Ford Fiesta ST - long-term review

Having claimed our coveted TopGear Magazine Car of the Year award (Issue 316), the Ford Fiesta ST has fallen straight out of the afterparty and into the TopGear Garage.

Initially, we were cynical about the move to lop off a cylinder… we were wrong. We were worried about them fattening it up by force-feeding tech down its throat… we shouldn’t have been. See, over the last year, the little hot hatch has impressed us time and time again. It’s breezed a 1,700-mile road trip around Britain, seen off the likes of Porsche and Ferrari at our Performance Car of the Year and earned Chris Harris’s seal of approval. But now it’s got its biggest test yet: living with us rabble for six months.

Snotty kids, airport runs, freezing winters, the occasional track day and many B-road thrashes – EA68 CZX is going to have to deal with them all.

Specced in the priciest ST-3 trim, then loaded with extras – a Quaife diff (£850), LED lights (£600), posh blue paint (£745), blind spot monitoring (£350) and a better sound system (£350) – this tiddly hot hatch comes in at just under £25k. Yep, £25k. Are your eyes smarting? Mine are.

But it’s a clever hot hatch with proper grown-up tech, like torque vectoring and trick frequency dependent suspension. And even being one cylinder and 100cc down from the last gen (but making 197bhp and 214lb ft) the ST has already proved that less is more. Now it just needs to keep it up for six months.