Out on the track in the UK rally champ’s Fiesta

Elfyn Evans takes us for a ride in his Ford Fiesta R5.
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John Calne|Autocar10 November 2016

People who profess to know stuff about Porsches like to guff on about how the standard models are often better than the full-house S versions of the same car.

Is it the same with rally motors? What you’re looking at here is the Ford Fiesta R5 in which Elfyn Evans has just won five out of seven rounds of the British Rally Championship. One of the two that got away went to an R5, too.

What you’re not looking at, though, is a WRC Fiesta. Those cost £420,000: Evans’ chariot stands his employer, M-Sport, a mere £180,000.

What do you get for the difference? Only 30bhp more power and 30kg less weight; enough to make a difference of about 1.5 seconds per competitive mile, but not to guarantee victory for the star car.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the R5 is defined by what it is, not what it’s not. And Evans is defined by who he is, too – and who he is, ladies and gents, is the 2016 British Rally Champion.

At the time of writing, Evans has also just been defined as the bloke who took us for a demo drive in his Fiesta.

Elfyn Evans has just won five out of seven rounds of the British Rally Championship in the Ford Fiesta R5.

We get to experience a lot of mad car stuff in this lucky old job of ours, so mainly we don’t feel like spewing up our breakfast any more. But that’s already happened before we’ve even got started – Evans pulls a doughnut or three to get the tyres warmed up, and the feeling of a huge invisible hand pressing into your guts is quite overwhelming.

Happily, we keep it in check. Then the champ presses a button on the dash, the Fiesta’s management goes into ‘Stage’ mode and the need to chunder is replaced by a desperate search for metaphors.

You know that scene in Dambusters where the Mohne cracks and crumbles and an entire reservoir erupts out from behind it? Imagine you were floating on said reservoir aboard a small coracle at the time. It’s like that – the 1.6-litre engine pins all four wheels to the ground and though 290bhp might not sound that epic, the torque is simply mind-bending.

If you’re afraid of water, imagine instead that you had somehow managed to hitch a ride aboard a meteor hurtling towards the surface of the earth.

Only this meteor isn’t going to smash into anything or annihilate the human race. It has brakes, and it has steering, and by God it has a driver.

A driver who doesn’t actually seem to use the brakes that much, save for to lighten the car up so he can spin the wheel into the apex and squirt it out the other side with minimum speed lost. We’re on tarmac tyres and a firm surface, so there’s no need for big, loony drifts – those just cost time, because sideways isn’t forwards.

And forwards is where the flying finish lies. And flying, and finishing, are two things this Fiesta has proved very good at. Better than the WRC car? Don’t know, but driven like this it would take a good ‘un to keep up.

As for Evans, we’ll defer to M-Sport commercial director Andrew Wheatley for the last word to end all last words. ’I’ve been in this business for years,’ he tells us. ‘And I’d say now there’s no difference between the level he is on and that reached by Colin McRae and Richard Burns.’ The phrase ‘high praise indeed’ comes to mind.

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