Once Ford had introduced the Fiesta ST to the small hot hatch market it was only a matter of time before tuning companies started to develop ways of making it go even faster than it already could.
There are several options out there, but at the time of writing only the Mountune Performance MP215 package leaves the car's warranty unaffected. That's partly because it's not as extreme as some of the others, though it does have a significant effect.
It consists of revisions to the air intake, a remap of the ECU, all the hardware needed to fit them and a smart little yellow badge. It can be yours for £599 including VAT but not fitting, which is estimated to take an hour. The result is increased power all the way from 2,000rpm to when the rev limiter kicks in, the highest figure being 212bhp at around 6,000rpm.
The 0-62mph sprint in a standard ST takes 6.9 seconds. According to Mountune, a car fitted with their package will do 0-60mph in 6.4 seconds. Ford says 0-62mph takes 6.7. Either way, there's an improvement, and since a significant proportion of the time is spent getting the car away from rest the figures undersell how much better the car reacts to a sudden bootful of throttle when it's already moving.
The package can be fitted to any ST. The test car happened to be an ST-3, a model Ford introduced when it became clear that buyers of the ST-2 were on the whole specifying every optional extra they could lay their hands on.
ST-3s cost £19,545 in standard form. With the Mountune package, rear parking sensors, a style pack and a space-saver spare wheel, the test car was worth £20,719. However, it's easy to get the same performance for much less money. An ST-1 with the Mountune kit but no other options would cost £18,144, plus whatever you pay for fitting.
There are no other changes to the specification. The standard brakes are certainly good enough for the job, but I'd like to see Ford rethink the suspension set-up on all Fiesta STs. The ride is harsh, as if the dampers haven't been designed to cope with the shocks transferred from the road through the tyres. Even at gentle speeds the car jiggles over every single bump on the road - even ones you may not have noticed before when driving another car.
At the same time, the front end is quite soft, which leads to more body roll than the dampers can happily deal with. One effect of this, if you've switched off the traction control, is wheelspin. Another is understeer, which you can limit to some extent by making radical changes to the tyre pressures.
I'm not going to suggest that you divert from the standard settings for road use, but on a track you can improve the handling quite significantly by taking air out of the front tyres and pumping a lot more into the rears.
The ST has become almost the default choice among hot hatch fans who have no interest in what Peugeot, Renault or Citroen are offering. However, with a better-controlled front end - and, ideally, a limited slip differential offered as an option on the Corsa VXR - it could be a great car rather than, as now, simply a very good one.