There’s Still Hope for the Old-Fashioned Hand Brake

Ten years (and about a half-dozen daily drivers) ago, I purchased a brand-new Ford Fiesta ST. Back then, when you bought one of Ford’s fun cars, the company threw in a complimentary day of driver “education” at what we colloquially call Utah Motorsports Park. If you bought a either the Focus or Fiesta ST, that program took the form of ST Octane Academy.

The Academy was a day-long school that mixed time on track with classroom sessions and a massive autocross/gymkhana course. It was in that sea of cones that we were expected to apply all of the knowledge we’d gained throughout the day for a best-of-three timed runoff—with trophies and all. As one of the few in the room with any prior autocross experience, I was salivating at the prospect of climbing to the top of our small classroom podium. You can’t win a track day, after all, but you certainly can win an autocross.

There was a catch, however: this wasn’t a traditional autocross, and these weren’t entirely stock cars. While both of Ford’s hot hatches came with an old-fashioned hand brake, these had custom-fabricated “drift” brakes instead. Functionally, they’re not really all that different. They both engage the rear brakes with the yank of a handle; the major difference is that a drift brake lacks the latching detents you find in a regular hand brake. When you let go, it simply springs back to the “off” position.

That renders it useless for holding your car stationary on a hill while you visit a restaurant, but it’s super helpful if you’re trying to break a car’s rear end loose on command. And that’s precisely what our instructors (and, at this point, scorers) wanted us to do just a few seconds into the course, where they’d placed a 180-degree turn so tight that we simply had no choice but to attempt a j-turn.

If you’ve ever autocrossed with people who take it seriously (which is most of them), you already know that getting sideways is often frowned upon. Sure, some cars drive loose, but a good course is designed so that it can be negotiated without resorting to the sort of trickery expected of us here.

Suffice it to say that I’ve mellowed quite a bit over the past decade. My inner old man may still be yelling at clouds over the fact that the EcoBoost Mustang lost its stick-shift with the S650 redesign, but I don’t view the RTR’s drift brake with the same ire I might have ten years ago. In fact, I consider myself a full-blown convert; that turbocharged RTR Mustang is actually a fun little package.

As it turns out, I actually just miss the entire notion of a hand brake. It’s one of those things whose utility is made more obvious by its absence, and where a dual-clutch gearbox can do a respectable impression of a manual in some cases, a button-activated parking brake, while perfectly adequate for use as an actual parking brake, is even more useless than a pedal-activated parking brake when it comes to traction management.

Even in the dwindling population of cars still available with a manual transmission, the old-fashioned, pull-handle parking brake is virtually extinct. Almost every one of them has been replaced by an electronic button or switch. In a way it’s strange and funny that Ford and RTR had to come together to engineer a hand brake back into the Mustang; it hasn’t even been gone long enough for anybody to really miss it.

But miss it, I do. Like the manual gearbox, it’s yet another tool we no longer have access to. It was just another sacrifice in the name of saving space—and saving somebody else money. And so I’m glad Ford and RTR took the time (and resources) to keep some part of that functionality alive. It’s nice to see that somebody still thinks “It’s just fun” is a good enough reason to do something.

Oh, and that autocross? I finished third. Yep, still bitter, just less.

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