While Mitsubishi and Subaru have done admirable jobs of leveraging their World Rally Car (WRC) efforts into products Americans can actually buy, the company that's shown the greatest long-term commitment to the racing series has been Ford. For 2006, they're back with yet another version of the Focus, aimed at claiming WRC supremacy and at least another four-year commitment to the series.
Ford put its new Focus RS WRC '06 on display at Italy's Bologna Motor Show last December and, of course, it's based on the latest version of Ford's most popular car worldwide. It's supposedly a derivative of the Focus ST, though the basic elements of the car have been so fundamentally twisted by Britain's M-Sport and chief engineer Christian Laoriaux that it could have been based on a loaf of Wonder Bread and still looked pretty much the same.
With the extensive use of exotic materials like titanium now banned, saving weight was a critical challenge in designing the new car. But the basic elements of a modern rally machine are in place. That includes a 2.0-liter, DOHC, 16-valve turbocharged four making around 300-horsepower while inhaling through the FIA mandated 34-millimeter inlet restrictor; full-time four-wheel drive with an active center differential; a Ricardo five-speed sequential gearbox; and really big Brembo brakes. Nothing you wouldn't expect from a serious rally competitor at the sport's highest level.
The team tested the car in competition at the Rally Australia in November and took two special stages and finished sixth overall. Not a bad shakedown run, and they got some great shots of the car in flight.
What's frustrating from an American perspective is that not only do we not get anything approaching the mechanical tastiness of the rally machine in the United States, we don't even get the second-generation Focus upon which the car is based. So the rest of the world can at least drive a Focus that looks like the ones Marcus Grnholm and Mikko Hirvonen get. What's up with that?
Meanwhile, despite the fact that it actually sells the all-wheel drive, turbocharged Lancer Evolution to us civilians, Team Mitsubishi Ralliart has pulled out of WRC competition. Mitsubishi's financial troubles are very public, so this can't be too much of a surprise. But general unhappiness with how FIA runs the series also led Citroen, Peugeot and Skoda to dump their factory efforts. That leaves Ford competing against just one other factory team during 2006: Subaru.
Ford and Subaru began fighting it out during the Rally of Monte Carlo in January. It should be a good, dirty battle.
Scirocco Redux?Back when VW introduced the first front-drive Golf in 1974, it introduced the Golf-based Scirocco sport coupe alongside it. More than 30 years later, there's still a hardcore cult of Scirocco-holics who haven't been able to buy a new version of the car since 1988. That cult is about to see the resurrection for which they've so long prayed.
Rumors abound that the Scirocco name is about to be revived on a new coupe based on the Jetta chassis. Styled to resemble the Concept R show car, the new Scirocco has been rumored to be both front and rear drive at different times. The most believable scenario has it emerging during 2007 in a base front-drive version with four-cylinder power and derivatives ranging up to V6-powered models with all-wheel drive. Whatever, it will give VW a car in a segment they practically invented - and abandoned - with the first two generations of Scirocco.
Or VW may call the new coupe "Rivo" and screw over all those Scirocco guys.