“When your foot is all the way to the floor, you call up an additional 15 lb-ft of torque,” explains Chris Terry, a Ford Focus communications specialist. “It just dials in more boost for 15 seconds.”
That means that the Focus ST reaches its full torque number for only 15 seconds at a time. Terry said that the extra power is only provided for this short amount of time to protect the engine.
“Thats the beautiful thing about turbo chargers,” Terry said, noting that the process is done by the Engine Control Unit (ECU) which pumps more boost into the turbo.
“It’s fair to say in future EcoBoost performance engines, that overboost will be used,” said Terry in reply to whether more vehicles will sport this new feature.
This technology is already in use in some diesel vehicles in Europe, and now it is being adapted to gasoline engines here in the States. The EcoBoost four-cylinder engine in the Focus ST is the first small EcoBoost performance engine, according to Ford.
Overboost has been seen in some very high-performance vehicles, like the Nissan GT-R and the BMW 1M, so its very interesting to see it in use in a Ford Focus.
Terry likens the overboost feature to a computer term called “overclocking” where you make a computer component run faster than it was originally intended. The major difference is that Fords overboost only allows it for 15 seconds, in an effort to protect the engines durability.
