Ford is really banking on the Focus ST taking over where the Focus SVT left of in the U.S. market, and they went a rather creative way to grow its buzz even more. Ford needed a commercial introducing the ST as a performance hatchback to the U.S. market, so what better way than to set up a street race involving two Foci STs. This “street race” was held on closed roads and each car was driven by a professional driver, of course.

That was not the interesting part though, as Ford->ke31 relied on customers to film the event for them. You’re reading that correctly; no camera crews, no sound team, no directors. Just two Focuses, hundreds of screaming fans and a whole bunch of cellphone cameras, digital cameras and likely a few pieces of professional equipment.

Not only is the commercial bad ass (you can see it above), but just the pure concept really got the public excited for the upcoming release of this high performance econo-hatch.

Of course, Ford did have a hand in editing the videos taken by the fans and we are certain the majority of the shots were taken by semi-professional cameramen with thousand dollar equipment, but some of them were obviously by handheld camcorders and digital cameras too.

Our favorite camera operator was a man sitting in the tree at the 0:35 mark in the video. He obviously didn’t get his shot into the commercial, but he gets a shiny gold star for effort. Good call Ford, good call indeed!

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