Motoring Journalists and "Driver Involvement"

[MikeTheNative]

What year Focus is it? My partner has recently changed her 12plate 1.6 diesel one, the engine was a bit underpowered but the chassis was fantastic, I thought it a very sweet handling car, you could easily keep it at a good pace along twisty roads - once it got to said pace that is!

07 plate so it's a bit old now, it doesn't feel too bad to be honest. But it's severely under powered.

 

[Scania]

07 plate so it's a bit old now, it doesn't feel too bad to be honest. But it's severely under powered.

That explains it, when we’re in Cyprus a neighbour of my in law’s (who live out there) lend us their 09 plate 1.4 Focus - same variant as yours - , going up into the Troodos mountains, you have to turn off the air conditioning to help it up some of the steep inclines! It’s woeful, the handling isn’t confidence inspiring either despite it only having covered 21,000km from new, it feels like it’s in desperate need of a suspension refresh by comparison with the later version my partner had.