by David Finlay (16 Oct 02)

Many thoughts come to your mind as you drive to a race circuit on a wet day. At first you're disappointed. You know you're not going to be able to attack the corners as hard as you would like. There may be a moment of hope, as you look for a break in the clouds and try to work out how long it will take for a dry line to develop on the track. But the rain continues and you're resigned to a day of early braking points and slow laps. Then you remember previous wet outings and realise just how much fun it is to slither around on the limit of grip.

I went through this whole sequence as I made my way to Mondello Park - the Republic of Ireland's principal motorsport venue and the location of the only non-UK round of the British Touring Car Championship - to drive a trio of standard but high-performance Fords.

It seemed like a good idea to start with the least powerful of the three. This was the Focus ST170, a car I thought very little of when it was the subject of a recent CARkeys road test. There are the makings of a very good hot hatchback here, but more work needs to be done to the front suspension before the ST170 can begin to make sense as a sporty road car.

To be honest, I wasn't greatly looking forward to driving this one on a circuit, and on a dry surface I suspect it would have been very disappointing. But in the wet it wasn't possible to generate enough sideways force to get the car into trouble. There was a certain amount of front-end bounciness, but nothing too serious.

With just enough power to be interesting, but not so much that it lost grip in the conditions, the ST170 was a fine machine for learning the complicated twists and turns of the Mondello circuit (I hadn't been there for ten years, since when about ten new corners have been added to make a challenging but enjoyable layout.) Although I didn't fully agree with him, I could quite see why a colleague felt that this was the nicest car to drive on the day.

The Bigger The Better

My own favourite, perhaps surprisingly, was the next car I drove. The Mondeo ST220 is considerably more powerful than the Focus, and of course it's substantially bigger. Parts of Mondello are very tight (the hairpin at the end of the pit straight being a good example), and you would think that the smaller the car you were driving, the easier it would be to negotiate the more difficult corners.

In the dry, that might well have been the case, and I might have become frustrated with the Mondeo's bulk quite quickly. But in the wet, its size - or, more specifically, the fact that each of its wheels is a long way from the other three - turned out to be a big advantage. Good cornering ability is largely about weight transfer, and the wider a car is the less transfer you generate, leaving more scope available for higher cornering speeds.

Mondello was so slippery that the outside tyres on any given bend couldn't cope with much transfer at all, so the ST220's considerable width was a help rather than a hindrance (and, for similar reasons, its length helped to minimise wheelspin as you put the power on for the next straight).

Although the Mondeo had an inherent advantage over the smaller cars on corners, there was enough power to create problems if you weren't careful.

This was best illustrated by a short sequence of corners near the end of the lap. A tight uphill right-hander leads into a faster left-hander over a crest, followed by a short straight to another left-hander. The middle corner had absolutely no grip at all, so it was very important to have the car pointing in as straight a line as possible when you went over the crest, and you could only do this by getting absolutely the correct line through the right-hander. Everything clear? Good.

In the Mondeo, a fraction too much throttle through the right-hander would send the nose drifting wide. There was then no option but to turn the car across the crest, whereupon both ends would let go and a series of yellow lights would start flashing on the dashboard.

All very distressing, especially if you happened to catch sight of the barrier you would hit if you didn't get it all sorted out before the next corner. But make a good job of the first right-hander and everything else would just click into place. It's very satisfying to get through a sequence of bends correctly when the consequences of mucking up the whole process are so obvious and alarming; and of the three cars I drove, the Mondeo was the most rewarding through this section.

Softly, Softly

The key to driving the Mondeo well, ironically, was to drive it as slowly as possible. Obviously you want to be on full throttle whenever conditions allow, and you try to brake as late as possible, but in the wet all these actions had to be done very gently, and on some corners (most notably that hairpin early in the lap) you had to let the car do its own thing without forcing it. Trying to make up time was actually the best way to lose time.

I inadvertently proved this the second time I drove the Mondeo. On my first lap I tried to go too quickly, with the result that the car was all over the place, vastly slower than it had been before. The only solution was to keep a cool head and make sure I allowed the car to find as much grip as it could.

In my first stint with the Mondeo I was astonished to find I could take several seconds a lap out of a colleague who was driving a Focus RS. At the time I thought this was because he didn't have much track experience, but it was clear within moments of my taking to the circuit in another RS that there was another problem.

I greatly enjoyed driving the RS at the original press launch. I thought it was brilliantly set up for the road. But on a wet track it is completely and utterly hopeless, to the point where I think Ford managed to damage its reputation by allowing the press to drive it at Mondello.

It turns in quite well, even in the wet, but the weight transfer which immediately follows is enough to make the outside front tyre lose grip and create understeer. And that's before you even think about applying any power. If you do, you have to make sure that you're in a high enough gear to prevent the turbo chiming in too quickly.

Corners which were taken in second in the two ST cars - including the hairpins - had to be taken in third in the RS. If you tried to use second, the slightest touch on the throttle would set the turbo spinning. The wheels would immediately do likewise, and the car would lose every vestige of front-end grip. And there was no way of getting this grip back without coming right off the throttle again.

The Priority Technique

Even using third and fourth gears, driving the RS was a question not so much of Going Quickly as of Not Crashing. The only way of making up any time at all was to gun it down the straights. Any attempt to make swift progress through the corners was guaranteed at best to leave you floundering, or at worst to make a sharp exit into the nearest gravel trap. (In fact, several people did this - one of them complained that he had been caught out by the lack of traction control, and it had to be pointed out to him that traction control wasn't an issue under braking.)

On a dry day the RS would have been by far the best car on the circuit. In the wet it was by far the worst. It's only viable as a track day car if the weather is good, and I'm now concerned about how safe it would be on public roads in damp conditions with an inexperienced driver at the wheel.

The ST170 was Mr Average at Mondello - not great, but inoffensive, and perfectly reasonable for people who have never been on a circuit before. The ST220 was, in these conditions, easily the best of the bunch, and was the one car I would have been happy to continue driving round this fine circuit until the management hauled me in and told me to go home.

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