New Ford Focus to get first run in September?

Ford TeamRS director, Jost Capito has revealed that development work on the all-new Focus for 2006 is going well - and that they will begin producing the first few parts for it very soon.

Asked about how they are progressing with the car he added that it could get its first roll-out as early as September and that it may do some rallies before next year - with Corsica or Spain possibilities, although Australia at the beginning of November may prove to be more realistic. The only problem with that would be the fact it is a fly-away, making logistics although the more troublesome.

"The 2006 Focus is getting well developed," he said.

"We are concentrating very much on design and CAD to get this very detailed [at this stage], so we don't have to re-design. We are very close to producing and manufacturing the first parts.

"We expect to run it in September or October. It's too early to say when we will run this year. We want a proper development programme and we have to do this before we decide about a rally. In principle it's good to have rallies before WRC. This allows us experience in competition, so fingers crossed we can do some rallies before next year."

Meanwhile the engineers at M-Sport have also been busy on the Super 1600 Fiesta, which somewhat flopped last year when it made its debut in the Junior World Rally Championship.

"At the end of last year the S1600 programme was handed to M-Sport," he added.

"The car was developed further. The car was homologated on April 1 and did a rally in Turkey the week after. Now we have the full homologation and the teams who have the car from last year have the up-rated parts. I hope we will see the car on JWRC soon, but at the same time we want to see it more in national championships - it's well developed for those."