Ford Focus KenBlock

Due to the fact that the RX is so specific to rallycross, it features a number of features and upgrades that the road-going model wouldn’t be able to have. For a start, virtually every non-essential part is stripped out, including the passenger and rear seats and sound deadening material, in order to save weight.

A competition-spec roll cage is then welded into the car, which adds a little of the weight back but crucially makes the car a lot more rigid than it would be otherwise.

The stripped-out interior of the RS RX also allowed Ford and M-Sport to make some radical changes to the driving position too. Compared to the Fiesta, the RS RX is noticeably larger and in order to ensure the car handles well, M-Sport shifted the steering column and the driver’s seat back towards the middle of the chassis.

That means that Block sits much further back in the vehicle than virtually any other car. Everything from the exact position of the hand controls, the gear shifter and the handbrake was scrutinised and personalised for each car and each driver to ensure it’s as ergonomically perfect for its pilot as possible.

The suspension system is also much different to the road car, with the front strut bars taken out and double wishbone suspension installed in the front and the rear. Ford’s clever torque-vectoring four-wheel drive system is also dumped in favour of a more traditional four-wheel drive system with a standard differential.

Rallycross rules state that competition cars aren’t allowed any sort of active systems like torque vectoring, or anything else that would give drivers the edge over each other in a race, but the standard system also wouldn’t be able to handle the sheer power the RS RX generates.

Power comes courtesy of a bespoke engine built by Ford in conjunction with M-Sport. Although the standard RS uses a 2.3-litre EcoBoost engine, the RS RX’s engine is only 2.0-litres, but can generate north of 600bhp: nearly twice the power of the standard Focus RS.