The Ford Focus had a dramatic start to life in the WRC
Nine months may sound like a long time, it may even feel like a long time. But it's absolutely no time at all to turn a blank sheet of paper into a fully-fledged World Rally Car good enough for a world champion to drive.
But somehow, 25 years ago, that's exactly what Ford managed.
Through its various guises, the Focus WRC went onto become one of the most famous rally cars of all time and brought Ford plenty of success: 45 rally wins in fact, although agonisingly never the drivers' title despite coming perilously close in both 2001 and 2009. But getting that off the ground was far from an easy job.
Prior to the Focus' launch in 1999, Ford's rallying pedigree was absolute. Bjorn Waldegard became the first ever World Rally champion in a Ford Escort Mk2, and Ari Vatanen followed suit two years later. But the modern incarnation of the Escort, the WRC, was far from the best, or most developed, car in the championship.
Malcolm Wilson's M-Sport operation had won the contract to run Ford's rallying concern in 1997 and was performing well: Ford was second in the manufacturers' race and two victories for Carlos Sainz ensured he placed third in the drivers' standings.
But with Toyota's Corolla WRC coming on strong, Mitsubishi going from strength to strength and Subaru remaining a potent threat, the ageing Escort was ultimately outgunned.
What M-Sport and Ford needed was a new car. Thankfully that's exactly what Ford of Europe was already producing for the streets, with the launch of the innovative Focus hatchback as a successor to the Escort.
What better way to demonstrate the Focus' capabilities than to take it rallying? The problem was, Wilson had less than a year to make it all happen.
The project, headed up by ex-Haas F1 boss Guenther Steiner, began in early 1998 and soon gathered pace behind closed doors. It was clear Ford wanted to make a splash, and so it needed a star driver. Enter 1995 world champion, Colin McRae.
"Colin had been with Subaru for all of his motorsport career, and basically felt he had to move if he didn't want to be branded just a Subaru driver," Nicky Grist, McRae's co-driver at the time, tells Minoia.
"I think that was more the case. When you look at it at the time, when he decided to move the car hadn't even turned a wheel! The thing was not complete.
"Guenther Steiner was pulling the whole project together at that time and it was based out of Millbrook."
It really was that modest. The team was developing its all-new Focus WRC out of a rented office at Ford's proving ground, with the clock constantly ticking to ready the car for January's Rallye Monte Carlo.
McRae signed on the dotted line on his 30th birthday, which also happened to be the day the Focus fired up for the first time.
Upon completing their final season for Subaru third in the championship, Grist recalls those early test sessions as he and McRae readied themselves for their new challenge.
"We probably literally only had the end of November / December to really fine-tune things, so a bit of driving around Millbrook and actually physically getting out to the roads of Monte Carlo and giving it a try," he says.
"We were full of great expectations but the proof of the pudding comes in the eating and in those initial tests, there were a lot of basic fundamental handling issues to overcome to get the car to start to work. There were a few other technical issues which halted our progress somewhat, and unfortunately took a week or two weeks out of our schedule just waiting for parts.
"New springs, different damper settings, all this sort of stuff and I think they had something on paper which were the settings they thought would work for Monte Carlo Rally and it turned out it was far from that, it was way too hard the car.
"So they just had to completely go back and rethink it all through: get new springs done, new damper settings done, and then let's start again.
"I do remember the second time we went over between Christmas and New Year, we started but we soon ran into a power-steering pipe leak, and then the car caught fire. So that didn't bode well and basically abandoned the test and we went back for New Year then.
"These were the kind of issues you have very early on in a testing phase, but in a position that the rally was only in three weeks' time. So you can imagine there was a lot of fretting and people worrying about the situation, but in the end we got the car somewhere near reasonable and we were there at the start of Monte Carlo."
The eyes of the world were watching as McRae and Grist - the clear number ones in the team - took the start of the Monte. It was an achievement just to be there, but of course that wasn't enough. Everyone in the team wanted to be competitive.
"I think we were always going to be at the start, but of course from a drivers' perspective and from Malcolm's perspective, they wanted to have reasonable performance on the car, more than just turn up and be absolutely nowhere. We wanted to be somewhere in the leaderboard in the top 10 somewhere," says Grist.
But they at least had one thing counting in their favour:
"The thing with Monte Carlo, and it changes always based on the weather conditions, if you are faced with massively mixed conditions the performance element of a car is almost levelled off with tactical tyre choices, driving sensibly and picking up time in good conditions or bad conditions, whichever way you look at it.
