Ford Focus RS Race Red Edition 2018 UK first drive

It’s not so easy saying goodbye to a performance hatchback as special and inspirational as the Focus RS, especially since Ford's previous practice was to wait several years before replacing the icon.

But the matter has become urgent now that a newer Focus range has been revealed.

Ford has chosen to launch two special editions to bid farewell to its quickest hatchback – a car whose performance, if not its price, has positioned it just short of true supercar level.

The limited-to-300, £36,295 Race Red edition announced late last year comes in only one colour, rolls on standard black wheels and gets a standard Quaife mechanical limited-slip differential between its front wheels.

An even rarer Heritage Edition in Tief Orange, of which there will only ever be 50 sold in the UK, has since surfaced – with an exalted £39,895 price. That's £3600 over a Race Red car and around £7000 more than the standard one.

The hike is justified by the car’s bespoke colour and a standard Mountune M375 tuning kit that uses electronic and breathing tweaks to hike the 2.3-litre engine’s turbo power by 25bhp to 370bhp and add 30lb ft of torque. The Quaife diff is in here, too.

Our test car combined the assets of both farewell editions: it’s red with black wheels, but it has the extra shove of the Heritage, whose production run is only just concluding so it’s not quite available yet.

That combination is a superb car that will stand as a poignant reminder of the four-wheel-drive RS era. And if it repeats the market appeal of other RS editions, which now reach back half a century, it will always command a high value.

We’d be lying if we said the extra power and torque made this car markedly faster. They don’t – and they don’t need to. It was fast before. Instead, they make the mid-range engine response feel marginally fuller and more effortless.

The Quaife diff – working with a previously fitted rear torque vectoring system and its famous Drift mode – distributes torque more capably across the front axle, calming the wheel fight that was noticeable (although hardly a major fault) in the standard car and firing the car out of lower-speed corners even more effectively.