Ford's parade of fast European Focuses during the last decade has had us both admiring the Blue Oval for building them and admonishing the company for playing keep-away with its home market. We've been assured that the days of keeping its hottest hatches out of our hands will be over once the new world-market Focus comes online starting in 2011 as a 2012 model-but Ford had to go and twist the knife one more time. Witness the 2011 Focus RS500, the fiercest Focus ever and what the company considers to be the successor to the legendary Ford Sierra RS500 racer of the 1980s.
Decked out with matte black ?foil? paint and 19-inch wheels, the RS500 is clearly no ordinary Focus. Vents, spoilers, and a gnarly rear diffuser complete the blacked-out Bat-Focus look. There is a little color on the car: Red brake calipers hide behind those thin-spoked rims, and the gloss-black vents set behind the massively flared front fenders contain blue ?RS? badging. But other than that, color is out to lunch.
Really, the color is in the engine bay: the Focus RS500's 2.5-liter inline five-cylinder engine has been juiced up some 45 hp and 14 lb-ft of torque from its appearance in the Focus RS; here it makes 345 hp and 339 lb-ft, achieved mostly through breathing enhancements instead of additional turbo boost. The wide track and a revised limited-slip differential developed for the Focus RS are said to be able to handle the additional torque of this particular front-wheel-drive pocket rocket. We still recommend holding on with both hands, though.
As for acceleration, Ford claims the RS500 will hit 62 mph in 5.6 seconds. We're pretty sure we could do better than that, since we coaxed a 5.4-second 0?60 run from the first-gen Mazdaspeed 3, which had 263 hp.
The 500 RS500s that Ford will build for 20 European markets-each car gets its own numbered plaque on the center console-will be the last of the current-gen Focuses to be built at the company's Saarlouis plant in Germany. Of the 500 example, 101 will be reserved for the U.K., while buyers in the other 19 countries will have to split much smaller allotments. Pricing was not announced, but don't expect this ?Ultimate Performance Ford? to come cheap.
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