This Could Be Your Last Chance To Buy An Affordable Ford Focus RS

While this slightly leggy first-generation Focus RS is far from perfect, is there enough potential for the price to tempt any home mechanics out there?

It doesn’t seem like five minutes ago that Ford first introduced the current Focus RS into our lives, but soon it’ll be gone. It looked fantastic, its handling sent the media into raptures and Drift Mode got all sorts of ant-car people hot under the collar with accusations of encouraging wilful buffoonery. Admittedly, some people did prove them right.

In short, the third attempt at building a Focus RS nailed the bulls-eye. It smashed it so hard that it even boosted interest in – and values of – its used MkI and MkII ancestors. These days you’re hard-pressed to find many Focus RSs of any vintage for less than £10,000, and that’s why this find is so appealing.

What we have is a 2003 MkI Focus RS for £7975. This infamously lairy front-wheel driven animal had a meagre-sounding 212bhp but made a huge fuss about putting it down. This was before the days of RevoKnuckle suspension linkages, but even with that in mind the RS struggled. It was snowflake-sensitive to tyre choice, wear and wheel alignment.

On its day, with perfect setup, this boost-fest was a roughneck renegade that rewarded every ounce of your hard work. It lacked the crispness of the contemporary Honda Civic Type R’s gear shift and throttle response but at the time it was so much more exciting than a Seat Leon Cupra R. On the other hand, with slapdash alignment and cheap tyres, it was a dog.

We’re not going to pretend that our find is in the former camp. At this price, and with 137,000 miles behind it, you’d have to be the luckiest person on Earth to find it in Ford-approved fettle underneath. It’s the cheapest Focus RS we could find in the UK classifieds, and there’s going to be a reason.

It looks to be in full working order, which is to say the generic advert description lists a load of features and doesn’t actively state that any are broken. The bodywork looks okay, even if the photos were taken with a potato-spec camera, but there are a few minor mods.

Otherwise, the seat side bolsters all look in fair-to-good condition for the age of the car, the steering wheel trim looks intact and aside from a few signs of a general lack of aesthetic care, like a rust trail from an exposed number plate fixing, this RS is worth a closer inspection. The one tyre we can read the writing on looks to be a high-quality Pirelli P-Zero, too. A positive sign.

If the service history is in order, and it really needs to be, then this could be one of your last chances to buy a tidy Focus RS while they’re still relatively affordable. Legends like this, if looked after, will never be worth less than they are today.