Saturday 4th September 1999 saw the first sighting at the race track of the eagerly awaited, all new 4 cylinder turbocharged Ford Focus of Wayne Saunders. Wayne brought the car to a private test session at Santa Pod to make some shakedown passes with the car prior to competing in next weekend's Euro Finals at Santa Pod and then taking the car over to the USA for both exhibition runs and competitive racing. Eurodragster was was fortunate enough to attend that session and Wayne has given us the ok to publish this report and pictures so you good people can have your first glimpse of this beautiful new racecar which has been put together in just 8 weeks by Jon Webster, at Geoff Hausers workshop.

Wayne's first run in the car was scheduled to be a 60' pass as the car had never been run in anger, indeed the finishing touches to it had only been applied the night before, but Wayne said that everything just felt so good that he stayed with it until after the 1/8 mile and picked up an 8.446, 125.58mph timing slip for his efforts. Safe to say that everybody was delighted by the way the car had performed.

The next run was aborted when the rpms came up too high on the launch but that was quickly forgotten as on only his third run in the car and the cars FIRST EVER full pass Wayne stopped the clocks at 7.888 and 166.26mph to show the potential that this superb new racecar has. Further adjustments were tried through out the afternoon, leading to a string of high seven second passes until the final run of the day.

On that final run Wayne seemed to be getting more comfortable in the car and this showed in a much stronger burnout. The rpm's sounded spot on as the lights went green and the Focus really launched hard and as it had all day ran arrow straight to put a 7.798 171.77mph pass on the scoreboards. Wayne and crew were naturally delighted with this as they are still very much getting to grips with an all new (remember, it had never seen a race track before today) car and are looking forward to the coming months with a great deal of enthusiasm.

At the 1999 Euro Finals, the car's sole race in the UK before it was shipped to California, Wayne qualified no.2 in Super Pro ET with a news-perfect 7.701/171.47 on a 7.70 dial-in. In eliminations, Wayne reached the final, where he red lit on a 7.831 on a 7.71 against Steve Johnson's 7.406 on a 7.40 dial in.

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