The original purchaser of every Ford Performance vehicle—Focus RS, Focus ST, Fiesta ST, Mustang GT350, F 150 Raptor–receives complimentary tuition to the Ford Performance Racing School at Utah Motorsports Campus. Ford has tailored classes that honor the high-performance capability of each model and teach owners how to reach those limits safely. As the first-owner of a Focus RS, I am on my way to Salt Lake City to attend the RS Adrenaline Academy!
My instructions are to arrive at the Ford Performance center on Utah Motorsports Campus at 6 pm the evening before my one-day class. Since my flight into SLC lands mid-morning, I have a chance to do a little exploring of Salt Lake’s mountain roads first. My side trip into the Rockies turns out to be an excellent choice for a couple of reasons. First, the Big and Little Cottonwood Canyon Roads climb into some jaw-dropping mountains. At lower elevations, the first pale green leaves of spring are donning the trees, and the waterfalls are full of rushing snowmelt. It matters not that my Nissan Altima rental is the worst car I’d driven all year; every five minutes, I stop to take photos and do short hikes. At this time of year, when the passes are closed, the canyon roads dead end at snow-covered ski resorts and seemingly endless saw-tooth peaks. It is late in the season, but there is still a ski lift or two operating. The scope and grandeur of Utah’s finest resorts certainly put California skiing in perspective…
The second reason the trip into the mountains is an excellent idea is that Ford’s press launch of the exotic new Ford GT is ongoing. Three of these incredibly exclusive vehicles are running up and down the canyons, followed by press photographers hanging out of minivans. At the Donut Falls trailhead, a delicious red GT is parked for photography, and I spend thirty minutes gaping at this speed machine. It looks amazing set in front of one of nature’s best landscapes. The crew from Automobile magazine has the car on loan, and I chat-up the editor-in-chief Mike Floyd about his impressions of the car. He’s only driven it on the road but thinks that this amazing machine would be more at home on the race track than on the street. I ask Mike if he’d take one over the foreign competition. For the street, Mike would give the nod to the Ferrari 488 GTB and its howling V8 over the Ford GT with its much less sonorous V6.
I look inside the GT’s cabin and find it to be spartan and stripped down. I think there may be reasons beyond engine note for leaving the Ford at the track. Still, if I were to park a single exotic car in my living room just to gawk at as art, the Ford GT would be my choice. It is so beautiful to behold, shaped by racecar dreams, and it is poetry in motion even when it is standing still.
So yes, an excellent start to a fast Ford vacation.
The evening Ford Performance reception is a chance to sign waivers, meet some of the instructor corps, and chat with fellow owners. The dinner is attended by both RS and GT350 owners; I admit I am jealous of the Mustang guys as I really want to drive a GT350! My conversation is with RS owners, however, and unsurprisingly that chat revolves around stories of dealer markup and other delivery mishaps, then digresses into early adopter foibles like the infamous B-pillar rattle. Everyone enjoys arguing whether Nitrous Blue was the best color in the world. I say yes.
I am back at the track early the next day for the 7:30 am roll call. We all get fitted for helmets and race suits, then listen to a thirty-minute primer from the instructors. A tinge of disappointment and worry sets in when the professional racecar driver giving the presentation covers trail-braking only to say it is forbidden at the RS Adrenaline Academy. Then he says the best way through a corner is to coast from turn-in to apex. I know he is not going to win any races that way! This class is clearly structured with first-time track drivers in mind. I am unhappy as I have eight years of on-track experience and already know the basics and then some, but I can’t fault Ford as fourteen of the eighteen participants are newbies to the track.
Our first exercise of the day is a van tour of Utah Motorsports Campus’ West Track. The West Track is a 2.2-mile slice of the full circuit, but one that flows nicely with many sweeping corners and a few gotchas too. The instructor pauses the van at each significant corner, pointing out the entry and apex cones, and discussing how to place the car and what to expect from the handling.
