It's taken Ford SA nearly a year but they have finally managed to secure an allotment of Ford Focus RSs to be brought into SA. Exactly 60 will make the trip and they're all sold.

IMAGE GALLERY FORD FOCUS RS

So that's the bad news out of the way, you can't actually get your hands on one in SA anymore but you may be lucky enough to catch one flying by on the road or track. We had the chance to test a few of Ford's latest trinket on Zwartkops's short but quirky race circuit, just how you'd want to spend time with a car that you have to give back at the end of the day.

As many of us have read, the Focus RS has some pretty brain frazzling figures notched to its performance enhanced physique. Just skimming over them, power is at 224kW and torque at a mammoth 440Nm, this all helps it launch to 100kph in a claimed 5.9 seconds. Problem, this power aimed all at the front wheels sounds like the perfect recipe for torque steer no?

Going back for a second into the RS's development phase you may be interested to know that it started out as a 4WD model, just like the rally car. Why then didn't they keep it that way? Well Ford's technical team found that the weight, agility and fuel consumption were all hampered by the 4WD system and detracted from the driving system they wanted to create. Thus begun the task of creating a FWD car capable of laying down severe power without massacring a set of tyres every time you tried to pull off or exit a corner.

This is where the RS really shows off its mechanical trickery and the heart behind that trickery is the RevoKnuckle, this is not the easiest thing to explain without diagrams and men with white coats but in essence it reduces torque steer significantly by reducing the critical distance – known as the ‘king-pin offset’ – between the wheel centre and the steering axis line. More importantly though all you need to know is that it works brilliantly. It doesn't mask the torque steer with electronics but physically reduces it so that you still have power when you exit a corner or pull away on changeable road conditions.