2017 Ford Fiesta ST teaser vid revealed ahead of Feb 24 reveal

TWO days from now Ford will lift the lid on its next-generation Fiesta ST warm hatch, and to whet the appetites of cash-strapped performance junkies the European arm of Ford has released a short teaser film.

Showing the hotted-up version of Ford’s all-new Fiesta racing through the Cologne assembly plant that birthed it, the video doesn’t give much away. The car wears camouflage, the editing is fast and there’s a hell of a lot of assembly line equipment getting between the camera and the Fiesta ST.

All we know is that this car sports a five-door bodystyle, is compact enough to race through a confined factory environment, and will probably outrun a guy on a bicycle.

Vanilla versions of the new 2017 Ford Fiesta will be offered with a three-door bodystyle in Europe, but at this point it’s unclear whether the ST will come with the same option. Initially a three-door only model, the Europe-market Fiesta ST received a five-door version late in its life cycle. In Australia it was only ever offered as a three-door, while the Fiesta ST was exclusively a five-door proposition in the USA.

With rivals like the Renault Clio RS and Volkswagen Polo GTI proving successful as five-doors, the Fiesta ST may follow suit with a global roll-out of a more versatile five-door body style.

Tech details are naturally under wraps until the 24th of this month, but expect more herbs than the outgoing model’s 134kW/240Nm peak outputs. Will an automatic gearbox option be offered? It’d be a first for the Fiesta ST, which has been manual-only up until now, but offering a two-pedal variant would certainly unlock the door to more sales.

Ford Australia wont’ be drawn on whether the updated Fiesta ST will be offered here as a five-door model, or whether it will continue to be offered a three-door only model. Local deliveries of the regular Fiesta aren’t expected to happen until late 2017 at the earliest, so we can likely expect the new Fiesta ST to be a 2018 proposition.