One last showdown: Ford Focus ST vs Honda Civic Type R

The cars have brought along their own legends as baggage, mind you. Every time you feel the Honda’s 2.0-litre engine surge forwards on a wave of turbocharged boost, it’s having to outrun the ghosts of so many less torquey but faster-revving, naturally aspirated predecessors.

Every time the Ford’s 2.3-litre lump breathes in, and stirs its intake sound symposer device into warbling life, it conjures up shades of the Volvo-engined, five-cylinder ST of 2005, which needed no second invitation to howl mournfully down your earhole.

Cars this good always tend to have few greater rivals than their own antecedents. And yet it remains hard to deny, as they head towards permanent retirement, that both are cars whose most vivid, evocative, memorable years are probably behind them. Not that either is about to ‘go gently’, I’m pleased to report. It would be wrong to let that happen.

So now we can look back and wonder: when was peak hot hatchback? Could it have been as early as 2002 (Ford Focus RS Mk1, VW Golf R32, Alfa Romeo 147 GTA)? Or earlier still? Or what about 2005 (VW Golf GTI Mk5, Renaultsport Clio 182 Trophy, BMW 130i)?

And what was the GOAT? Do you toe the classic line and venerate the likes of the Peugeot 205 GTi 1.6? Or are you a lover of the left-field JDM unicorn, perhaps?

The beauty of it is there’s plenty of room for us all to wander off into our own little corner of wistful reverie here – but, as has been clear for a while, reverie has become the main domain of the hot hatchback in 2025. Those that have found a way to soldier on this long are few in number and, often enough, shadows of their former selves.

But pray silence, if you please. In the departing Ford Focus ST Mk4.5 and the Honda Civic Type R Mk6, we have nothing more or less than the very last two front-wheel-drive, manual gearbox-equipped hot hatchbacks that money can buy. Or, very soon, could buy. Now isn’t that a moment in time?

The genre’s hallmarks

Have there been two greater and more defining mechanical influences on the dynamic appeal of the hot hatchback than the driven front axle and the manual gearbox? Would we have had quite so much fun in these cars, over so many decades, in quite the same way, without either?

Turbos have played their part. Slippy diffs, clever torsion beam rear axles, and semi-slick tyres, too. But none of those quite as decisively, it seems to me.

Engaging with a powerful, angrily forthcoming, slightly unruly combustion engine that feels close enough to you spatially to be almost on your lap and exclusively drives the front axle (also the nearest to you) – all via three pedals and a manual shifter – seems to me just about the irreducible definition of the hot hatchback experience.

It’s a test of your skill, timing, judgement and mechanical affinity – one that’s engrossing of body and mind, and totally absorbing.

Narrowly but clearly enough, I think the Civic Type R represents this better than the Ford. Even so many years after this car abandoned normal aspiration, the Civic’s slightly oversquare-cylindered four-pot turbo remains an exceptional performance engine. Balanced and free-revving.

Torquey, but thriving when extended. Dramatic and lively, yet still tame enough to respond precisely and behave itself under your right foot when you need it to, and not to feel remotely like a blunt instrument.

The Focus’s longer-stroke 2.3 makes a bigger slug of low-rpm torque so it feels more urgent right away, without a downshift, but it’s slightly laggier in its throttle response and lazier-revving beyond 5000rpm. You would expect Honda, at the height of its powers, to do the better job under the bonnet than Ford with a car like this. It clearly has.

And what an ally the Type R’s engine has in its superbly slick, wonderfully tactile, dreamily connected-feeling six-speed manual gearbox. Invitations to change ratio, just for the joy of it, don’t come any more vivid. The sense of haptic definition you feel through the elegant aluminium shift lever, as you move each cog in and out of engagement, is fully 4K.

It makes the Ford’s perfectly respectable six-speed manual change feel rubbery, baggy and vague, albeit only in relative terms. In their outright performance on the road, these two front-drive greats are differently quick.

The Ford seems to pull harder, and more instantly, from lower revs and its greater accessible response makes it feel more energetic as it exits tighter bends and livelier as it forges through them. But the Honda builds to a more potent crescendo and snarls with a clearer sense of authenticity. Ultimately, it feels like it wants to go quicker.

But then it needs to, because, lordy, this Civic has got big. It doesn’t feel soft or heavy – not at all. Just large. Long in the wheelbase by hot hatchback standards, and wide across the cabin and door mirrors.

It has all the mechanical grip it needs, superb body control and delectably tactile steering, so you lock it onto a cornering line as if it were some touring car racer with numberplates – and it sticks to that line with the kind of tenacity that dares you to go harder and faster and carry bigger and bigger speeds.

But it’s stable rather than agile; super-composed rather than lively or adjustable with its handling. It isn’t the classically playful, ‘here for your entertainment’ kind of hot hatchback that has, over the years, so vividly defined the type.

The Focus, on the other hand, plays fully to that classic character type – even in its extra-special ST Edition form tested here, with its manually adjustable coilover suspension from KW Automotive and its beefed-up Brembo brakes. The ST feels every inch like the smaller, narrower, more naturally agile car.

It turns in so keenly – as Focuses always have. The chassis can fairly easily be persuaded to rotate on a trailing throttle halfway round a corner to help point the car towards its exit trajectory in an altogether different way from how a locking front differential might.

The Focus doesn’t have the tactile appeal through its controls or the fathoms-deep sense of performance purpose that the Civic possesses but, in its way, it’s a little more ebullient, dynamically accessible and naturally entertaining.

Looking back, there were always hot hatchbacks whose engines made the magic happen – and others where the chassis was what really transformed the driving experience, propelling it into the realms of the extraordinary. It’s fitting, then, that as the classic hot hatchback’s mechanical lineage comes to a close, we’ve got one of each.

Could I pick one to live forever? If I had to, it would be the Ford. Though, if only as a tribute to the joys of the manual ’box, the Honda deserves a place among the immortals almost as much.