Ford Puma ST 2020 UK first drive

The latest addition to the fast Ford model line up, the Ford Puma ST is a car about which even the staunchest critic of modern market trends and showroom tastes might quite easily allow himself to get at least a little excited. Disregard the rather confusing route by which this jacked-up, slammed-down fast compact crossover hatchback has made it off the drawing board if you need to, and concentrate instead on the alluring technical detail.

This is, after all, a five-door, 4.2-metre hot hatchback of around 200-horsepower with driven front wheels, a six-speed manual gearbox and a Quaife helical limited-slip differential (although the last item listed there is optional). And so, while it’s technically a crossover hatchback by segment, mechanically it’s unlike even what you might consider its closest usually all-wheel driven, auto-box-equipped, ‘performance crossover’ rivals.

The car is, for outright size and weight, actually within a whisker of a matching the one with which Team RS (as Ford’s in-house performance tuning arm was formerly known) made its modern reputation: the feted Focus RS of 2001. It’s slightly larger than the old-timer if only by a couple of inches here and there, as well as 50kg or so heavier and slightly less powerful; but it’s also torquier, and so it needs precisely as long as the hot Focus did to hit 62mph from rest almost twenty years ago: 6.7sec.

Ford’s sell for the car is that it’s intended more for Ford Fiesta ST owners whose families have grown out of their cars than Ford Focus ST clientele who fancy something more high-rise and urban-flavoured (why would they?). Delete the ‘ST’ suffixes, though, and that statement could very accurately be applied to the Ford Puma in a wider sense.

The Puma is, we already know, not the biggest or tallest supermini-based crossover going; and even though the ST version retains the usefully deep ‘megabox’ under-floor boot storage area of the standard car, it’s the kind of crossover much better suited to transporting adults up front and kids in the rear than grown-ups in both rows.

Being a performance crossover hatchback, of course, this is a car whose profile and ride height have gone up to come down again; a bit of a daft notion however you try to rationalize it. The front seats are big-bolstered and supportive, identical to those you’ll find in the related Fiesta ST. They’re particularly comfortable if you’re tall because they retain separate adjustable headrests, which is rare among modern hot hatchbacks which mostly get one-piece backrests with ‘integrated’ head restraints. And the level at which those front seats are set feels neither particularly low nor high, neatly enough. Adjust the cushions as low as they’ll go and you feel like you’re sat at absolutely bog-standard hatchback level, with the Puma’s wider cabin architecture offering decent space for your limbs and extremities but no great expanse of glasshouse or high roofline to give the game away that what you’re driving is a pseudo-SUV at all.