The oil consumption, lack of torque and lack of carrying capacity in the RX8 finally got the better of me, and I changed to this.

The growly beast

It's a Ford Focus ST-3. It has a 5-cylinder (yes, 5, that's not a typo) 2.5 litre engine with a turbo charger. It develops 225PS (whatever a PS is), but more importantly it also develops 320Nm of torque. It's this amount of torque - now officially adopted by ANSI as the reference standard for an "oodle" - which makes the car such a hoot to drive. That and the soundtrack. Press the loud pedal and you get a very satisfying growl of annoyance from the (Volvo) engine, just before the turbo kicks in and throws you into a hedge.

According to Ford it will reach 60 in 6.5 seconds, not that I've tested this. More importantly, you can get half a ton of crap in the back and take it down to the council dump, which I have tested. The suspension is also quite soft by hot hatch standards: much softer than a Civic Type R, which will have you picking your fillings up out of the footwell inside of a day. The Focus is much easier to live with.

Also easy to live with is the price - at least two thousand less than a similarly equipped Golf GTi.

Sadly you have to put up with Ford build quality, which isn't stunning. My car developed a fault which meant that the hatch wouldn't open via the electrical switch on the outside. This wouldn't normally be a problem, but the ST has no mechanical release for the hatch, so my car was pretty effectively converted into a Toyota MR2 until Ford could figure out the problem. Since the problem only manifested on cold wet mornings, this was a challenge. I ended up having to leave it at the garage for days until they could get the problem to reproduce. Faulty central locking master control unit - a long standing Focus achilles heel.

Other issues that are harder to deal with include the fuel consumption around town, which is worse than a Range Rover (15mpg) and the large turning circle, which makes parking a bit of an issue. My average consumption is around 28mpg, mostly because my journey to work is more than half motorway, but you wouldn't want to buy one of these as a town car. Still better than the RX8 though.