reckoning has since gone down in rallying history.

The following season couldn’t hope to match the drama of 2001, and in any case, the pairing of Gronholm and 206 proved unbeatable. Sainz and McRae ended the year in 3rd and 4th respectively, and both decamped to Citroen for the following year. This left Ford to field an all new driver lineup of Francois Duval and Marko Martin, and the latter would prove to be quite the find, spearheading the Blue Oval’s charge for the remainder of the Mk1 Focus’s works career.

It was abundantly clear by this point that the Focus was slipping behind its rivals, both in terms of development and raw pace. The good news is that Ford had commenced a wholesale development push some 12 months previously, one spearheaded by the widely respected Christian Loriaux. The Belgian was poached from Prodrive and promptly given the keys to the M-Sport/Ford toy-box, and the Focus Evo (or the Focus RS WRC ’03) was the result.

The most obvious difference from the previous car was in aero, the ’03 car sporting a far more aggressive crop of air-channelling appendages than McRae, Sainz and co could call upon with its previous iteration. These wings and splitters were bolted to revised bodyshell based upon the USDM spec Focus, and therefore able to run larger, more efficient front and rear bumpers.

Cosworth was tasked with working its magic once more, Northampton’s finest coming up with a revised engine, the Duratec ‘R,’ both lighter and more responsive than its predecessor and now governed by a revised ECU.

Technical highlights were myriad and far reaching but the most striking feature of the new car was how it looked, and in a related matter, how it captured the collective imagination of the rallying public. Rarely has a rally car been greeted by so much acclaim as the ‘03 Focus, certainly not since the demise of Group B.

It went as quickly as it looked, especially in Martin’s hands. The Estonian truly ‘clicked’ with the car in a manner that was all too plain to see, and the pairing would eventually net 5 WRC wins outright. Impressive as these results doubtless were they couldn’t disguise the fact that the Mk1 Focus was nearing the end of its works career, nor could the revised car stem the PSA juggernaut of Loeb, Citroen and the Xsara. A new car would be required for that, and luckily for all concerned, Ford had just the model in the second-generation Focus.

Does the first gen Focus deserve to stand among the ranks of Ford’s greatest motorsport creations, bearing in mind it ultimately failed to take either McRae, Sainz or Martin to rallying’s ultimate prize? Absolutely, if only because it proved the M-Sport/Ford partnership to be devastatingly effective and that it knew how to develop a front-line World Rally Car.

That said, it remains a car inexorably linked with a certain moment in time, and the story of the Focus WRC and Ford’s relationship with the WRC could’ve been so very different had McRae had not taken quite as aggressive a cut 14km into Rhondda on the Friday morning of Rally GB 2001…