"That year we started off with a 48km stage of which the first few kilometres were on wet Tarmac and then we had snow and ice for 14 kms to the top of the col, so all of a sudden Jesus the tactical element kicked in straightaway," Grist remembers.
"There were numerous offs in the first few kilometres of this stage - Carlos went out, somebody else went off as well, and I think all of a sudden anything was possible on Monte Carlo that year."
Unfortunately though, the Focus WRC's debut stage was a bit of a disaster. Tommi Makinen dominated in his Mitsubishi, while McRae was just 14th fastest, some 3m20s off the pace.
"In that first snowy section where a lot of wheel-spin as you can imagine, we had the spark plug caps blow off which was interesting. And then all of a sudden smoke starts to appear in the car. 'Shit, what's this?' In the end it became choking and we had to stop.
"We could see the smoke was coming from inside the car at the back, so when we actually opened up the boot the paint on the floor pan was burning on the inside of the car.
"This again stems from not having enough mileage, as we hadn't done that much running constantly, under high pressure and load, to actually see how hot the exhaust got. So where the exhaust box was at the rear of the car didn't have enough heat protection on the exhaust or the floor pan.
"As soon as we put the flames out, scraped off what paint was on it, we jumped back in the car and continued. But from there on it was a fairly constant run. There's always ups and downs on stage times at Monte anyway, but basically I think that was our worst case scenario I believe."
The fightback was impressive. Dominant stage wins on SS4 and SS5 (the latter by 44.5s!) vaulted the #7 Focus up to sixth, and while others - like Gilles Panizzi in his privateer Subaru - fell by the wayside, McRae and Grist kept their head and kept rising up the leaderboard.
"We got through and we finished third," Grist says. "But... but."
What should have been a dream debut result was snatched away as the FIA excluded both McRae and team-mate Simon Jean-Joseph (who was 11th overall) as the placement of the water pump didn't match the car's homologation form.
Naturally this was a huge blow, but there was genuine encouragement that the Focus was able to be this competitive from the off and with such little testing and development time.
However the true test would come later in the season as the events became less unpredictable - but the Focus delivered. A sublime win on Safari was followed up by another win in Portugal. Had McRae not been thrown out of the Monte Carlo results, he'd have been leading the championship.
"The win in Safari was just unbelievable," Grist smiles. "Nobody was ready for it, but then we went back to a sprint event, and Portugal was probably the first time you're getting onto an event where it's all about flat out, go for it sprint rallying.
"And lo and behold we won that too, so again we were all dumbfounded, didn't expect that. But what we didn't foresee was the sheer disappointment we were about to face."
Over the course of the next 10 events, McRae and Grist retired on nine of them through a variety of mechanical mistakes and driver errors.
"Other than finishing fourth in Corsica, every other event was retirement - and that I have to say was probably the most demoralising season I'd ever had," Grist admits.
"Unlike the events nowadays where you had super-rally, in those days when you retired you were retired, and probably from a team perspective the worst event of the year would have been Rally of China where both cars retired on the very first stage at the very same corner with the very same issue.
"We were running in front of our team-mate, we took a line over this big, flat rounded boulder into a hairpin left and the wheel just popped out, something broke on the suspension. We watched the next few cars and they all took exactly the same line as us round the hairpin and off they went.
"Then came Thomas Radstrom, our team-mate - he took the same line and 'bang', same thing happened to him. In this case it was a part of the car that had been badly machined - it wasn't necessarily a technical issue because we got through Safari without any issue whatsoever.
"It was retirement after retirement after retirement, but you're doing all the testing, all the recce, the pre-event prep and everything else, you're going through all the motions but it was just giving us nothing back in return.
"To have such a turnaround from the start of the year to the end of the year, where you'd expect to start bad and finish well, was tough."
It was a bitter way to end a season that started so spectacularly well. But considering the lead time, Grist feels the Focus' debut has to go down as one of the best ever.
"It was on to be one of the best launches of a WRC car ever when you think about it - third, first, first in the first four rallies," he concludes. "It was just an unbelievable start.
"It's not something now that's going to happen again in the future because there's a lot more advanced testing and development before they get to the first round of an event, so a rally team wouldn't necessarily be faced with that again."
Nine months may sound like a long time, it may even feel like a long time. But it's absolutely no time at all to turn a blank sheet of paper into a fully-fledged World Rally Car good enough for a world champion to drive.
But somehow, 25 years ago, that's exactly what Ford managed.
