FIESTA ST
Afraid of the dark? You should be. You never know where John Angove’s custom-kitted, 300bhp ST might be hiding…
Boasting 300bhp coupled with unique body styling.
Sparking against the dark in thick, searing slashes, it’s the electric blue that grabs you first. As wide as your thumbprint and twice as individual, it traces the Fiesta ST in bold neon daubs, dividing the familiar upswept shape into jagged, jarring elements. ‘Here is the spoiler!’ it shouts. ‘This a tailight!’ ‘Look at the front grille!’ Assailed by intersections and attacked by jolting, unfamiliar angles, the ink black bodywork doesn’t get a chance to speak. Your senses are too busy elsewhere.
Follow the lines down, down, down and the underlying Ford fights back with details that are too good to miss. The studs shout out first, ringing each corner with a dozen flashes of bare metal. Hold your gaze and the wheelarches themselves fuzz into focus: huge, distended hoops straight from the styling schools of Rocket Bunny and Rauh Welt Porsche. They’re stitched together by textured, low slung side skirts, the two elements conspiring together to set serious stance. This Fiesta must be something pretty special.
Roll round to the rear and the shocks continue. Gone is the standard rear bumper, with its colour-coded chicane and neatly tucked twin exhaust, and the item in its
place is picking up what the Mk3 Focus RS has laid down. Affixed to a low-slung lip, the Fiesta sprouts four stubby diffuser strakes to separate a pair of chunky exhaust tips.
If the sides didn’t get you on side and the rear didn’t make it clear, the front apron is a screaming symphony of aggression. Forget the smooth creases of a standard ST: this Fiesta has an entirely custom front apron. Where once the grille sat smooth with the surrounding bodywork, its squat honeycomb is now set deep in basking shark lips, reinforced by a pair of extruding cheekbones that give the car an exotic, alien vibe. Beneath them sit two auxiliary grilles, tall, wide patches that provide some rallycross edge and locate a horizontal slither of LEDs that sparkle against the night.
Turn your gaze in and you’ll spy a pair of struts which rise up and away from the body, leaning under the main grille in mirrored diagonal slashes. Far back between them, the moonlight picks out the glint of a substantial intercooler. Deep and sharp, the aggressive front bumper builds to its most striking feature: the front splitter. Starting below the front wheelarch, it extends ahead of even the other styling
“...we decided to give it a twist. That’s when we ended up settling on neon blue around the edges – kind of like TRON...”
“We love fast, stupid front-wheel drive cars. We had a Mk3 Focus RS and, despite having 50bhp more and 4wd, the Fiesta was right there with it...”
features, reaching lower down and further forwards than anything else in sight before swerving up to underline the main grille.
Stung through with style, the ST shakes out graphic novel looks with every one of its thick, blue lines. Almost a caricature of speed, none of these bodywork additions have come off the shelf: they’re all unique. You’d expect nothing less from John Angove and Stuart Bowen, a pair of committed Ford fans and the main men behind van customisers Transit GT. After a decade in business, and over 3500 commercial vehicle conversions, they know their way around a custom bodykit.
“What we wanted was a rally-bred, handmade look for the road,” explains John, “and added our look to make a car which is a one-off!” The pair and their design team started out with an idea for a more aggressive ST that was still within Ford’s own design language, before channelling their concept into a number of hand-sketched drawings. Sketches complete, they then purchased a donor Fiesta which was used to make moulds for the kit itself.
The guys couldn’t stop there and, with the additions freshly formed, quickly turned their attentions to the livery. “It just sort of developed,” John confesses, “we were looking to do something different and never do anything twice. Well, we really love the JPS Lotus Formula One cars but you can hardly have cigarette references on a car nowadays, so we decided to give it a twist. That’s when we ended up settling on neon blue around the edges – kind of like TRON!”
With the popping, punching exterior layers complete, the standard interior was looking distinctly… indistinct. Luckily, John had a plan to add some tang to the trim. Keen to replicate the car’s exterior flashes of electric blue, he set out to secure Alcantara and leather to match. BMW Individual, the German manufacturer’s in-house customisation department, provided the perfect shade, while John also hunted down matching blue thread.
The steering wheel was the first item to benefit from the team’s vision. The rim benefits larger thumbprints and two new sections of trim: a bright blue straight ahead market tops the tiller, while a larger neon strip encases the base. A small section of the leather wrapper has also been cut out and filled with grey Alcantara, the blue and red stitching echoing the twin strings that