FPV Typhoon 2004 Review

Now add a durable six-speed close-ratio gearbox, a stronger clutch to take the torque strain, and get a veteran V8 Supercar driving legend to tweak the suspension. Now you're talking!

On a rainy day in Melbourne last week as SES crews cleaned up after an unseasonal typhoon-like storm, Ford's performance arm, FPV, launched the turbo-charged performance Typhoon to the motoring media.

The turbo Typhoon joins the MkII GT and GT-P and Pursuit ute in the Ford Performance Vehicles stable, with a manual only ute version, called Tornado, blowing into a town near you in January.

The big story, though, is the Typhoon's (and Tornado's) flat torque curve. From just 1000rpm, there is 400Nm, enough to make any grown man weak at the knees. But that's just the start of it.

From there, it climbs to a whopping 550Nm another 1000 revs up the dial. And there it stays until 4250rpm, where it rolls off gently back to 400Nm as the audible limit alert sounds at 5700rpm and before the limiter cuts in at 6000rpm.

It launches in a long first gear and slips second, then hits 100km/h. And there are still four gears left in the stick shift.

The Typhoon and Tornado give FPV a new weapon to attack the performance market and attract buyers they hadn't appealed to before -- turbo fiends.

Product planning manager Mark Behr said turbo and V8 owners were different.

He said a snapshot of their V8 customers showed they were self-made people, usually tradespeople, who were interested in V8 Supercars racing and wanted people to notice them. They were typically aged 35-55 and 85 per cent were family men.

By comparison, he said, turbo customers were more interested in technological aspects. They expected Typhoon and Tornado customers to be slightly younger, white collar workers, former Euro car buyers and more interested in following F1 than Supercars. He even expected to attract WRX owners who now had a family.

FPV sales and marketing manager, Roger Gray, agreed that the two turbo models would attract new buyers.

"We don't see ourselves as restricted to V8 buyers," he said. "F6 appeals to a new type of buyer."

He said they had sold 2565 vehicles in the past two years since taking over from Tickford and moving to separate headquarters around the corner from the Ford HQ in Broadmeadows.

GT accounted for 1154 sales with 52 per cent manual and 58 per cent choosing stripes. The GT-P sold 1020, 38 per cent manual and 50 per cent stripes, while the Pursuit ute has sold 391, 56 per cent manual. Stripes are not available. But Gray says the new range opens up the choice of new colours and stripe combinations as part of its bid to broaden its appeal to new buyers.

He said there was no competitor in the market for F6 on value and performance.

"It has the most torque produced in a locally developed production engine."

That extra torque placed extra demands on other parts of the vehicle and former Lotus engineer Alastair Bacon was brought in as program manager to ensure the vehicle met those requirements.

"The engine's increased torque required a transmission with increased torque capacity and durability," Bacon said.

It also had to be made from available transmissions to keep costs down, with selectable gear ratios and had to fit in Falcon's floorplan.

Their choice was a six-speed close-ratio Tremec T56 transmission, the same as used in the new Holden.

"But this is not an off-the-shelf gearbox," Bacon said.

It has been engineered on FPV's new 3600sq m site which also houses the Ford Performance Racing team, a machine shop where they can design and mill their own parts, a panel fabrication area, two dynos and a dustproof engine building area.

He said the transmission had shift precision without any increase in effort, good gear spacing without jumps or loss of revs, linear bearings on the shift rail to make shifts smooth and crisp, direct linkage shifter for better feel, reverse gear synchro and double synchro in all forward gears for fast shifting.

A test through the typhoon-drenched Yarra Valley last week proved most of his claims.

With a tall first gear, it launches strongly and hits the magic 100km/h mark well within second gear yet has a usable overdrive ratio within legal road speeds.