So this weekend I’ve been driving the new Focus ST, the latest offering from Ford’s newly-homogenized Performance division and bigger brother to the roundly-acclaimed Fiesta ST. The plus points of the larger Ford are, say the motoring magazines, excellent handling, great affordability and healthy dose of hot hatch street cred. The negatives, say those same people, are <thing>, <thing>, and a rather aggressive look that might just be trying a bit too hard.
So, what’s right, and what’s wrong?
Let’s address that last negative right away. Yes, the Focus ST does have rather a lairy bodykit and yes, it’s heavy bonnet line does make it look like it wants to bite your head off, but this is a hot hatch, and a Ford one to boot – it’s supposed to have a sizable dollop of council estate swagger. Renault and Volkswagen might have dressed their performance hatches up in continental curves but the ST is an Essex boy at heart and it’s designed accordingly.
Performance isn’t subtle either. Some people have criticised this car, saying that it’s happiness to be driven like a normal car and not on throwing you into a hedge every hundred yards make it more of a “warm” hatch, an imaginary category of car for people who don’t have the guts to buy a hot one. This is, of course, total rubbish, and the ability to handle the family shopping run as easily as it can a track day, a trait supposed to be a hallmark of the class, is something the ST does really well. In fact, if you took away the special ST branding and chose to follow the gear changes suggested by the on board computer, you’d be hard pressed to notice you were in a performance car at all.
Put your toe down, though, and it definitely heats up. The first thing you notice is that Ford haven’t quite eliminated the heavy torque steer that plagued the old model, but the second thing is that the dual-hexagonal exhausts, quiet until now, produce a satisfyingly rough throaty growl under any sort of load that you’d be hard-pressed to notice is being slightly sweetened by the on board symposer. The third would be the chevrons of the road sign rushing towards you at an enormous rate of knots, as 60mph arrives in just over 6 seconds from a standing start and will carry on accelerating all the way to 154mph.
All this is thanks to the turbocharged 2 litre EcoBoost engine, which Ford have squeezed nearly 250bhp out of despite dropping a fifth of it’s capacity since the old model.
Returning to practicality for a moment, even with the Recaro racing seats in the front – standard on the ST-2 and ST-3 trim levels – the cabin is still fairly sizeable. If you’re well over six foot like me you’re probably going to struggle to get another long-legged person in behind you, but you find me a similar car where this isn’t the case – if you’re buying a minibus for a rugby team, perhaps the Focus ST isn’t for you. The boot is decent enough too – it’s slightly smaller than it’s rivals, but no wheel well intrusion means no awkward strategising about what to put where, and there’s still plenty of room for a family shop or a few suitcases. The seats fold flat, too, so even the occasional low-key trip to Ikea isn’t out of the question.
It’s all been rather nice up until this point, hasn’t it? So here’s what I don’t like.
I really, really don’t like the Ford Sync system that comes as standard. Apparently the ST-3 comes with the new Sync 2 system which is a huge improvement, but this was the ST-2, which doesn’t, and it’s easy to see why the older system is being replaced – it will drive you around the bend. The satnav is the worst feature – if you’re travelling to a particular town for a night out make sure you memorise at least one road name because it absolutely will not accept just a town as a destination. It suggests it does (“Navigate to town” is an option offered up) but that just takes you to the standard address entry screen, just with the town now pre-filled. The voice guidance when using speech recognition is also awful, with long pauses between sentences and a voice that cuts in time to interrupt you as you start to speak. It made me so angry that, after a short argument outside a disused pub just outside Paglesham, I stopped using it entirely. Nobody is buying this car for it’s voice-activated computer, so if this is really the best Ford can do, then they really shouldn’t have bothered. It’s a real shame, because everything else feels nice and well-made.
I’m still waiting to give this car the hooning I promised – a swamped-out weekend warble around the countryside doesn’t quite suffice – but I’m happy enough to agree with my predictions that, for the price these cars go for, they really do come with an awful lot of bang for your buck. If the worst I can say about this car is it’s not particularly refined and the electronic gadgetry is a bit of a letdown, then that’s not going to do much to deter it’s hot hatch fanbase.
