At every Cars and Coffee event there’ll always be some guy in a Mustang threatening to slither it into the crowd, but this time it’s the turn of Ford’s latest hoon-machine, the Focus RS.
Watch below as a hapless RS owner attempts to show off his brand new car at a Cars and Coffee in Stuttgart, before utterly bungling it and nearly sliding it into the crowd, and then into another car.
Don’t forget, this is a car literally built to drift, with a trick four-wheel drive setup that’s led some reviewers to say it’s so easy to control sideways that even your mum could drift it.
Built to drift
As this video proves, though, all the technology in the world does not a good driver make, as evidenced when the RS owner nearly bins it into a pedestrian a second time upon take-off.
The secret to the RS’ drift mode is the car’s unique four-wheel drive powertrain, which has been developed as a completely bespoke system rather than based on off the shelf setups.
Ford said that most standard four-wheel drive systems are too limited in how much torque they can send to each wheel, but the RS uses a pair of clutch packs on the rear axle to distribute power.
Trick four-wheel drive system
As a result, the four-wheel drive can send as much as 70 per cent of the engine power to the rear wheels alone, and 100 per cent of that available power to just one individual rear wheel.
In effect, drift mode relaxes the electronic stability controls and allows maximum power to be sent to one of the rear wheels, which drags the car’s back end out and around in a wide arc.
It’s drifting for dummies, essentially, but then as the video proves even the most complex of systems can’t always account for the behaviour of their driver. Still, at least it wasn’t a Mustang this time!
