Two thousand two hundred miles. That is how far one 2016 Ford Focus RS has traveled in roughly a decade. It now sits on Bring a Trailer as one of the last reminders that Ford once built the best hot hatch sold in America.
The car is a single-owner, garage-kept example out of Texas. Stealth Gray paint, plus the RS2 package with heated seats and a heated steering wheel.
The auction closes November 11.
Ford, meanwhile, has stopped making the Focus everywhere. The Fiesta is gone too. In the U.S., the Mustang is the only passenger car left wearing the blue oval with any performance intent.
That leaves a hole shaped exactly like this car.
The recipe was simple and serious: a 350-horsepower turbocharged 2.3-liter four, a six-speed manual, and an all-wheel-drive system that could push up to 70 percent of the torque rearward and nearly all of that to a single rear wheel. Ford aimed it squarely at the Subaru STI and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.
It did not arrive as a marketing exercise. Ford’s rally pedigree runs through Colin McRae, and the RS carried that lineage onto American roads, even if most buyers here had never watched a WRC stage.
The ones who had understood immediately.
The same basic engine went into the EcoBoost Mustang, yet in the Focus it felt like a different animal, building boost fast and wearing its turbo character openly. The rear axle did the heavy lifting. It all but erased understeer, letting a compact hatchback run with far pricier machinery on a tight back road.
Then there was Drift mode. Flip it on and the RS would hold tire-smoking slides on command, Ken Block style. It meant a rear-tire bill on demand, and nobody who bought one complained.
Getting one was the hard part. Dealers routinely stacked markups onto the sticker, turning a working-class rally car into a showroom collectible.
This example shows what happens next. Bought, garaged, and mostly left alone. A car engineered to be thrown sideways through slush has averaged a few hundred miles a year.
Nothing on the outside shouts. A rear wing and blue Brembo calipers are the only giveaways on a body that otherwise vanishes in a grocery store parking lot.
That subtlety was always part of the appeal.
The odometer is the strange part. Ford built the RS to commute in, haul groceries in, and then fling at a mountain road on Saturday. The most valuable thing about this one at auction is how little of that it has done.
The Focus RS has followed the same arc as the STI and the Evo it was built to fight. All three are out of production. The survivors are being preserved, photographed, and bid on.
Somebody should buy it, fit snow tires, and pile on miles this winter. The heated wheel is already there for it.
Ford has offered no replacement. The bidding runs through November 11.
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