Project Focus SVT Part III

Making it roadworthy
It's been so long since our Focus ran that it took a little extra work to make it roadworthy. When we tore it down for the turbo install, it had recently been victimized by a curb-crawling executive. Two tires were bald, one had a finger-sized hole in the sidewall, one wheel had a mangled rim and the other three looked like we dragged them behind a truck.

Naturally, we only had four hours to fix the problem.

First, the tire search. SVT is pretty good at filling its wheel wells with all the tire that will fit, but the stock 215/45ZR-17 size is a bit limiting. There are several good tires available in that size, but step up to 225/45ZR-17 and you can choose from nearly every tire made. Plus, we like big tires.

Word on the street, however, is that 225s won't fit on a Focus. We downloaded the specs on a few 225/45ZR-17s and found most of them to be only half an inch wider and about a quarter of an inch taller than stock. Most aftermarket Focus wheels are around 42mm offset, though, while the SVT wheels are 49mm. That makes the aftermarket wheels 7mm closer to rubbing on the fenders, which explains the word on the street. The stock 17x7-inch wheel size is as narrow as you can go on a 225, and using it will make the sidewall more rounded and reduce the size of the contact patch slightly, but it's amazing the details you'll overlook when you already have the wheels.

We decided to use a file to clean up the curbed parts of our wheels and shave off the big, jagged scar on the one with a popped tire, then headed to the hardware store for some red primer (red doesn't look silver or black, which makes it easy to tell when you've primered everything) and flat black spray paint. Oh, yeah, flat black.

Then it was time to choose tires. The recently released Michelin Pilot Sport PS2 has been high on our list of tires to try, and 225/45ZR-17 is the smallest size it comes in. The PS2 is supposed to combine stellar dry grip, reassuring wet performance and good ride quality. Normally we don't care much about ride quality, but with this kind of power on tap, we do care about torque steer. The suppleness that makes a tire ride well also tends to minimize torque steer. But how to find a set of brand-new PS2s in the right size in three hours and 30 minutes? One lucky phone call to Shoreline Motoring, half an hour away in Huntington Beach, solved that dilemma.

Cocky with our success, we decided to stop by Progress on the way to see if the boys could slap in one of its stiffer rear anti-roll bars. Being only .03g away from the Cobra's skidpad grip in stock form, we figured stickier tires and a big rear bar might be enough to catch up. Turns out the stock SVT rear bar, at 21mm, is nearly as big as Progress' 22mm Focus bar. Undeterred, Progress' Ed Florez grabbed a 25mm diameter bar of spring steel and just made a bigger one. Forty minutes later, with the paint on the bar still tacky, we tore off toward Shoreline, shifting with one hand and shaking spray paint cans with the other.As you can tell from the photos, we made it.

Driving it
With just 8 psi of boost, the Focus is amazing. We've always complained that the SVT was geared like a turbo car, now we're glad it is. The gearing is so tall, you can use all 245 hp (from a roll) in first gear without wheelspin. As we had hoped, replacing our bald front tires and mismatched rears (spare tire, remember) with new, supple Michelin PS2s all but eliminated torque steer. There's a big yank to the left when you grab third gear hard, but otherwise, it's surprisingly tame. The car squats noticeably on its stock suspension in second and even third gear, and with the redline bumped up to 7800 rpm, the engine has incredibly long legs.

On its first night on the road (before the new tires), we got into a second-gear roll-on with a stock SRT-4 and simply drove past it. This in a completely stock-looking Focus with a stock exhaust and a space-saver spare on the rear. Oh, for a glimpse into that poor driver's head. The next day we barely lost to a mildly tuned WRX. Never have we driven a car that attracts such frequent street challenges. Of course, it's rare that we drive a car that looks like such an easy conquest.

The GT2871R is designed to work best at more like 20 psi of boost, so at 8.5 psi it's a little off its game. You notice this as a low-rpm lagginess that only accentuates the SVT's already soft bottom end. Roll into the throttle at anything over 3000, though, and it's instant smooth, seamless acceleration. One advantage of our oversized turbo is that it never runs out of breath. At 7800 rpm, it still laughs at 8.5 pounds of boost. With the turbo barely working and the efficient, low-restriction NS111 turbine, you hear a slightly louder, more urgent version of the normal SVT exhaust note--a blatty, edgy wail that makes you think European Mk II Escort, even if you've never heard one. At cruise, the exhaust sounds stock. We're so impressed with the sound and low restriction of the SVT exhaust, in fact, that other than adding a cat, we intend to keep it on the car as is.

Getting it out of the hole at the dragstrip isn't as hard as we expected. Launch with a bit of clutch slip at around 3500 and the turbo comes up and turns the front tires to smog. Power delivery is easy to modulate at this low boost, though, so you can feather the throttle all the way through first and lay serious stripe in second. We dropped front tire pressures only slightly for our testing (30 psi hot), wanting to see what the car could do in the real world rather than some freak dragstrip setup. Turns out the real world, on a mild, 80-degree day, is a 14.1-second quarter mile at 102.6 mph. Sixty miles per hour takes an even 6 seconds.

Our new Michelin Pilot Sport PS2s and the big rear bar didn't quite do what we expected on the skidpad. While we hoped to leapfrog from the SVT's stock .89g all the way to the Cobra's .92g, we managed only .90 with these two tweaks. The massive 25 mm rear bar seemed to have little effect on the handling balance, which suggests to us that the poly-urethane end links are deflecting enough to render thebar ineffective.