This to me is the most important part of the site. Here I hope to dispel some of the incorrect rumors surrounding the Focus Cosworth's final specification that I have seen and heard.

A lot of the press about the Focus Cosworth has been pure speculation or a mish mash of quotes that originated from TeamRS. A good example of this was from one site reporting the spec as going to be a 200ps Volvo powered car which will be rear wheel drive. The result of this and other reports has been very negative as a lot of people have understandably been left thinking that the car will not be the monster they were hoping for.

The facts as is currently understood

Reading the interview with Jost Capito (Head of TeamRS) HERE you can establish the primary specification guidelines.
He does not however not say anything exact, this will be for two main reasons:
1) It woukd give away important information to the competitors. This would allow them to come up with a battle plan.
2) They won't know yet either! Everything has to be designed, tested, costed and tested again and again, and this will often mean changes.

What we can understand though is that it will be:

Power will be a minimum of 225bhp - Many articles have stated 225bhp as being the actual output, rather than setting it as the minimum it will be (i.e. more than the Focus RS) which is thecontext in which it was said. Most people expect it to be close to the 300bhp mark but this will never be stated until Ford are satisfied that they can achieve it for fear of overstating the car. The engine may be a derivative of the Volvo 5 cylinder 225bhp turbo engine used in the V50 (note derivative, not the actual!) or something totally different.

4 Wheel Drive - One of the reasons it wasn't produced on the chassis was that it couldn't house a 4x4 drive train.The new C1 chassis is a shared platform between Ford, Land Rover and Volvo. It is a real hybrid. One thing's for sure, it will be too powerful to be FWD.

WRC Styling - It is inevitable that the car will inherit some of the WRC styling.

More ' Britain' friendly - The Mk1 Focus RS was often criticised for reported torquesteer on bumpy British roads. This was blamed by Jost on the cars testing on the Nurburgring (racetrack in Germany) rather than normal roads. Jost has said of the Focus Cosworth:
"If the new car can be made to handle well on UK B-roads and motorways, it should work on any roads. Every change we make to the chassis during development will be tested on B-roads and motorways."

Other expectations of the car are that it will have a very trick suspension/steering setup (similar to the Mitsubishi Evo's active yawl control), a 6-speed gearbox and launch control.

 

The final words on the specification of the car should be left to Jost, as he said them:

"The Cosworth should be even more ex-treme than the RS Focus. It should be lightweight, stripped out,
have more performance and be more extreme. Maybe it wouldn't even have air-conditioning."