We normally associate Gymkhana with Ken Block. When Ken is in the driver’s seat of his Ford Fiesta rally monster, Hoonicorn Mustang or fooling around with the 2016 Ford Focus RS, there will be lots of drifting and tire smoke at the end of his run. As expected, many people grew fond of the Ken Block’s way of Gymkhana-ing, even the racing drivers.
As Ford Motor Company’s Romanian arm celebrated the 400,000th locally built EcoBoost engine, the Ford people deemed necessary to celebrate the event with great pomp and circumstance - Gymkhana style... with an East European twist. For this, we have to cue Simone Tempestini, a 20-year-old rally driver that didn’t even have a driver’s license when he debuted in the Romanian Rally Championship (CNR).
Simone was 16 when he started playing in the dirt with the big boys. Inspired by his father Marco Tempestini, a rally driver himself, the Napoca Rally Team’s young gun can talk the talk and walk the walk as well. Heck, he won the Danube Delta Rally two days ago in his Ford Fiesta R5. He may be the junior of the team, but he’s no junior in terms of talent. But Simone didn’t go to the Ford Craiova to compete WRC style.
He was summoned only to have fun behind the steering wheel while scaring the life out of his guest co-pilot. Though the engine block of the R5 rally car is a 1.6-liter EcoBoost turbo similar to the one found in the Fiesta ST, many of the internals have been swapped for motorsport-spec components, including the blistering quick Sadev five-speed sequential transmission mated to front and rear diffs.
With these being said, we’ll let the attached video do the talking for Simone and his hooning skills in and around Ford’s Craiova plant. After all, a Gymkhana video is worth more than a thousand words. On an ending note, Ford is informing that Craiova-built EcoBoost #400,000 is the 125 HP three-banger. It will power a 2015 Ford Focus Titanium hatchback specified with a neat Deep Impact Blue paint job.
After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well. Full profile
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