Whatever happened to…the Ford Focus TCR

This is the story of the Ford Focus TCR: how it came to be; why it became one of the first TCR project to be scrapped, and also its origins, which are partly in a TC1-specification WTCC car that never got off the drawing board.

First, let’s wind back to where it started, and that’s at the end of something else — the collapse of an earlier WTCC project, the Ford Focus S2000 TC and Arena Motorsport.

Arena was a British-based car builder which had joined the 2012 WTCC season, with its new Focus raced by drivers Tom Chilton, and James Nash.

Arena themselves had just left the BTCC after arguably one of the most heated seasons in the championship’s history, which was due a tumultuous season of regulation parity.

2011, with full Next Generation Touring Car (NGTC)-spec 2.0 turbocharged cars, some cars with 2.0 turbo engines in existing Super 2000 cars, or just Super 2000 cars with their original normally aspirated engines, not to mention both front and rear-wheel drive, was one of the most intense seasons in terms of parity tweaks, and arguing, and even threats of legal action.

While BTCC eventually got the mix right in the end, a few teams decided the FIA-governed landscape of WTCC would be a fairer playing field for 2012, and Arena Motorsport was the biggest team to make the move, having come so close to winning the 2010 BTCC title with their controversial, Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG)-powered Ford Focus ST Mk.II.

It was a tough start in the WTCC, when their suspension system was deemed illegal straight away, and the team were handed a weight penalty as compensation, and just a few races in which to develop a whole new one. The former TOCA-scrutineer the team had hired to make sure they’d followed the rules correctly, very quickly departed the team.

The season’s results were challenging to say the least. A sixth-place for James Nash very early on at the third round in Marrakech was the highlight, as the car struggled against the almighty RML-developed Chevrolet Cruze 1.6T, and the swarms of BMW 320sis and SEAT León WTCCs, with the León sporting an all-new ORECA-developed 1.6 turbo engine as well, and even the JAS Motorsport-build Honda Civic hit the ground running when it appeared at the end of the season.

Come the end of the year, team owner Grahame Chilton, the father of driver Tom Chilton, and a successful businessman by day, made the tough decision to close the team, and focus on his other racing investment, the single-seater Carlin Motorsport squad.

Tom Chilton’s racing budget went with him to a plum independent drive with RML in a Chevrolet, while Nash began the first year of what would be a successful relationship with the Silverstone-based Bamboo Engineering team.

But Arena Motorsport was now gone after 13 years of operation, and most of the team’s staff quickly moved on elsewhere, mostly back to the BTCC.

Onyx rises from the ashes

With Arena now gone, team principal Mike Earle launched a new team, along with Arena Motorsport’s chief engineer Greg Simmons, Onyx Race Engineering was born, named in spirit after the Formula 1 racing team Earle ran in 1989 and 1990.

With 2013 already well underway, and with no assets, the team started from scratch and had no racing programme active in its first year. The Focus S2000 TCs had been sold to Rotek Racing, which was raced and run by Robb Holland, a US-based racing driver who’d competed in the American, British and World touring car championships, but plans to run the car in the WTCC were scrapped when the new high-cost TC1 regulations were brought forward to 2014, making the S2000 “TC2T” Focuses an noncompetitive offering, and he sold them to the Hong Kong-based FRD Team.

Onyx began its evaluation for a TC1 entry in 2014, and was set to be the second provider of an independent TC1 car, next to RML’s offering, the Chevrolet Cruze TC1.

Like RML, Onyx chose to use the manufacturer it was already familiar with, despite the fact the manufacturer was providing no investment or support in the programme at all.

The model chosen was the Ford Fiesta. The saloon version of the then-current Mk.VII model to be precise, which was an American market model, as only the hatchback was sold in Europe.

The engine would have been a development of the 1.6 litre turbocharged engine which had been produced for the 2012 Ford Focus S2000 TCs, and would also be developed by their engine partner Mountune Racing.

Two drivers attached to the programme were two of the 2013 WTCC season drivers who’d effectively been priced out of the 2014 season, with the new Cruze TC1 commanding a 750,000 EUR price tag for both chassis and engine, before running and operational costs were even considered. They were Tom Boardman, and Pepe Oriola — with the team also interested in tempting Colin Turkington back away from the BTCC.

Greg Simmons, Onyx Race Engineering’s technical director, told this writer:

There was no involvement from Ford from the word go, we knew what their opinion was, and what they wanted to pursue, and world touring cars wasn’t on their radar, so it was all an in-house operation.

On the selection of the Fiesta saloon, he explained:

One of the reasons for choosing it more than anything, if you’re starting with the base vehicle of a hatchback, it’s a nightmare — you’re just asking for horsepower trouble before you even get going.

We already had a good understanding of the engine, and as we’d already spent a bucket load developing a 1.6T, we could carryover all that development, all we had to develop was the engine and the chassis package.

When it came down to the choices, we chose the Fiesta sedan. We didn’t want to start with a car that would be too heavy, or had a lot of drag, and we already had an engine package that would transfer into it.

The car was never built, with commercial issues hitting the programme early on. The team concluded that the Ford Fiesta TC1 was never going to be a financially viable project, and was scrapped.

We actually did quite a lot of design work on it. But there was a point when we realised it was never going to come together, as we were missing the raw ingredient, which was cash money.

