A car worth waiting for!
Ford Focus Coupé-Cabriolet
On a bad day at the office, I picture himself driving a cabrio on some picturesque country road, with the wind blowing in my hair and soft music in the background. That normally helps the day to go by quicker, but what can I say when this really happens?
Thanks to Gasan and Ford, last November I was driving the Focus CC in Sienna. How can it get any better?
Enough said! To get down to business, coupé-cabriolets involve compromise, and it's usually the driving that suffers. Not so with the Focus CC, engineered by Pininfarina.
The new Focus Coupé-Cabriolet: simply one of the best of its kind. It can't be changed. The visible part can be blended in innumerable ways to create countless colours, but the ingredients will always be what they have always been.
So it's hardly surprising that 'new' car colours have usually been seen before. Ford's new Focus CC comes in some very nice new colours. They are from Pininfarina's palette, the Italian car designer and building operation that builds the open-top Focus in Turin, and helped to engineer it.
One of these colours is almost identical to Ford's old Saluki Bronze (think Cortina 1600E, Capri, Mark 1 Escort, huge Zephyrs with bonnets like aircraft carriers). It's so retro that it looks modern again.
Sparkling in the Tuscan sun, these colours suited the Focus well. It looked sporty, and could even have tended towards sleek had its bottom not been so big. But that's often a problem with coupé-cabriolets, whose solid roofs take up more space when stowed than a soft-top.
At least the Focus lets you into the boot's roomy cavity when the roof is folded without having to press a button to raise, laboriously, the stacked roof sections. The price they pay for having a roof made up of three sections instead of the usual two.
But do their bums look big? They do not. Its bum hides a colossal boot of 534 litres. So bags of space for golf bags or holiday luggage, and still 248 litres with the top down. That means sacrificing a few inches of rear seat legroom, though. A 5' 9" person can travel a decent distance behind another five-foot-niner, but two six-footers can't.
Siena. Pininfarina. Ford plays the Italian-style card hard with the Focus CC. We first saw the open Focus as the Vignale concept car, reviving the name of another Italian carrozzeria which came to Ford as part of the deal when it acquired Ghia.
As a concept it had lots of chrome detailing, some of which remains in the production version. The trapezoidal air intake under the front bumper (the face of Ford from now on) has a chrome outline, and there's a satin-chrome strip across the tail with 'Focus' embossed on it: very Jaguar-esque.
The Vignale concept had chrome strips along the sills, too, so look out for these on a future Vignale edition version. Maybe.
So, how did Ford convert the Focus into a convertible? Removing the roof took away a worrying 90 per cent of the torsional stiffness, so - as always with an open car - strength had to be put back elsewhere.
This doesn't mean that the roof contributes 90 per cent of a Focus's strength in itself, by the way; it's simply that the roof is normally the final piece of the structural puzzle. The strengthening parts are pressed and assembled by Pininfarina, while the roof mechanism comes from Oasis, a subsidiary of Webasto, itself once famous for its fabric sunroofs.
The windscreen glass is regular Focus, but set back at a racier angle. This made the driving position seem too high, so it's now set 20 mm lower than in a normal Focus. New foam in the seat cushion - soft in the middle for comfort, firm at the edges for support - accounts for 10 mm, while the other 10 mm comes from a new, lower position for the seat mountings.
This entailed complete new steel pressing across the cabin, which will now be used in all Focuses. That's good; I've always thought that the front edge of a Focus seat is too high. Rear seat space is surprisingly generous for two, and there's acceptable headroom with the roof up.
As a convertible package, then, the Focus CC works well. Where it could all go wrong, though, is in the driving. Usually, a convertible has softer suspension to reduce shocks fed into the floppier body, but the Focus is different. The front springs are 8% stiffer than in a regular Focus, the rear springs a surprisingly 33% stiffer.
