OF ALL the market’s big sellers, you stand the highest chance of avoiding a roo, errant pedestrian, whatever (and, importantly, regaining control) in the Focus. It ripped out an absolute pearler of a high-speed lane change, entering at a blistering 121km/h and successfully completing the manoeuvre without ‘killing’ a cone – that’s a full 20km/h faster than the last-placed RAV4 could manage. It boils down to rather a lot of highway safety margin. Aurion (2nd) managed it 4km/h slower, and Mazda 3 (3rd) was 9km/h behind the Focus – that’s a big spread that did the Focus a few favours in the final tally.

As a rough guide, the Focus has the capacity to swerve something like 45 percent harder than the RAV4 on the limit at highway speeds. That’s because small changes in speed make a big difference to cornering loads.



Ninth in the outright cornering test looks somewhat, umm, unfocused, but isn’t. In fact, because of the relative closeness of the G-circle lap times, the first 10 performers all scored more than 19 out of a possible 20 there. In the lane change, third place was already well into the 18s – the brake, slalom and hot lap were also close, especially for the front-runners. The result of which is that nailing the lane change really helped Focus along for an overall dynamic fourth despite a string of 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th places in slalom, emergency brake, overtaking and outright cornering capability, respectively.



One relatively poor result was in overtaking. It took the Focus a massive 135 metres to jump from 60-100km/h (Aurion, 1st, took just 81 metres). Most telling comparison here is Lancer VR CVT versus Focus CL manual. Weight-to-power ratios are line-ball (Lancer’s 11.81kg/kW versus Focus’s 11.85kg/kW are well within one percent variation) but the Lancer steams from 60-100km/h in 5.31 seconds (4th) ahead of Focus’s 6.11 seconds for 8th place.