Ford Focus ST Vauxhall Astra VXR Audi S3 VW Golf GTI PDF

There’s a button on the dash of this Astra VXR. A inger hovers over it. ‘You ready for Sport mode yet?’ asks my passenger. ‘Suppose so,’ I reply. After all, what harm can it do? Might sharpen up the throttle a bit. The LED glows orange. I give the right-hand pedal a prod. Yep, that’s bett… there’s a frantic izzing up front, like someone’s dropped a giant Alka-Seltzer in the engine bay. The steering wheel jolts violently left then right.
I back off. ‘What the hell happened there?’ I venture.

There’s a grin from my passenger. ‘Sport gives you an extra 160bhp,’ he says. We’re at the Millbrook Proving Ground because of the new Focus RS and a question, namely how much power can a front-wheel-drive car cope with? Ford has proved 300bhp is no barrier to usability, so in the interests of research and amusement we’ve rounded up Britain’s fastest, most powerful hot hatches. Entry criteria? At least 400bhp. Or that was the plan anyway. Unfortunately the Focus ST you see here ‘only’ musters 327bhp. We had been promised a more powerful one from another irm, but it never materialised. Never mind, with 358lb ft of

torque, Morego’s ST330 isn’t exactly short of grunt. That said, I can’t help feeling it’s going to have its work cut out keeping up with a 407bhp
Golf (claimed to be the UK’s fastest mk5) and an Astra that, with Sport mode engaged, boasts 420bhp. And the 400bhp Audi S3? That’s along
so we can see what difference an extra pair of driveshafts makes. Our 400bhp-plus trio are the result of a joint effort by three companies:
Regal Autosport, Veil Tuning and Autograph Cars. Despite the truth of how Regal got its name (spell it backwards), not one is from the
spit-and-sawdust end of the tuning market.The mile straight beckons, but it’s doing so with icy ingers – snow banked up at the sides has sent black ice creeping across the tarmac.

Part of me is glad about this because it means there’ll be less stress on components, so less chance of something going pop or bang. I strap the Racelogic VBOX to the Focus irst – I igure I might as well start low and work up. It’s all relative in this company, though, and from the off the ST330 feels almost ridiculously healthy. Morego’s mods focus less on power than drivability, magnifying the characteristics of the standard car, so it still sounds detectably ive-cylinder, still has a delicious torque surge at 2000rpm, still has the general demeanour of a rugby lanker. It rips through the in-gear increments, lopping 3.3sec off the standard 222bhp ST’s 70-90mph time in top, bringing it down to just 5.1sec. We’ll later discover it can also teach the more highly tuned opposition with their spikier deliveries a lesson.

I try to think of other cars that have such effortless, any-gear, any-revs pull, and oddly enough it’s the non-turbo Merc C63 that springs to mind irst – the ST330 has that same sense of a large, weighty car made to feel much lighter by a surfeit of grunt. It’s a different story from a standing start. Here the Ford is struggling. I reckon I’m using about 20 per cent of the throttle’s travel in irst gear, maybe 30 per cent in second, and still it refuses to hook up, leaving me trying to judge the fragile margin where grip dissolves into messy wheelspin. The best time is achieved by shifting to third as quickly as possible and letting the torque take over: 5.8sec to 60mph. Ford claims 5.9sec to 62mph for its new RS, and that won’t be on wet.

Download Ford Focus ST Vauxhall Astra VXR Audi S3 VW Golf GTI PDF