A new wrinkle in the ongoing saga of the Ford Focus RS and its possible U.S. arrival has emerged: Our pals at Road & Track are reporting that not only is the RS now more likely than ever to be sold in the U.S., but that it will blat and slide onto our shores packing torque-vectoring all-wheel drive.
Quoting an unnamed insider, R&T says the RS will appear in “extremely limited numbers [and] unlike its predecessor will be all-wheel drive.” The former jibes with our most recent report, which said that the RS isn’t likely to appear before 2016 or 2017, one or 2 years before the current-gen Focus is due to be replaced. We had also previously spotted a camouflaged Focus RS undergoing testing right here in the Rust Belt, followed shortly thereafter by a new batch of details that fueled speculation of a stateside arrival.
SUCK UP ALL OF THE ROAD: The last-gen Focus RS was forbidden fruit. Juicy, juicy forbidden fruit.
As for the all-wheel-drive tidbit, persistent rumors that a 330-hp variant of the 2.3-liter EcoBoost turbo 4 from the 2015 Ford Mustang might find a home in the Focus RS had us wondering how exactly Ford would mitigate the inevitable torque steer if the car remained front-wheel drive. Based on our experience with the current Focus ST, it seems Ford’s torque-steer-mitigation prowess may be maxed out. (The ST uses its stability-control program to brake individual front wheels when it senses torque steer; it sort of works. The last RS used RevoKnuckle, a special strut design, to stay out of ditches.) So it makes sense that Ford might call on an AWD setup to spread output to both ends of the car; we’re assuming that any additional weight of the driveline components will be offset by the additional power.
We reached out to our own sources at Ford, and this is what they had to say: “None of what is being reported is confirmed, including the part about the RS coming to America. That said, everything in the [report] references existing stuff and is certainly doable. If you look at what we can do with the Escape, which is a C-platform vehicle, you can see these things are not beyond the realm of possibility.” We didn’t read a categorical denial in there, did you? The scales may indeed be beginning to tip in our favor.
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