Ford Focus RS WINS VDI Car of the Year as orders just keep on growing

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The Ford Focus RS has been declared 2016 Car of the Year at the Vehicle Dynamics International Awards, as UK orders pass 3,000.

The new Ford Focus RS is only just starting to arrive with owners in the UK, but it’s already starting to garner international awards.

The Focus RS has been named 2016 Car of the Year at the Vehicle Dynamics International Awards (VDI), an award voted on by an international panel of 23 independent motoring journalists from around the world.

But what’s interesting about this award (last year’s winner was the BMW i8) is that it’s an award for the best technology innovations and dynamics development, and the Focus RS seems to have bowled over the awards panel with its package of goodies.

Comments from the panel included “Focus RS has completely rewritten the hot hatch rulebook“, “Focus RS is by far the most entertaining to drive owing to neutral and oversteer handling characteristics that the opposition can’t match” and “The Focus RS simply rewrites the rulebook for how sporting hatchbacks behave“. Which is pretty unequivocal.

This is the sixth VDI award Ford has won – more than any other car maker – and it wasn’t just Car of the Year either for 2016, Ford also won the Dynamics Team of the Year Award.

Tyrone Johnson, Ford Performance’s Engineering Manager, said:

We set the bar high for the Focus RS, to deliver a world-beating hot hatch worthy of the Rallye Sport badge with the most exhilarating and dynamic RS driving experience yet.

Ford Performance is honoured to receive two awards from Vehicle Dynamics International, and proud to have developed a car that sets new standards for affordable hot hatch performance.

The news of awards that celebrates the RS’s technology achievements comes as Ford reveals UK orders for the RS have now topped 3,000 – twice what Ford expected – and demonstrates that Ford’s ‘One Ford’ development programme for its performance cars can yield stunning results.

And that is being demonstrated not just with sales of the Focus RS, but with other Ford Performance cars like the Focus ST, Fiesta ST, Mustang and GT, and Ford expect 40,000 performance car sales in Europe in 2016, up 50 per cent compared to 2015 (which was 60 per cent up on 2014).