Focus ST Edition review: it’s not your average hot hatch
The steering, the braking and the tidal wave of torque from this Focus’s Mustang engine combine to create something very special.
Back in 1985, when James Bond didn’t have issues with his sexuality and could kill a shark with a single karate chop, he was dispatched to France to work out why Christopher Walken was hoarding computer chips in the doping lab underneath his stables. Needless to say, he ended up on the back of a wayward fire engine that was being driven by a very pretty girl who went on to be a soft porn star and then, after Grace Jones exploded, he was to be found on the underside of an airship twanging the lightning conductor on the top of San Francisco’s Transamerica building with his testes.
A View to a Kill was a tremendous film, but there was a problem with the central pillar of the plot. I can take a hollowed-out volcano and an invisible space station, but why would anyone hoard silicon chips? It made as much sense as the notion of hoarding actual chips.
Ha, because here we are in 2021 and the motor industry is facing a terrible shortage of the damn things. It seems that as the pandemic began to bite, car companies realised that no one was buying their products and slashed their orders for the microchips that control everything from braking to wipers. A normal modern car needs about 1400 to work properly.
But from the chip maker’s perspective this sudden drop-off in demand was OK because people, stuck at home, were buying millions of electronic goods that they could put in a cupboard and never use. So they switched from making chips for cars to making them for gaming consoles and machines for making sourdough. But then there were fires at two factories in Japan that wrecked the supply chain, and on top of this there was the aftermath of a trade war between Mr Trump and Mr Xi, which meant China was hoarding what few chips were being made to use in its 5G network.
Today the microchip shortage is so severe that when you buy a new Range Rover, I’m told you only get one key. They simply don’t have enough chips to give you a spare. All the other makers say they are having problems too, except Tesla.
As a result, the price of used cars has gone through the roof. So really, I should be reviewing the 1978 Lincoln Continental that I brought back from a Grand Tour shoot last year. Or maybe the four-year-old Range Rover that I use for shooting. Instead, because I’m obtuse, I’m reviewing the brand-new Ford Focus ST Edition. It’s not a looker. No Focus ever has been, but the manual Edition variant, with its plasticky trim and football-shirt paintwork, is sort of bland and yobbish at the same time.
Inside, Ford has taken away nearly all the buttons and put the controls on the central screen, saying that no function is ever more than one or two clicks away. True. But when it’s raining and you’re bouncing along in the dark, your finger will almost certainly hit the wrong part of the screen and you then have to pull over and find your spectacles to find out how you can get back to the start point. Buttons are so much easier.
Still, behind the top-of-the-range flimflam, it’s a very practical car with lots of space in the back, five doors and a big boot. In which you’ll find a kit that can be used to adjust the suspension. This is provided not because the chip shortage means it can’t be done electronically. It’s provided because Ford reckons its customers will like it this way. The old skool way. Seriously, they reckon people will wake up on a Saturday morning and think, “Right, I’m going to jack my car up and spend all day deciding which one of 16 rebound adjustments I want for my coilover suspension and which one of the 12 compression settings. Then I’ll go online to tell my mates what I’ve done and STBOY3526 will reply, saying I should have gone for a slightly lower ride height.”
There may well be people who want to tune their suspension like this, but I’m not one of them. When I buy something, I like to think it has already been set up and tuned by a professional. So I didn’t bother jacking the Focus up or tuning it. I just got in and went for a drive and, oooh, it was good. The steering, the braking and the tidal wave of torque that comes from that Mustang engine every time you touch the throttle combine in a blizzard of magic fairy dust to create something really very special.
Do not, however, imagine that because it has all this specialness it’s a hardcore track-day special for boy racers only, because it isn’t. When you’re not in the mood or you’re doing the school run, it settles down to become quiet and sensible. It even rides well. There are a lot of hot hatchbacks on the market and almost all of them these days are very good. The Hyundai N cars are brilliant and I’ve always been a sucker for a Golf GTI. Yet somehow there’s an unquantifiable streak of genius in the Focus ST that none of the others can really match.
FORD FOCUS ST EDITION
ENGINE: 2.3-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol (206kW/420Nm). Average fuel 8.1 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: Six-speed manual
PRICE: Edition n/a in Australia; new Focus ST-3 (auto/manual from $47,990) due Q2 2022
STARS: Four out of five
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