When we first announced the Ford Focus as European Car of the Year in our 18 November 1998 issue, would we have predicted, 25 years on, that it would remain the contest’s most significant winner, in our judging panel’s opinion?
Well, we must have had an inkling, because the test that Autocar conceived to welcome Ford’s new wunder-model into the market was as audacious as the Focus was groundbreaking.
Then editor Patrick Fuller tasked the road test team, which I’d recently joined, to take one of the first Focus press cars and accrue as many miles as possible in a week. Perhaps as a joke, some bright spark suggested 100 laps of the M25 – or roughly 12,000 miles.
But after the guffaws subsided, the idea somehow stuck, and thanks to a nicely timed embargo, Autocar was able to run the full story on the very day the Focus received its COTY gong.
Today, the car resides at Ford’s Heritage Centre, but in late 1998 it was about to endure a year’s worth of motoring by being driven 24 hours a day for an entire week on the world’s longest city bypass.
Piloting the Focus in six-hour stints, then road test editor Steve Sutcliffe’s first shift got off to an inauspicious start: “Three hours and 23 minutes. To do one solitary 117.7-mile lap of this wretched road. Not good. Not good at all.”
So it was probably with unalloyed smugness that senior staff writer Colin Goodwin bagged the night shift, entering the Focus’s cabin at midnight at our changeover point near junction 11.