Next: the Focus TCR

While the WTCC was showing off its new TC1 product in 2014 under its new management, its old management, Marcello Lotti, was off developing the project which he believed was the WTCC’s future, which soon became known as TCR.

Based on the SEAT León Cup Racer prototype which was shown off at the Salzburgring in 2013, TCR confirmed it was to launch a new international championship in 2015, with a host of car builders, both private and manufacturers, developing the cars to a 100,000 EUR cost cap — with a target of producing a minimum of ten models for sale to customers, with the car builders restricted from racing the cars themselves.

With SEAT having already developed the León Cup Racer for its own Eurocup series in 2014, this was the most available model, while JAS Motorsport had developed the new Honda Civic Type R FK2 TCR alongside its WTCC counterpart, with just three cars ready for the start of the inaugural season.

Volkswagen were developing a Golf with support of SEAT, but while they waited, the Engstler Motorsport team were given clearance to compete with the Audi TT Cup car in the interim, while Italian constructors Top Run Motorsport began developing a TCR car based on the rallying favourite the Subaru WRX STi.

Onyx Race Engineering announced it would build the Ford Focus ST to TCR regulations, with the Italian Proteam Racing team running the cars from the outset, but while the championship looked strong at the front of the field with the SEATs and Hondas fighting for overall glory, more development was clearly needed further down the field.

The Ford disappeared after the first round in Malaysia, failing to make it to the start of either race, when it was driven by Diego Romanini during practice. The car resurfaced again at Monza, the fifth round of the championship, now in the hands of Tom Boardman.

Boardman picked up a point in Race 1, and fought to 11th in Race 2, before the car went back to the workshop. The car made one more appearance at Spielberg, driven by Romanini again to a pair of DNFs, before the whole project was handed over to the FRD Team in China, with Onyx concluding it was as impractical a project as the Fiesta TC1 programme that preceded it, this time due to the changing economic climate, with the team effectively ending all operations just over a year later.

Speaking to this writer, Greg Simmons, the TCR project manager for Onyx, explained:

The thing that killed our TCR project is when the value of the pound dropped. When that happened, it became not commercially viable to build and develop a TCR car.

It was a new championship, and we needed to be able to make profit off everything that we were going to sell, and couldn’t base the business on selling the cars at a loss and making it back in parts later on.

And part of the problem was the price cap (of 100,000 EUR), which precipitated a market value which was pegged by the SEAT — you got a lot of car for your money with the SEAT, and if the vehicle isn’t subsidised like SEAT, you’ve got to work out how this business is going to work on paper.

It was a challenge to build a car which was already a tenth of the cost of our WTCC car. We actually got there, it was a really good exercise when you set yourself a difficult goal, that you actually do it. That’s the disappointing thing really, as although we actually got there, for us not to be able to push on with it as as a business was a bit of a pain really.

The TCR price cap was increased in 2016, in part due to the quickly expanding costs with cars quickly flocking to fit a sequential racing gearbox, just like the Civic TCRs were carrying, as opposed to the Direct-Shift Gearbox (DSG) units which the Volkswagen and SEATs were carrying.

The cap had one final increase in 2017, with the new Audi Sport-developed RS 3 LMS demanding a higher asking price, fitted with the latest safety equipment, where it has remained since.

It was economics and all the other bits and pieces, more than the technical issues. I think if the price cap was 130,000 EUR back then, I think it may have been a different story for us.

In the hands of FRD, the car appeared at the final three rounds of the 2015 season, first driven by team principal Kenneth Ma in Singapore, before Robb Holland drove the car in Thailand, and then finally James Nash took the reins in Macau.

The car then went into a long development cycle again, before reappearing with the new Focus ST face-lift late in 2016 at Singapore, driven by front-running Chinese racer Martin Cao, before sports car driver Nicky Pastorelli gave the car its final competitive outing in Malaysia, before the car failed to qualify for the season-ender at Macau, now being driven again by Kenneth Ma, with the car never to be seen again after leaving the Guia circuit garages below ground.

We provided as much information as we could, as we had a good business relationship with the guys at FRD, but when you sell someone something you can’t control what they’re going to do with it.

The potential was there, they did a nice job of putting the new bodywork on it, they took it out to Sepang and the ECU was overheating, as it was put in a location where it wasn’t getting any airflow and was just cooking its brains out, but apart from that it was competitive.

That’s the best reflection of the performance of the car I could give you, but from there-on, it sort of went sideways.

FRD pulled the plug on the project, with technical director Brian Ma confirming that part of the issue was the performance of the 2.0 litre EcoBoost engine, which wasn’t rated to go much beyond 350bhp, with the TCR cars now demanding more power output after its first season.

While FRD focussed its full attention on its China Touring Car Championship programmes with Changan Ford, also developing the Mk.IV Focus for the 2018 CTCC season, the Focus TCR has now disappeared, with no candidates likely to pick up a new programme for the model.

Under TCR regulations, the car builder must at least have the car manufacturer’s blessing, or at least the national arm, for example the same way the Kia Cee’d TCR came to be, with support from Kia Austria.

At present, with Ford not showing any interest in a TCR programme, there’s no expectation that we’ll be seeing a Ford Focus ST Mk.IV on the grid any time soon.