Just had a go in a hire car that a mate has. It is a petrol Fiesta that has a TDCi badge on the back!

The engine is a little rough at the top of the rev range but feels fairly nippy. I'm guessing it's a 1.4? The engine bay is reasonably full, but still quite a bit of room left. It says Duratec Ford on the engine cover.

Had a good blast with the handling and was pretty impressed. