LAP DANCERS

What does a Track Pack add to Ford's hyperactive Focus ST and is it a match for the playful Toyota GR86? Matt Prior puts in some hot laps to see

- Matt Prior

 

Second gear, third gear, it doesn't really matter. 

Sometimes I'm wringing every last rev out of the Toyota GR86 on the way out of Anglesey Circuit's imaginatively named The Hairpin. Other times I'm dispensing with the time-consuming and chassis-unsettling third-to-second-to-third gearshifts on the way in and out of the 180deg right-hander to see if that makes a difference.

It doesn't. The result is the same: ahead of me, my colleague Richard Lane in the Ford Focus ST with Track Pack (hence the race track we're at) comes out of things further along the track than when we went in. Some of that is the inevitable result of a specific time gap between two objects being a larger distance when they're travelling faster, as gives the concertina effect when you're watching racing cars enter and exit corners. But mostly he's just extending the gap.

This is a circuit (and road, see p33) meeting of two cars that do similar things at a specific price point, something car mags have been doing since way before I started reading them.

But even the obvious tests, and I'm not sure this is one, keep bringing up little surprises to me even now. The thing that keeps tweaking my eyebrow upwards these days, but really shouldn't be by now, is that this is, effectively if not officially, a £40,000 twin test.

The Focus ST Track Pack is actually a £40,000 car, with its near-£37,000 base price for this 276bhp 2.3-litre family-sized five-door hatchback bolstered by another £3000 for the new Track Pack.