A wild RS8, a six-figure Lambo, and a comparison that somehow made perfect sense
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[ This story originally appeared in the August 2004 issue of MotorTrend with the headline "Ford Racing Focus RS8 vs. Lamborghini Gallardo." ] We interrupt our usual carefully considered journalism to bring you this special report. For the next few pages, we shall depart from our regular format of informing car-savvy readers on how various vehicles rank against similarly priced and configured competition using meticulous scientific performance data backed by reasoned subjective impressions gleaned from 250-plus staff-years of sampling all things automotive. Frankly, after 250 years, we were ready for a vacation.
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So what we have here is a daydream brought to life. It's everyone's happy-hour hallucination: What if you had a pile of money to blow on a go-fast four-wheeled toy? Damn the practical considerations, full dream ahead! Is it smarter to buy off the rack and write a single check for a ready-made supercar—the kind that swivels heads and gets parked right in front of the toniest trattorias? Or could it be more satisfying to express oneself and concoct a custom-tailored built-to-order monster capable of performing like a supercar without drawing as much attention and prompting passersby to whisper epithets about phallic compensation, gold-chain accessorizing, and Hair-Club-for-Men membership?
There's only one sure way to answer these deep philosophical questions: Drive like hell in one of each to see which makes you smile more.
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Supercar or Super Build?
We reckoned that if we were buying ready-to-wear, we'd pass by the obvious racks for something a bit wilder. Why not a Lamborghini, in this case the raging bull's newest 5.0-liter V-10-powered Gallardo? It's boutique-rare, raffish and striking from every angle, compact and maneuverable, and fortified with all-wheel drive, enormous brakes, wheels, tires, and all the right stuff for comfy cruising and angry hot lapping. Cost being no object here in Fantasyland, we popped for the paddle-shifted E-gear six-speed ($10,000), $2990 for the dude-check-me-out! pearl-yellow paint, and $1150 for a swanky custom two-tone interior. The tab: a mere $187,959.
As we contemplated our vision of the ideal custom-tailored ride—watching decidedly unreal reality TV shows like Monster Garage and Pimp My Ride for inspiration—we recalled a certain factory-built Frankenstein spotted on the floor at last fall's SEMA show. The Ford Racing Focus RS8 was born of a beer-soaked bar-napkin doodling session among members of the tight-knit Ford Racing Technology team (see sidebar). FRT was looking to showcase its new "Cammer" V-8 line of crate motors and its Fast Focus Catalog of aftermarket parts. Between burps, someone must have spluttered "Hey! Let's jam a Cammer into a Focus." A few sleepless months later, this beast was ready to take its first baby burnouts.
Since its show debut, development of the Focus RS8 has continued, and a kit is being developed to facilitate shade-tree Frankensteining of customer Foci. That's right, you could build an RS8 of your very own, ordering most of the parts directly from Ford Racing. The kit will work on any donor Focus, even the wagon.
Check out the specs: Snuggled under the stock hood is an all-aluminum DOHC V-8, bored out to 5.0 liters to make 450 horsepower and 365 pound-feet of torque (up 30 horses from the show-car motor, thanks to ported heads and hotter cams with more overlap). The power is routed aft through a close-ratio T-5 five-speed to a 4.10:1 Traction-Lok live axle. The finished RS8 weighs 3375 pounds (7.5 per horse), with a weight distribution of 56/44 front/rear.
Compare that with the 4961cc V-10 Lamborghini engine, which harnesses each of its 493 horses to 7.2 pounds of menacing, low-slung mass, and the comparison looks less and less fantastic. Given the Focus's ultra-low gearing (over 25 percent shorter in first, 18 percent in second), the odds looked pretty even at the dragstrip. But the Lambo's weight distribution is exactly reversed from that of the Focus (44 front/56 rear), its tires are fatter, it stands almost nine inches shorter, and it's almost five inches wider and longer than the Focus, so we expected the Gallardo to shine on the road course.
Other than the fact that the Lambo and the Focusmonster both have four wheels and 5.0-liter engines and run on gasoline, they have nothing in common. Sounds like a perfect matchup to us. So we packed our test gear and set out on the ultimate busman's holiday: a full day of hot-lapping at Willow Springs Raceway, a mixed freeway and twisty-road blast over the San Gabriels, then a full day of instrumented acceleration, braking, slalom, and figure-eight testing. Our quest: to determine whether nature or nurture is the true path to supercar driving satisfaction—and to have a blast.
Much of the development work done on the RS8 since SEMA was aimed at ensuring that this mongrel could brake and turn as deftly as it generates rear-tire smoke. The starting point for the rear-drive conversion was a $6,000 Kugel Komponents V-8 conversion kit that installs with simple tools, requiring only a small hole to be cut in the floorpan. The trouble is that it forces the driveshaft to run at an 11-degree angle to the transmission, which can induce vibration. So Ford raised the entire tunnel an inch to straighten that out.
The kit's four-link Mustang live axle was swapped for a Ford Racing axle ($799) that employs an adjustable Panhard rod. Up front, the kit includes parts to move the steering rack ahead of the front axle, but Ford changed the rack and fine-tuned all the suspension geometry.
In the name of expediency, the donor Focus was a European RS model that's out of production, but you can buy all the body and chassis bits to make a ZX3 into an RS. The RS's FR500 Mustang front brakes, SVT rear brakes, three-position-adjustable shocks, and lowered racing springs are available as a package costing roughly $2500. An $1138 set of Michelin Pilot Sport Cup tires—225/40s front, 265/35s in back—on 18-inch OZ Racing wheels put the power down. These tires are DOT legal, but with a tread-wear rating of 80, consider them radial racing gumballs.
For this exercise, we're all playing rich guys who don't care, but let the record show that Ford figures it has roughly $105,000 in the car you see here. Duplicating it as closely as possible (buying parts out of the Fast Focus catalog) would cost about $39,700 and require 150 to 200 hours labor (not including the raised tunnel and suspension geometry tweaks).
There is one rub: While our car was indeed fitted with high-flow metal-matrix catalysts, Ford hasn't attempted to certify the Cammer with the killjoys at CARB and the EPA, so it's technically for off-road use only. Check your state and local laws. Happily, just about any Ford mod-motor family V-8 will fit (some require hood bulges and/or moving the brake booster inside the cabin), so substituting a certified stock engine and exhaust (like the $12,000 390-horsepower supercharged 4.6) might stand you in better stead with your local smog station. Or not.