The Ford Fiesta R5 rally car is legal to drive on public roads, but that’s pretty much all it has in common with a road car – that and the shape of the bodywork which is borrowed from the series production Fiesta. The folks at British magazine EVO wanted to find out what it would be like to drive a Fiesta R5 on a public road – albeit a deserted one – and M Sport let them have a go in one of the models they built.
The FIA R5 class is a sort of poor man’s WRC alternative, as an R5 car is less than half the price of a WRC car, while only having 10 percent less horsepower and the same weight. It even has four-wheel drive. So why is it that much cheaper? Well, R5 models (which compete in the WRC-2 category) use as many standard parts as possible, whereas WRC cars are made using a lot more specially designed parts.
EVO’s Henry Catchpole was impressed by the Fiesta R5’s pace and its fast-shifting sequential gearbox, but found it impossible to talk while driving the car because of the noise. That may have been good for him, because a rally car usually doesn’t allow more than one mistake. Of course, he couldn’t get close to the car’s limits on a public road, and that’s why he was later invited by M Sport to a test day at an airfield to have another go. You can see how that went in the video below.
By Dan Mihalascu
VIDEO