If you walk into an American Ford dealership tomorrow and hand over $22,000 you can drive off in a 200hp Fiesta ST. Walk into an Irish dealership and fork over €25,760 and you get a 182hp Fiesta ST! Surely the European market would the ideal location for a higher powered version of the hot Fiesta, especially when you consider that its chief rivals from Renault and Peugeot offer 200hp? Is this another case of the American market getting the plum choice like BMW only offering a manual M5 in the states?
Nope - it all comes down to homologation!
Both cars, be it US or European spec, are powered by the same 1.6-litre EcoBoost engine, and in truth the only difference between the cars is that the US model has a five-door body, while the Irish version a three-door. The confusion is down to the ST's 'overboost' function.
When required the Fiesta ST can deliver 200hp and 260Nm of torque - rather than the 182hp and 240Nm that the spec sheet lists - for 20 seconds at a time. Now I know that you are thinking "that will make overtaking handy but little else." Well here's the thing - while the extra power is limited to 20 second chunks at a time before the car's ECU automatically throttles back, if during that 20 seconds you lift off the accelerator the clock starts afresh.
Lift off to change gear - that's a fresh 20 seconds. Lift off while approaching a corner - that's a fresh 20 seconds and - assuming you do not employ left foot braking - if you brake for a tighter corner that's a fresh 20 seconds. The amount of time you are off throttle has no bearing on the outcome; all the banks of computers have to sense is a release of throttle before charging the system again and sending you on your merry way.
So if, in a 61-second timeframe, you momentarily lift off to change gears three times you could feasibly have 60 seconds of full 200hp/260Nm (assuming you can do three gear changes in a second) and in all reality, unless you are doing a full speed run on the Autobahn, you are unlikely to be at full throttle for longer than 20 seconds at a time anyway.
So any notion that Ford has ceded a power advantage to its two main rivals is tosh - for all intents and purposes the Fiesta ST has the same 200hp power output as the Clio Renaultsport and Peugeot 208 GTi - it just could not convince European certifiers of that.