Next, half of the class buckles in a lead-follow exercise while the rest of us look on from the pit wall. Groups of three students in Focus RSes chase instructors in Mustang GTs. The goal is to learn the track layout, lines and braking points at a chaperoned speed. Each student gets two laps directly behind the instructor and four laps further back in the line. Since the instructor scales his pace to keep all the cars together, we only go as fast as the slowest guy can manage. My word of advice to future attendees is to study video of the track the night before and then pair up with other experienced track rats so that you are in a fast lead-follow group and can encourage your instructor to move briskly.
Our full-bore track driving comes next. As with lead-follow, half of the students drive while the rest wait and watch. Four instructors rotate into the running cars, giving me a mix of instructed and solo laps. I had expected this full-bore track time to be the highlight of my day, but it turns out to be second best. The main frustration is that I frequently end up trapped behind slower traffic. Passing is not allowed, so I pull into the pits three times in 20 minutes to wait for a gap in traffic and give myself clear track to run.
When I can go fast, the RS is quite fun to hustle around the track, work through the heavy braking zones, and whip out of the corners. The RS’s power and torque vectoring open up interesting options for overpowering the chassis inherent understeer. (Jetting out of the tight corners in the RS is more rewarding than it would be in most other FWD or AWD vehicles.) I am also having great fun romping over UMC’s many smooth and high curbs—because racecar!—but the instructor tells me off when he rotates into my car. Apparently, it is hard on the wheel bearings.
We have been instructed to leave the cars in Sport mode all day long, but I find the ESC too intrusive on the track. The Focus intervenes and kills power on corner exit well before I need help. I run Track mode for my seven or eight open laps, and I enjoy that setting much more.
Our last event before lunch is riding shotgun while the professionals show us how it is done. My classmates emerge from their rides blathering about how hard the instructors brake on the way into the corners; I’m a little blasé to the pace since I’ve been a passenger in faster cars with stickier tires, but I am reduced to hooting and hollering when we get a little slide on through the Three Ds complex.
I ask the instructors if any modifications have been made to the RSes. Higher-temp Brembo brake pads and higher-temp brake fluid has been installed. The school also bolts in roll bars and 4-point harnesses to use with the stock seats. We students notice an unusual cooling duct protruding out from the underbody, just forward of the front passenger’s feet. An inquiry with the mechanics reveals that the extra cooling is for the power steering; they say the Power Transfer Unit also has an additional heat exchanger to keep it cool.
After a lunch of sandwiches and cookies, we are split into three groups and sent out for a series of skidpad exercises. First for me is a figure-eight course around two tight collections of barrels at opposite ends of a small parking lot. We can try launch control on two of our four runs; Ford Engineering tells the school that back-to-back launches in the RS are fine so long as the clutch pedal is completely sidestepped when released. Indeed, the launches work remarkably well. The front tires spin for a fraction of a second before the whole car hooks up and bolts forward. I did not smell any burnt clutch, so the car seems built for the abuse. The hardest part of the launch is finding the option in the drive menus and preventing the mode from timing out as you get ready to go.
As was true on the track, we are supposed to stick to Sport mode and nothing more for the figure-eight. However, the ESP keeps drastically reducing power as I try to exit my U-turns around the barrels. I reselect Track mode, the interference goes away, and I find the RS is even capable of a useful smidgen of power-on over-rotation when I stand on the throttle. Track mode’s stiffened suspension may be helping braking and cornering too.
There is so much hype around the RS’s drift mode that I had really, really, really been looking forward to the sanctioned chance to turn Ford’s tires into smoke. But all day long, we’ve been getting hints that the drifting will be a dialed-back version of my smoky dreams. Heartbreaker #1: The exercise is just about “initiating the drift, not sustaining it.” We will not be doing multiple four-wheel slide donuts around the pivot cone. Heartbreaker #2: We’ll only get three attempts at initiating the drift. Then it will be the next student’s turn. Heartbreaker #3: The skidpad would be wet. No smoke! This is not the exercise I’d seen on YouTube from the RS press launch.
