Despite a lot of past drama, Hennessey has endured. The Texas-based tuner and low-volume manufacturer that specializes in American muscle and speed-focused hypercars has gone from a small shop in the ’90s to a manufacturer of its own vehicles, with plans to build a massive H-shaped facility starting this year that feels oddly fitting for the brand.
Throughout that journey, Hennessey has always focused on American cars, but it hasn’t always been pure muscle machines. The tuner has offered modifications for Jeeps like the Grand Cherokee, pickup trucks like the Ford F-150, and even luxury SUVs like the Escalade.
At one point, Hennessey even offered a package for a Ford hatchback.
The Hottest Hatch Reaches American Shores
If you were into cars in the year 2016, you probably saw a lot of buzz about the arrival of the then-new Ford Focus RS. It was a big deal for a few reasons, the first being all of the hype generated by the trim level itself. It had huge shoes to fill, with the bonkers, five-cylinder RS500 still fresh in the minds of European shoppers.
The second reason for all of the hoopla was the switch to all-wheel drive. Up until the RS, the Focus had always been a front-drive vehicle, even in the RS500 with its 350-hp five-cylinder. Adding a second set of driven wheels would launch the car into an entirely new performance category, facing off against cars like the Volkswagen Golf R and the Subaru WRX STI (may it rest in peace). It even had a drift mode, which caused a bunch of drama on its own.
The biggest reason for all the hype was, of course, that Ford would sell the Focus RS in the United States. Up until this car, we had only gotten the lower-tier, front-drive Focus and Fiesta ST models (I even owned the latter, and it was great). A truly top-level Ford hot hatch was to be forbidden fruit no more.
On paper, the Focus RS was already a pretty serious machine from the factory. It made 350 horsepower and 350 pound-feet from its Mustang-derived 2.3-liter Ecoboost inline-four, and got power to the ground exclusively via a six-speed manual transmission. In testing, it impressed. Car and Driver was able to squeeze a 0-60 time of just 4.6 seconds from the RS, and harped on how it put handling above all else:
Straight-line speed is just one of the RS’s party tricks. Aim it into a corner, and the super Focus sticks to the road with 0.98 g of lateral grip. That’s on the standard Michelin Pilot Super Sport tires. Spend $1990 for Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires on forged wheels and it should generate a sideways force greater than the gravitational pull that keeps everything on earth from becoming satellites.
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On a fast back road, the RS handles with more finesse and neutrality than any nose-heavy hatchback has a right to, and the steering relays quick, precise communication both to and from the tires. The trade-off is a hard ride that becomes almost unbearable in its stiffer Sport setting. Ford engineers say that mode is intended for the smoothest racetracks, and thankfully a button on the end of the turn-signal stalk allows you to cycle the dampers between the two settings independent of the four drive modes. Still, we wish Ford had provided another mode with greater compliance for the worst roads.
Of course, there will always be those who want even more. And that’s where Hennessey came in.
The Hennessey HPE400 Is Born
In August 2016, right as the first Focus RSs were hitting dealers, Hennessey published a video to its YouTube channel revealing it had purchased one of the all-wheel-drive hot hatches as a development testbed, with founder John Hennessey doing a walkaround of the car and a quick top speed run to 150 mph.
For a tuner that seemed to only focus on muscle cars with huge engines, this was a bit of a left turn for the firm. Really, it was more of Hennessey leaning further into the Ford brand. Remember, just two years earlier, it launched the Velociraptor, a supercharged, 600-horsepower version of the Ford F-150 pickup truck that ended up being a huge hit. Presumably, it wanted to capture more of that market share in the Ford space.
Just one month after that video dropped, Hennessey announced it would be offering an upgrade package that would take the RS to new heights. From Autoweek:
Specifically, Hennessey’s HPE400 package will take the 2.3-liter EcoBoost engine from 350 hp and 350 lb-ft of torque up to 405 hp and 425 lb-ft of torque. The tuner plans to achieve this by installing a new stainless-steel exhaust system, tweaking the engine management software and adding a high-flow air filter. The performance pack isn’t quite ready yet, but Hennessey plans to sell the parts needed as a kit for $2,995 and will install the parts and run the car on a dyno for $4,995.
In a video published later that September, Hennessey revealed it was actually able to squeeze 445 lb-ft from the car with the upgrades mentioned above. The company also offered the tune as a standalone package, without any of the hardware upgrades, for just $695 (though it didn’t specify how much horsepower was gained without the air filter or exhaust).
Hennessey’s HPE400 was the first off-the-shelf kit for the Focus RS to break the 400-hp barrier, besting even the 370-hp kit from Mountune, a well-known UK tuner shop that specializes in Ford hot hatches. Despite that, it didn’t seem to catch on. Evidence of the kit’s existence has since been scrubbed from Hennessey’s website, with a landing page for Focus RS parts now redirecting to the site’s “Vehicles” page.
I’ve reached out to the company to see why the HPE400 was ultimately discontinued, though I have yet to hear back. If I had to guess, it was probably a lack of demand. If I had a Focus RS, I think I’d take my business to a place like Mountune. Past legal drama aside, I’d rather trust a brand that’s been tuning turbocharged Ford hot hatches for years than a brand that’s getting into this segment for the first time, even if the final power result is a little lower.
It’s unclear how many HPE400 kits were sold (I asked the company about that, too), but I’ve never seen a Focus RS equipped with a Hennessey badge outside of the above video until today, when a friend sent me this listing on Facebook Marketplace. This particular car has a bunch of other mods in addition to the Hennessey kit, including some widebody fenders and a set of sweet Fifteen52 Rally Sport Tarmac five-spoke wheels.
Would I recommend you spend $25,000 on this very deeply modified Focus RS? No. But it could be one of the few chances to own a piece of Ford tuning history.
Top graphic image: Ford
The post Nearly a Decade Ago, Hennessey Would Sell You A Hot Hatch That Made As Much Horsepower As A Ranger Raptor appeared first on The Autopian.
