Ford Focus RS

Price/as tested £31,250/£35,765 Driver Jack Rix Why it’s here Can the Focus RS do sensible as well as sideways?

With parenthood looming fast, Jack has ditched the Zenos E10R for something “sensible”. With 345bhp and 347lb ft

That’s it, it’s all over. I’ve had my fun, I suppose. Time to stop shoehorning my wife into two-seater track cars, driving at irresponsible speeds and kidding myself that those delicious little pickles you get in a 3am kebab are one of my fve a day. I’m having a baby, you see, like, any minute now, so I’m doing what any responsible father-to-be would do and swapping a Zenos for a sensible fve-door hatch with a big boot and Isofix.

The fact that it has 345bhp, Recaro shell seats and a drift mode button is completely beside the point – that’s got nothing to do with the baby, that’s for me when ‘it’ isn’t around, or sleeping. I hear they do that a lot. I’ve got previous with the RS, of course, driving it 2,000 miles around Europe in issue 279 before confidently proclaiming it to be “THE WORLD’S GREATEST HOT HATCH” in giant orange letters on the cover of the magazine. Fair to say, we quite like it.

Since then, it’s won our previous car of the year award, Matt LeBlanc added one to his three-car dream garage in issue 289, and Chris Harris branded it the most overhyped thing ever. What does he know about cars, though, really?

So here’s the point of having one in the TG Garage: my frst fing with the RS mostly involved a deserted Route Napoléon, maple syrup sunsets and a hilarious ten hours sliding around a frosty race circuit in northern France. My second bite is likely to be less glam and more... pram. I will, naturally, be seeking out any opportunity to use the RS in the manner in which its engineers intended, but it’s the bits in between that will reveal new layers hitherto unseen. We know it’s firmly sprung, so how will it fare mounting several thousand speed bumps, each way, on my commute? Is there anywhere you can actually deploy the drift mode, or launch control, within the M25? And can baby chunder be wiped of Alcantara, or does it remain forever engrained?

Although a fiver under £30,000 when it frst launched, the base price has now snuck up to £31,250 – still great value when you consider the performance. To that, EK16 XYF adds Nitrous Blue paint (£745), Recaro shell seats (£1,145), 10-speaker stereo, nav and rear camera (£465), blue brake calipers (£100), the Luxury Pack with power mirrors, rear parking sensors, keyless entry and cruise (£1,000) and 19-inch black forged alloy wheels (£975). The rims look incredible, but do have a tendency to show up any nicks or scrapes...

Or enormous 12-inch gouges, courtesy of the delivery driver, who to be fair stuck his hand up immediately. Later that day, champing for my frst go in it, I discovered it had a puncture. So, not the smoothest of starts, but all wheels are now fully infated and uniform in colour, which can only be a good thing. If I can say the same about the baby when it arrives, I’ll be a happy man.