All four dampers are firmed by 30%. This is partly to cope with the extra weight, most of which is over the rear wheels, and partly to ensure a crisp, sporty drive. It means the engineers must have great faith in the stiffness of the CC's bodyshell, and how right they were.
I started my drive with the roof up, in which guise the Focus is quite a good-looking coupé. This was because of torrential rain, which the CC's roof seals managed to keep outside the cabin. Thus cocooned, I felt I was simply driving a lower, sportier Focus whose 136 bhp, 2.0-litre turbodiesel engine felt effortlessly energetic.
Then out came the sun and dried up all the rain and the ritzy-glitzy Focus became a Spider (as Italians call convertibles) again. This is the point at which many coupé-cabriolets go to pieces, their first steering movements doing little more than taking up the slack in the structure.
Not here. Certain road ripples cause an occasional gentle vibration in the windscreen, but that's about it. Very few other CCs, in my experience, feel as solid as this one.
Which means those sporty suspension settings can work well. Amazingly well, in fact; I even prefer the Focus CC's balance to that of the ultra-sporty Focus ST, because the CC feels (and is) less nose-heavy.
So it points beautifully into bends, its steering precise, and its tail obligingly helping the pointing process. Usually, a convertible makes you pay for your style by spoiling the driving dynamics, but not this one. It smothers bumps properly, too; bangs and shudders are banished.
In essence, the Focus CC feels like a lighter, more fleet-footed, more focused Volvo C70, a car whose basic structure it shares. It hides its weight well if you're driving the diesel version, whose huge pulling power and six-speed gearbox make a great combination for winding, hilly roads.
It sounds crisp, too, in a diesel-voiced way, so there's no aural annoyance when the roof is stowed, which takes 29 slightly jerky seconds.
I tried a 2.0-litre petrol version, with 145 bhp, much less torque and a five-speed gearbox. The engine proved sweeter than it is in a Fiesta ST, but this time the Focus CC's weight was obvious. It moved along swiftly enough, and hills were harder work, the relaxation factor was not gone. There's also a 1.6-litre version with an adequate 100 bhp, which is obviously slower than the 2.0-litre version but the entry level will suit the local market perfectly.
Thanks to Gasan and Ford, last November I was driving the Focus CC in Sienna. How can it get any better?
Enough said! To get down to business, coupé-cabriolets involve compromise, and it's usually the driving that suffers. Not so with the Focus CC, engineered by Pininfarina.
The new Focus Coupé-Cabriolet: simply one of the best of its kind. It can't be changed. The visible part can be blended in innumerable ways to create countless colours, but the ingredients will always be what they have always been.
So it's hardly surprising that 'new' car colours have usually been seen before. Ford's new Focus CC comes in some very nice new colours. They are from Pininfarina's palette, the Italian car designer and building operation that builds the open-top Focus in Turin, and helped to engineer it.
One of these colours is almost identical to Ford's old Saluki Bronze (think Cortina 1600E, Capri, Mark 1 Escort, huge Zephyrs with bonnets like aircraft carriers). It's so retro that it looks modern again.
Sparkling in the Tuscan sun, these colours suited the Focus well. It looked sporty, and could even have tended towards sleek had its bottom not been so big. But that's often a problem with coupé-cabriolets, whose solid roofs take up more space when stowed than a soft-top.
At least the Focus lets you into the boot's roomy cavity when the roof is folded without having to press a button to raise, laboriously, the stacked roof sections. The price they pay for having a roof made up of three sections instead of the usual two.
But do their bums look big? They do not. Its bum hides a colossal boot of 534 litres. So bags of space for golf bags or holiday luggage, and still 248 litres with the top down. That means sacrificing a few inches of rear seat legroom, though. A 5' 9" person can travel a decent distance behind another five-foot-niner, but two six-footers can't.
Siena. Pininfarina. Ford plays the Italian-style card hard with the Focus CC. We first saw the open Focus as the Vignale concept car, reviving the name of another Italian carrozzeria which came to Ford as part of the deal when it acquired Ghia.