Through its various guises, the Focus WRC went onto become one of the most famous rally cars of all time and brought Ford plenty of success: 45 rally wins in fact, although agonisingly never the drivers' title despite coming perilously close in both 2001 and 2009. But getting that off the ground was far from an easy job.
Prior to the Focus' launch in 1999, Ford's rallying pedigree was absolute. Bjorn Waldegard became the first ever World Rally champion in a Ford Escort Mk2, and Ari Vatanen followed suit two years later. But the modern incarnation of the Escort, the WRC, was far from the best, or most developed, car in the championship.
Embed from Getty ImagesMalcolm Wilson's M-Sport operation had won the contract to run Ford's rallying concern in 1997 and was performing well: Ford was second in the manufacturers' race and two victories for Carlos Sainz ensured he placed third in the drivers' standings.
But with Toyota's Corolla WRC coming on strong, Mitsubishi going from strength to strength and Subaru remaining a potent threat, the ageing Escort was ultimately outgunned.
What M-Sport and Ford needed was a new car. Thankfully that's exactly what Ford of Europe was already producing for the streets, with the launch of the innovative Focus hatchback as a successor to the Escort.
What better way to demonstrate the Focus' capabilities than to take it rallying? The problem was, Wilson had less than a year to make it all happen.
The project, headed up by ex-Haas F1 boss Guenther Steiner, began in early 1998 and soon gathered pace behind closed doors. It was clear Ford wanted to make a splash, and so it needed a star driver. Enter 1995 world champion, Colin McRae.
"Colin had been with Subaru for all of his motorsport career, and basically felt he had to move if he didn't want to be branded just a Subaru driver," Nicky Grist, McRae's co-driver at the time, tells Minoia.
"I think that was more the case. When you look at it at the time, when he decided to move the car hadn't even turned a wheel! The thing was not complete.
"Guenther Steiner was pulling the whole project together at that time and it was based out of Millbrook."
It really was that modest. The team was developing its all-new Focus WRC out of a rented office at Ford's proving ground, with the clock constantly ticking to ready the car for January's Rallye Monte Carlo.
McRae signed on the dotted line on his 30th birthday, which also happened to be the day the Focus fired up for the first time.
Upon completing their final season for Subaru third in the championship, Grist recalls those early test sessions as he and McRae readied themselves for their new challenge.
"We probably literally only had the end of November / December to really fine-tune things, so a bit of driving around Millbrook and actually physically getting out to the roads of Monte Carlo and giving it a try," he says.
Embed from Getty Images"We were full of great expectations but the proof of the pudding comes in the eating and in those initial tests, there were a lot of basic fundamental handling issues to overcome to get the car to start to work. There were a few other technical issues which halted our progress somewhat, and unfortunately took a week or two weeks out of our schedule just waiting for parts.
"New springs, different damper settings, all this sort of stuff and I think they had something on paper which were the settings they thought would work for Monte Carlo Rally and it turned out it was far from that, it was way too hard the car.
"So they just had to completely go back and rethink it all through: get new springs done, new damper settings done, and then let's start again.
"I do remember the second time we went over between Christmas and New Year, we started but we soon ran into a power-steering pipe leak, and then the car caught fire. So that didn't bode well and basically abandoned the test and we went back for New Year then.
"These were the kind of issues you have very early on in a testing phase, but in a position that the rally was only in three weeks' time. So you can imagine there was a lot of fretting and people worrying about the situation, but in the end we got the car somewhere near reasonable and we were there at the start of Monte Carlo."
The eyes of the world were watching as McRae and Grist - the clear number ones in the team - took the start of the Monte. It was an achievement just to be there, but of course that wasn't enough. Everyone in the team wanted to be competitive.
"I think we were always going to be at the start, but of course from a drivers' perspective and from Malcolm's perspective, they wanted to have reasonable performance on the car, more than just turn up and be absolutely nowhere. We wanted to be somewhere in the leaderboard in the top 10 somewhere," says Grist.
But they at least had one thing counting in their favour:
"The thing with Monte Carlo, and it changes always based on the weather conditions, if you are faced with massively mixed conditions the performance element of a car is almost levelled off with tactical tyre choices, driving sensibly and picking up time in good conditions or bad conditions, whichever way you look at it.
Embed from Getty Images"Monte Carlo is always a bit of a lottery.
"That year we started off with a 48km stage of which the first few kilometres were on wet Tarmac and then we had snow and ice for 14 kms to the top of the col, so all of a sudden Jesus the tactical element kicked in straightaway," Grist remembers.
"There were numerous offs in the first few kilometres of this stage - Carlos went out, somebody else went off as well, and I think all of a sudden anything was possible on Monte Carlo that year."
