How Rally Made the First Ford Focus a Legend

The original Ford Focus was a landmark car. Critically acclaimed and huge selling, it showed that Ford would be the standard-bearer for small cars in the new millennium. Ford engineers obsessed over the way the Focus drove, and the result was so good, it forced everyone else to up their game. Want to know why the Mk5 Golf was so much better to drive than the Mk4? It was this car.

But what made the Focus a real enthusiast hero was rallying. Ford contracted M-Sport to build an all-wheel drive, active-differential monster for the World Rally Championship, and paid Colin McRae and Carlos Sainz to drive it. In a new video for Hagerty, the very lucky Henry Catchpole gets to spend some time in an ex-Sainz Focus WRC and explains what made this car so special.

While the first-gen Focus WRC never won a WRC Title, McRae racked up a number of memorable rally wins with the car, with Sainz adding two victories to the tally as well. McRae left the WRC after 2003, and Ford’s new signing, Marko Martin managed five more victories with this car.

Like other WRC cars, the Focus was a technical marvel, with active center and front differentials, and a six-speed sequential transmission paired with a unique stubby gear lever sprouting from the steering column. Gunther Steiner of F1 fame led the development of the car, too.

The Focus WRC had an influence on the Focus RS road car, too, thanks to the work of Richard Parry-Jones. A Welshman and huge rally enthusiast himself, Parry-Jones is credited with the turnaround of Ford’s product in the 1990s and 2000s, and the Focus was his masterpiece. Catchpole drives a Focus RS road car too, and though it’s probably not the best hot-hatch of its era, it’s a good reminder of what made the Focus overall so special.

But the WRC car is a hell of a thing to drive. Powerful, agile, and a wonderful blend of analog and digital. 

Like the Mustang in the 1960s, the original Focus represents Ford as its very best. The Focus never had quite as big an impact here in the States as it did in the UK and Europe, but enthusiasts get it. Too bad it’s so hard to find a Focus SVT these days.