As a concept it had lots of chrome detailing, some of which remains in the production version. The trapezoidal air intake under the front bumper (the face of Ford from now on) has a chrome outline, and there's a satin-chrome strip across the tail with 'Focus' embossed on it: very Jaguar-esque.
The Vignale concept had chrome strips along the sills, too, so look out for these on a future Vignale edition version. Maybe.
So, how did Ford convert the Focus into a convertible? Removing the roof took away a worrying 90 per cent of the torsional stiffness, so - as always with an open car - strength had to be put back elsewhere.
This doesn't mean that the roof contributes 90 per cent of a Focus's strength in itself, by the way; it's simply that the roof is normally the final piece of the structural puzzle. The strengthening parts are pressed and assembled by Pininfarina, while the roof mechanism comes from Oasis, a subsidiary of Webasto, itself once famous for its fabric sunroofs.
The windscreen glass is regular Focus, but set back at a racier angle. This made the driving position seem too high, so it's now set 20 mm lower than in a normal Focus. New foam in the seat cushion - soft in the middle for comfort, firm at the edges for support - accounts for 10 mm, while the other 10 mm comes from a new, lower position for the seat mountings.
This entailed complete new steel pressing across the cabin, which will now be used in all Focuses. That's good; I've always thought that the front edge of a Focus seat is too high. Rear seat space is surprisingly generous for two, and there's acceptable headroom with the roof up.
As a convertible package, then, the Focus CC works well. Where it could all go wrong, though, is in the driving. Usually, a convertible has softer suspension to reduce shocks fed into the floppier body, but the Focus is different. The front springs are 8% stiffer than in a regular Focus, the rear springs a surprisingly 33% stiffer.
All four dampers are firmed by 30%. This is partly to cope with the extra weight, most of which is over the rear wheels, and partly to ensure a crisp, sporty drive. It means the engineers must have great faith in the stiffness of the CC's bodyshell, and how right they were.
I started my drive with the roof up, in which guise the Focus is quite a good-looking coupé. This was because of torrential rain, which the CC's roof seals managed to keep outside the cabin. Thus cocooned, I felt I was simply driving a lower, sportier Focus whose 136 bhp, 2.0-litre turbodiesel engine felt effortlessly energetic.
Then out came the sun and dried up all the rain and the ritzy-glitzy Focus became a Spider (as Italians call convertibles) again. This is the point at which many coupé-cabriolets go to pieces, their first steering movements doing little more than taking up the slack in the structure.
Not here. Certain road ripples cause an occasional gentle vibration in the windscreen, but that's about it. Very few other CCs, in my experience, feel as solid as this one.
Which means those sporty suspension settings can work well. Amazingly well, in fact; I even prefer the Focus CC's balance to that of the ultra-sporty Focus ST, because the CC feels (and is) less nose-heavy.
So it points beautifully into bends, its steering precise, and its tail obligingly helping the pointing process. Usually, a convertible makes you pay for your style by spoiling the driving dynamics, but not this one. It smothers bumps properly, too; bangs and shudders are banished.
In essence, the Focus CC feels like a lighter, more fleet-footed, more focused Volvo C70, a car whose basic structure it shares. It hides its weight well if you're driving the diesel version, whose huge pulling power and six-speed gearbox make a great combination for winding, hilly roads.
It sounds crisp, too, in a diesel-voiced way, so there's no aural annoyance when the roof is stowed, which takes 29 slightly jerky seconds.
I tried a 2.0-litre petrol version, with 145 bhp, much less torque and a five-speed gearbox. The engine proved sweeter than it is in a Fiesta ST, but this time the Focus CC's weight was obvious. It moved along swiftly enough, and hills were harder work, the relaxation factor was not gone. There's also a 1.6-litre version with an adequate 100 bhp, which is obviously slower than the 2.0-litre version but the entry level will suit the local market perfectly.