Unfortunately though, the Focus WRC's debut stage was a bit of a disaster. Tommi Makinen dominated in his Mitsubishi, while McRae was just 14th fastest, some 3m20s off the pace.
"In that first snowy section where a lot of wheel-spin as you can imagine, we had the spark plug caps blow off which was interesting. And then all of a sudden smoke starts to appear in the car. 'Shit, what's this?' In the end it became choking and we had to stop.
"We could see the smoke was coming from inside the car at the back, so when we actually opened up the boot the paint on the floor pan was burning on the inside of the car.
"This again stems from not having enough mileage, as we hadn't done that much running constantly, under high pressure and load, to actually see how hot the exhaust got. So where the exhaust box was at the rear of the car didn't have enough heat protection on the exhaust or the floor pan.
"As soon as we put the flames out, scraped off what paint was on it, we jumped back in the car and continued. But from there on it was a fairly constant run. There's always ups and downs on stage times at Monte anyway, but basically I think that was our worst case scenario I believe."
Embed from Getty ImagesThe fightback was impressive. Dominant stage wins on SS4 and SS5 (the latter by 44.5s!) vaulted the #7 Focus up to sixth, and while others - like Gilles Panizzi in his privateer Subaru - fell by the wayside, McRae and Grist kept their head and kept rising up the leaderboard.
"We got through and we finished third," Grist says. "But... but."
What should have been a dream debut result was snatched away as the FIA excluded both McRae and team-mate Simon Jean-Joseph (who was 11th overall) as the placement of the water pump didn't match the car's homologation form.
Naturally this was a huge blow, but there was genuine encouragement that the Focus was able to be this competitive from the off and with such little testing and development time.
However the true test would come later in the season as the events became less unpredictable - but the Focus delivered. A sublime win on Safari was followed up by another win in Portugal. Had McRae not been thrown out of the Monte Carlo results, he'd have been leading the championship.
Embed from Getty Images"The win in Safari was just unbelievable," Grist smiles. "Nobody was ready for it, but then we went back to a sprint event, and Portugal was probably the first time you're getting onto an event where it's all about flat out, go for it sprint rallying.
"And lo and behold we won that too, so again we were all dumbfounded, didn't expect that. But what we didn't foresee was the sheer disappointment we were about to face."
Over the course of the next 10 events, McRae and Grist retired on nine of them through a variety of mechanical mistakes and driver errors.
"Other than finishing fourth in Corsica, every other event was retirement - and that I have to say was probably the most demoralising season I'd ever had," Grist admits.
"Unlike the events nowadays where you had super-rally, in those days when you retired you were retired, and probably from a team perspective the worst event of the year would have been Rally of China where both cars retired on the very first stage at the very same corner with the very same issue.
"We were running in front of our team-mate, we took a line over this big, flat rounded boulder into a hairpin left and the wheel just popped out, something broke on the suspension. We watched the next few cars and they all took exactly the same line as us round the hairpin and off they went.
"Then came Thomas Radstrom, our team-mate - he took the same line and 'bang', same thing happened to him. In this case it was a part of the car that had been badly machined - it wasn't necessarily a technical issue because we got through Safari without any issue whatsoever.
"It was retirement after retirement after retirement, but you're doing all the testing, all the recce, the pre-event prep and everything else, you're going through all the motions but it was just giving us nothing back in return.
Embed from Getty Images"To have such a turnaround from the start of the year to the end of the year, where you'd expect to start bad and finish well, was tough."
It was a bitter way to end a season that started so spectacularly well. But considering the lead time, Grist feels the Focus' debut has to go down as one of the best ever.
"It was on to be one of the best launches of a WRC car ever when you think about it - third, first, first in the first four rallies," he concludes. "It was just an unbelievable start.
"It's not something now that's going to happen again in the future because there's a lot more advanced testing and development before they get to the first round of an event, so a rally team wouldn't necessarily be faced with that again."
Read Next
Hyundai unveils second WRC livery in as many events
The new livery pays homage to the N division's 10 years in the WRC
The drama surrounding Hamilton's Ferrari switch is F1 at its best
Lewis Hamilton's move to Ferrari caught everyone off guard. And the drama surrounding it won't be forgotten in a hurry
Video: Could condensed rallies be WRC's future?
Rally Sardinia announced it will run to a 48-hour format in 2024, and suggested that could become the norm for all events next year
Video: Neuville's "perfect" start
There was plenty to take away from the 2024 Rally Monte Carlo