Keeping my life in Ford Focus

By DAVID LINKLATER

It's going to be difficult to put the Ford Focus into context when it arrives in New Zealand next year.

By the time it hits Kiwi showrooms it will have been on the market in Europe for nearly four years. Can the Blue Oval's belated offering cut it against newer rivals?

I feel qualified to say yes because I drove it extensively during its launch period in Britain 1998 and subsequently ran one as my company car.

It takes a special vehicle to turn heads in central London, but in 1998 the then-new Focus was a bigger attention-grabber than any exotic. It was partly because everybody had heard about this replacement for the evergreen Escort and partly because the "new edge" design looked so radical on a family hatchback. The car's two most important rivals, the Vauxhall (Holden) Astra and Volkswagen Golf, were also new at the time, but looked and felt painfully conservative in comparison.

The Focus may not look quite so outlandish on Kiwi roads in 2003. We're all edged-up now thanks to the tiny Ka and larger Mondeo and the small-car segment has gone avant garde with the likes of the Honda Civic and Peugeot 307. But the Focus will still have a strong presence - the Ford's high-roof, cab-forward design philosophy is a lot closer to those cutting-edge models than the older guard.

My Focus was a five-door hatchback with a 75kW 1.6-litre engine. That was the most popular engine size in Britain, although Ford New Zealand is likely to concentrate on something slighty larger, like the 84kW 1.8 version.

Performance, handling and packaging were the strong points of the car. The four-pot engine was acceptably lively, but more importantly the Focus was - and is - one of the lightest cars in the class. The agile cornering attitude came courtesy of the Control Blade rear suspension set-up - the same design that's been adapted for use in the next Falcon.

The cabin was a cosseting place to spend my morning commute through the city: 20km in about 90 minutes. The seating position was high, switchgear easily accessible and the stereo controls commendably simple. The dashboard doesn't quite have the delightful detailing of the newer Mondeo, but the asymetrical styling and semi-circular centre console are even more distinctive. The wow factor faded away pretty quickly as the Focus became more common on British roads, but the car became more enjoyable and entertaining as time wore on.

I had more than my share of adventures in the Focus. In late 1998 I was even one of a massive team of motoring journalists to do 100 laps non-stop of the circular motorway surrounding greater London, the M25.

The idea of the 10-day project was to celebrate the Focus's European Car of the Year win by clocking up a whole year's mileage in one go.

My stint in the 19,000km run started flat-out in the early hours of the morning and ended as hundreds of thousands of rush-hour commuters clogged the southern section of the motorway. No wonder the Focus has felt like an old friend for so long.