What is a Ford Focus RS for? Without a doubt, for discovering roads and enjoying them

Preparing the launch of a car involves thousands of kilometres of testing a year on roads and tracks across all five continents. If, as is the case with Ford Performance, the division of the oval brand in charge of developing the sportier variants and much of the American manufacturer’s competition cars, you have to extract every last ounce of the character of the car you are working on, you are obliged to seek out difficult roads on which to subject the new models to the toughest demands during their development process.

That leads the brand’s engineers to search for incredible roads that can also be closed to traffic so that tests can be carried out and the necessary data gathered, moments the engineers and their teams take advantage of to shoot appealing videos like the one we offer youat the end of this article. But in this case, rather than closing a road, the guys at Ford Performance opened it up.

It was in China, among the karst mountain peaks shrouded in mist in Guizhou province, that they found this spectacular road climbing to the top of one of its summits. Along it, up to 24 hairpin bends follow one after another in quick succession with virtually no respite, in a 1,148 m climb over barely four kilometres, while the driver of the Focus RS seeks to subject the car to the greatest possible demands on this winding mountain road. A road that, since a modern motorway spared Chinese motorists from having to use it to cross the pass, has remained closed for decades, despite being a heavily used and well-known route during the Second World War.

And now, thanks to the guys at Ford Performance, the route has been reopened… in the wildest possible way, with the new Focus RS. The route is extremely quiet, with hardly any traffic apart from the odd lost tourist… and the 350 CV of the Focus RS and its four-wheel-drive system. Half dirt, half tarmac, the track shakes under the power of the Focus RS’s engine, which sends all its torque to the gravel so that the car advances spectacularly on its climb.

And amid the clouds of dust kicked up in its wake, the guys at Ford Performance make a final confession about why they do this work developing this type of car as they reach the summit in their Focus RS: “We all drive with more passion than others“.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob-9uQLxvbA

Technical specifications of this car

HatchbackFord Focus19 versions · from 31,034 €