Ford Focus ST-Line Video Review

There’s an unbelievable offer going on at the moment on the Ford ST Line Focus, but is it the perfect car for you? Well, watch and read my full review to find out.

A firm suspension, a great car to drive, sharp handling and great driver feedback make for a fun experience behind the wheel. At ST level it’s an absolute riot. The problems is, not everybody wants to drive fast and use up lots of fuel and not everyone wants a firm suspension.

I’m sitting in the Ford ST Line Focus. What is an ST Line, though? The ST Line blends looks, with affordability. In other words, this car, from a distance looks like the hot hardcore Ford Focus ST. Under this particular bonnet, lies a 1.4 petrol engine with 150 PS. That’s good enough for nought to 62 in 8.9 seconds, and also top speed is 130 miles per hour.

The ST Line Focus is available with three different engine options but you won’t find anything that’s high performance here.

This car’s actually quite efficient. You’ll do 51.4 to the gallon of combined cycle and it’s got 127 grams per kilometre of CO2, so emissions aren’t bad either. So what you really have at the end of the day is a package that looks sporty but really costs you very little to run.

Now, just because the Ford ST Line Focus promises to look sporty, it doesn’t mean it’s brash and in your face. The body kit is quite subtle and makes it look smarter and crisper. The ST Line touches continue inside too. You climb into the car of the ST Line branded door seals and sit in comfortable sports seats.

Got a very nice steering wheel wrapped in leather. But really, the only difference between this and a standard Focus is the faintly red stitching.

Red stitching goes down in between the screen here and you can touch it. So everything works absolutely effortlessly. The six-speed manual gearbox, which is really smooth. It feels good in the hand. It’s nice, positive action. You’ve got the fan. You can demist your front windscreen very quickly here. You’ve got air-conditioning. You’ll find all this in a standard Focus but you’ve got a cup holder here, look.

That’s really useful.

Well, you’ve seen me sitting in the front seat talking about the interior of this ST Line Focus. I thought I’d just nip into the rear, just to give you some sort of impression about how much space there is. Well, this is a normal Focus, since, like all Focus’, it’s got excellent knee, leg and foot room. Brilliant, look at this for the head room, as well. You can see, there’s lots of room for somebody my size in front and then my size in the rear. As you can see here, it’s a bit shallow. So you can probably get a small bottle of drink in there but this is the most disappointing aspect but look, can you believe it? I don’t think I’ve seen, winding windows.

How about that? And look at this. It’s a big car. 316 litres of boot space there, and another one there, and another one there. So you’ve got three hold all across the width. Only get four across the length like that. Take this out and you can lift this, look, and you’ve got a full-size spare wheel. And if you want, you take this part of shelf off, press this button here, you’ve got split folding rear seats if you’re carrying a rather large or unusually shaped object, you can lay that there. Or if you don’t want anyone in the rear and you need to go to your local DIY store, you put those seats down, look.

They don’t lay entirely flat but I think you all agree with me that that’s a big enough space to carry a washing machine, an old tumble dryer or whatever. So you can take something like that to the airport if you’re going to collect a washing machine or a tumble dryer, you’ll easily get it in there. Any slight issue with the Focus is it’s, quite high, load lip here. So you’d just have to be careful you don’t end up scraping your bumper and then scraping over here.

At the end of the day, the ST Line Focus offers a tempting alternative to the hardcore ST. Yes, there’s less clout but the handling promises to be very nearly, as good, as Ford’s established class leader. There’s most, if not all of what you need and very little of what you don’t. Sounds a good bet to us.