The Ford Fiesta is a car that lives two lives. To the vast sane majority of people in the UK, the Fiesta is an endemic little car. They just are. I’m fairly certain one of Voltaire’s less well-known philosophical musings read: “There are cars on Britain’s roads, therefore at least one will be a Ford Fiesta.”
But the Fiesta also moonlights as the ‘best driving small hatchback’, a fact that is confirmed the by the approximately err… seven people that work as full-time automotive journalists in the UK.
Here we see the great imbalance in being interested in cars. To mostly everyone the Ford Fiesta is a little hatchback driven by everyone from seventeen year olds to pensioners, but to the small few the Fiesta is seen as some driver’s entrée. The only little car that a mighty car journalist may cast their worthy opinion upon.
So what is the Fiesta Mk6 really like? Well, I’m sort of glad you asked.
Now, the Mk6 Fiesta was the first major reinvention of the humble Fiesta since the Mk1. Before the Mk6 the Ford Fiesta sort of became the hatchback equivalent of the Porsche 911, except without the enigmatic rear engine, motorsport success and worldwide fame and admiration.
That was to say, its design had largely been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. So anonymous was the change between the Mk4 and Mk5 Fiesta that the whole car’s naming convention has been knocked out of whack. Some see the Mk4 and Mk5 as such similar cars that they merely lump them all under the Mk4 banner – which makes the latest Fiesta the Mk7 – whereas others see the Mk4 and Mk5 as different cars which then, to these people, makes the latest Fiesta the Mk8. I’ve chosen to stick with the latter which means I’ve been driving a Mk6, innit.
The Mk6 was a real change in the design and dynamics of the Fiesta family, and it was the Mk6 that brought the Fiesta back into relevance. I mean it was possible to get a Mk5 Fiesta with a frightful single-overhead cam naturally aspirated diesel engine. That is the sort of engine that would have been heralded as ground-breaking by a particularly zealotic communist commissar in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
But the Mk6 was different. The old Ford Duratec staple was sacked-off for the new kid on the block – Zetec.
Now the Mk6 I’ve been driving is a 1.4 Zetec petrol, which produces a princely 78bhp. The engine also sounds like a tractor’s, not only at idle, but at any point during the rev range. But petty complaints aside, the engine does have a little bit of get-up-and-go, if only thanks to the benevolence of physics, which dictates light cars don’t require all that much power. The Fiesta is easily under 1000kg which does give it a good sense of lightness.
When up a driving the Fiesta is fairly well behaved. It doesn’t feel particularly antiquated, and its constant ratio hydraulic steering is actually quite a nice little reminder of motoring before small hatchbacks adopted electric steering and turn-the-wheel-with-your-pinky urban steering modes. The steering isn’t perfect and trying to get the wheel to self-centre with anything resembling speed is like trying to get a Pointer to heel when its head is halfway through the door to a butchers. Perhaps there is a lack of caster in the front axle geometry but you really have to boss the wheel back to centre, which is petty but annoying.
What I do appreciate is that the Fiesta is fairly idiot proof in terms of its practical driving. It’s almost as if the Ford engineers realised the huge oceanic gulf that made up the Fiesta’s ownership demographic. As a result, they adopted the position of a slightly chiding parent who’s child is about to do something unwise. You look to do something stupid in the Fiesta and it asks, “Are you really sure you want to do that?”, and if the response from your chocolate-smeared, snot nosed face is “YEEEEASS!” then the Fiesta lets you try, but like a good parent it prevents any harm from actually coming to you.
To put simply, the Mk6 Fiesta doesn’t let you down handbrake turns, nor does it let you unlatch the boot whilst driving and then it reminds you to turn off the lights when you get out of the car – the automotive equivalent of being asked if you’ve flushed the toilet or not. You might think this sounds lame, but in an automotive landscape where binary YES/NO switches allow you to do all sorts of stupid things whilst driving a modern car, the Fiesta’s omniscience to what kind of mischief/stupidity its driver may get up to is sort of sweet.
Well, the Fiesta’s parental drives only extend over the driving experience to a certain extent. When you are actually driving the car very much leaves you to its own devices. There is no traction control, no stability control and no ABS. The best thing about that last sentence is that I didn’t read that anywhere or know that about the Mk6 Fiesta before driving it. I found all of those things out in fairly hair-raising situations on the public road – look at me being a jen-you-ein road tester.
Anyway, back to the Fiesta on the backroads – where all cars either impress or depress. If you are like me, and see the monochromatic circle of a national speed limit sign as some sort of call to arms, then the Fiesta is a surprising bit of kit. Firstly, what strikes you most is how alive the car feels. The steering wheel vibrates and shimmies at sane speeds, with compressions in the road being clearly telegraphed through your palms, and the slightly crap brakes also give a good impression of how much pressure you are applying to the elevenses plate-sized front discs. The overall braking package isn’t brilliant, and you’d better be reading the road a good way ahead if you do begin to push on.
During cornering the Mk6’s steering loads up nicely and you can quite clearly begin to feel when the front tyres are reaching their limits of adhesion, a limit which is surprisingly high. During a recent passenger ride in a new G80 BMW M3, the driver had to take a sequence of corners far more gingerly in the BMW than I could in the Fiesta as the BMW’s divisive snout scurried well past the apex that the Fiesta could nail at far higher speeds.
The real surprise I had from the Mk6 Fiesta was the behaviour of its back axle. When going over bumps, even on relatively straight roads, the rear end of the Fiesta shimmies. The whole car seems to flex and rotate just momentarily over bigger bumps. The rotation seems to centre around your lower back and it can be quite alarming when driving the Fiesta quickly for the first time.
Eventually I became used to the shimmy, and began to take it for granted as it felt for the first time I was driving a car that was not only communicating to what its front axle was doing, but also what its hind wheels were up to. This shimmy can be lead to some quite sketchy scenarios however, particularly if you are going around a long corner that just happens to have a significant undulation in the middle. You’d best be prepared to put on some opposite lock to make sure you don’t end up getting an excellent view of that oncoming Range Rover’s personalised number plate through the Fiesta’s massive windscreen.
Push too hard around tight corners and the Fiesta’s tail finally achieves what the rear axle shimmy has been trying to communicate for a while – an attempt on your life. That dull brrrrrp of tyres relinquishing their duties is only heard by two kinds of people: heroes and people properly deep in the shit.
Luckily the Fiesta makes you a hero by rotating its pert little behind quite neatly, and the angles are never so extreme that it isn’t something that a half turn of opposite lock and a stamp of the throttle can’t solve. It didn’t stop one of my friends saying, “I really thought you were going to die,” after seeing such exuberance from behind. Thanks Fiesta.
So what is my final opinion on the Mk6 Fiesta?
It’s not a bad little car. I sort of cringed when I first thought about driving it. It’s a car that was so common during its era that I had convinced myself that surely there can’t be a fun car in there. People don’t buy cars because they’re fun – they buy small Ford hatchbacks because they’re easy.
Turns out those ever-deluded car journalists weren’t wrong. The Ford Fiesta Mk6 is a fine little thriller of a car.
Kerbside 