When the 2008 Ford Focus was introduced to the press at Cobo Arena during the 2007 Detroit auto show, the reaction was all-encompassing silence, punctuated only by the whine of charging flashes and the staccato, mechanical ballet of cameras. From the upper echelons of the arena, a journalist hissed, "It's El Cid! I'm watching El Cid!", referring to the Spanish knight whose corpse was strapped to his horse and sent out to lead his men in a charge against the Moors.
Ford's press conference at Detroit lasted only 40 minutes, of which fewer than 10 were devoted to the new Focus. The majority of those were dedicated not to celebrating the car's outstanding provenance as one of the most revolutionary chassis designs to have been rendered in steel, but to Microsoft's Sync infotainment system and color-changing lights in the cupholders. It was then that the suspicion began to creep in that, even as the new Focus led Ford's product charge at that year's auto show, it was dead to us enthusiasts already.
Critics of the 2008 Focus are quick to point out that the U.S. gets a reheated version of the old car's chassis while there exists a gentrified, second-generation Focus with Volvo underpinnings in Europe. But if our new Focus is a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," and the old boss was a popular and critical favorite that has won over 60 awards, are those slagging the 2008 model talking out of their collective ass? We assembled a 2008 Focus SES coupe and a 2002 Focus ZX3 hatchback to find out.
That the original Focus won over the world wasn't on account of its styling. A brief glance over Usenet posts from 1999, when the car was unleashed on the U.S. market, sounds suspiciously like the Internet vitriol slung about over the new car. The Focus, they said, looked "like a stinkbug," an "origami project," a "jack-o-lantern pumpkin from the front," and — for the economical — "fugly." Its interior was alternately described as "brittle," "cheap," "horrible," and — for the blunt — "full of crappy plastics." It was a success nonetheless. Even the dubious distinction of being the second-most recalled car in America couldn't take the bloom off the rose: The Focus garnered both Automobile Magazine's 2000 Automobile of the Year and ranked on Car and Driver's annual 10Best list five times. By the end of 2002, over two million examples were in the hands of eager buyers worldwide.
The reason that hotcakes sold like Focuses has everything to do with Ford's global architecture for the car. Designed from the ground up to be sold in staggering numbers around the world, the sheer volume of sales allowed Ford to endow the Focus with aristocratic engineering at prices the proles could afford. Put simply, not only was the Focus a good, cheap car, it was brilliantly fun to drive. And the reason for that can be summed up in three tidy words: Richard Parry-Jones.
The vice president of Ford Europe's Product Development Group, Parry-Jones was a rarity among engineers in that, while his Thatcher-era peers were busy starching their trousers, he was rallying a factory-backed Escort RS2000. When it came time to dial in the chassis dynamics of the first Ford Mondeo, Parry-Jones dispensed with the factory test drivers and brought in Grand Prix legend Jackie Stewart, learning from Stewart how to express subjective driving impressions in the objective language of engineers. As the man responsible for the driving dynamics of the Ford Focus, Parry-Jones relied on his preternatural ability to isolate exactly what was happening in the chassis — to separate tire flex from bushing deflection from the mechanical action of the steering rack — to understand the car as a gestalt. Working 50-hour shifts, Parry-Jones laid down the standards for the Focus to operate as a single, cohesive unit, tweaking the suspension bushings and geometry and elasto-kinematics to work with the damper tuning and friction points of the steering linkage and natural resonances of the Focus's unibody. His work was so successful that a Honda product planner admits to a cram session of recalibrating the EP Civic Si before its launch, on account of "how damned good" the Focus ZX3 was.
The care that went into tuning the Focus is obvious in our 2002 ZX3. Despite having enough suspension travel to soak up bumps and washboards, the Focus is willing to settle into a line without needing constant tweaking. Its steering is direct and weighty, without any slop or squidge introduced by the litany of rubber bushings isolating the steering wheel from the rest of the car. Its handling is lively. Caffeinated. Nimble. The first Focus was designed around Parry-Jones' strict order in which proper steering should work: First, he said, you should feel the feedback of steering torque through the wheel. Next you'll begin to feel the lateral forces in your inner ear. Then, and only then, once the car has communicated the direction and speed of its change, should you see the car begin to move. Despite having 70,000 miles on its odometer, the Focus we found still exemplified Parry-Jones' dictum, moving with a sublime, nimble grace that conventional wisdom once said American cars weren't capable of delivering.
The 2008 Focus — revised after Richard Parry-Jones was shunted out of global product development and back to Ford Europe — can be nimble, too. Its steering rack is actually quicker than its predecessor's (15.8 to the old car's 16.0), and the steering effort loads up nicely, revealing the baked-in prowess of the car it's based on. Throw the 2008 Focus into a sweeping bend, however, and it becomes obvious that the old car's sharp corners were shaven off. While its absolute limits of adhesion are similar to the old Focus, its transitional responses up to that point are blunted by a roll center that wouldn't be out of place on a Corolla.
Credit the Focus' new body structure for the car's lack of verve. For 2008, Ford stiffened the Focus' chassis by adding a crossbrace behind the dashboard, letting engineers soften the dampers and springs to give the Focus a softer ride. The new Focus raises the body two inches higher to give drivers a more commanding view of the road and a feeling of being cocooned inside the car — a psychological ploy that, according to customer clinics, makes drivers feel safer. Thicker window glass and a more robust windshield help quiet the cabin down so that drivers can converse clearly over the optional hands-free Bluetooth phone system. Changes that make the Focus more genteel, but ones that come at the expense of body control. The new Focus packed on only thirty pounds during its redesign, but some of the mass it started out with was moved upwards, giving the car leanings and rolls during maneuvers that continue long after the tires have dug in and the car has begun following its new tack.
The engine and transmission behave identically between our Focuses, which isn't surprising as they're carried over from one to the other. 2008 models found an extra five horsepower over the 2002, thanks to different intake and cooling systems, but the drivetrains both share similar laurels and laments. Both spin freely up to their redline, but are slow to rev-match thanks to a leaden flywheel. Clutch take-up is smooth and linear, grabbing at the middle and progressing through the pedal's range of motion. Both shifters have a slightly rubbery and uncommunicative feel, which defy quick gearchanges. Brake feel is identical between the cars, with a soft initial lead-in giving way to a progressive and firm pedal, despite the 2008 Focus having stiffer aluminum front calipers and 11-inch rear drums versus the 2002's iron calipers and 8-inch dogdish rear binders.
So is the 2008 Focus standing in the shadow of its predecessor, or are the caterwauls merely a pile-on of disappointed Eurosnobs who are pining for the continental model? Sadly, after spending a week in each car, we had to conclude that the former was true. Fortunately, however, the 2008 Focus is a stopgap measure. The next-generation car lands in the Americas in late 2010, on a global platform shared with both its European and Asian stablemates and at a price projected to undercut our existing Focus by a healthy margin. What started as a unified vision with the first-generation car was forced through a gauntlet of customer opinion groups and corporate steering committees, and like the Neon before it, the result was that an enthusiasts' favorite was dragged into the comfortably taupe-hued middle of the marketplace. The 2008 Focus may appeal to buyers of economous anonyboxes, but for the rest of us the new Focus has been bound to the back of its horse and sent out to battle.