The instructions we receive are to circle the circle of cones (20’ radius) in first gear with the steering cranked hard, then aggressively floor the throttle. When the tail kicks out, we should breathe off the throttle (go from 100% to 85%) to slow the over-rotation and then hold the slide by returning to full throttle and modulating the angle with steering. Our professional instructors admit RS drifting is very counterintuitive for racing drivers (where grip is gold). It took them a day of experimenting with the RS before they came up with this technique. Apparently, not even professional drivers morph into Ken Block when drift mode is engaged! We amateurs will only have four minutes to do our slides.
I am the last in my group to go. Only one or two of the five other students has managed to fully rotate around the cones, and the task is getting harder as the pavement dries out. Even the instructors are struggling with their drifts as they demo the technique to each student.
Luckily for me, the water truck re-wets the track before my turn, giving me ideal conditions. It takes a lot of mental focus to truly go WOT with the steering wheel cranked, and I more than a few times unwind the wheel or lift the gas as the car starts to rotate. Whenever I make such adjustments, the computers assume I am aborting my drift attempt and revert to grip mode. By dumb luck, I manage to initiate and hold one good drift that circles the majority of the cones. (The sensation in my belly reminds me of four-wheel donuts in my old Evo in the snow.) I fail to repeat the feat before my time is up; my other attempts abort early or quickly deteriorate into elliptical orbits that shoot me off the wet pavement.
No smoke.
The next exercise lacks the adrenaline the school’s name promises. We drive a coned-off course of two slaloms connected by hairpins and switch between Normal, Sport and Track modes to feel the changes in the car. I’ve explored these modes in depth before, and this tootle around the parking lot is not brisk enough to expose the differences. Other owners are more impressed than I am.
The final, and most fun event of the day, is the Urban X. An autocross with a fancy name, the Urban X is a second gear romp through a coned-out course incorporating several sweepers, a slalom, the figure-eight from earlier in the day, a chicane and a brake box. We get one run with an instructor in the passenger seat, two practice runs solo, and a final timed lap for the auspicious mini-cone trophy. I watch as most of my peers turn in laps in the low 50 seconds.
As encouraged, I use launch control at the start line, hold first gear through the initial left and right sweepers, then upshift into second for the rest of the course. With Track mode engaged, the RS dances beautifully through the cones; its strongest asset is its ability to quickly change direction without needing to wait for the weight to settle and the grip to build. Understeer is something that needs to be anticipated and managed in the tightest corners, such as when I am coming in hot to a pivot point in the figure-eight, but it can be worked around. The weakest aspect of these poor abused school cars is the brakes, which feel soft and squishy after this morning’s track time.
My first solo practice is timed at approximately 47.8s, the fastest time so far. I get approving glances from the other students, and one of the instructors comes over to tell me not to push any harder as I’ll probably overdrive and screw it up. The fastest student he’s seen did a 47.3s, and even the instructors themselves might snag a 46.9s. Knowing other students have done better, I ignore the advice and try a smidge harder on my next run. 47.3s and thumbs up from the crowd make my ego inflate even more. I have the fastest time of the day and just needed a repeat performance to win the event. Under pressure, I do a crisp launch, nail the first pair of sweepers, then miss my shift into second gear! Devastated and distracted, I then overcook the slalom, understeer around the figure eight, and clip a cone while sloppily negotiating the chicane. Sans cone, my 48.0s would have still been a winning time, but the 2-second penalty puts me deep in the pack. You must succeed under pressure to win! I didn’t.
The RS Adrenaline Academy is over. We all turn in our race gear and receive participation trophies (RS Brembo calipers). Vince, the Urban X winner, also goes home with the tiniest traffic cone I’ve ever seen.
Our parting gift is passes to the go-kart track. I find personal redemption in starting at the back of the pack and passing eight karts as I chase down Vince. Skidding, curb hopping, bumping, and occasionally putting wheels in the dirt ensues as I rip through the field. I do catch Vince but cannot pull off a pass before the checkered flag flies. Regardless, the 15 minutes on the go-kart track is the most exciting, energetic, and exuberant part of the day! I guess I should come back for a wheel-to-wheel racing school. Or just more karting.
Mike's Steering Column 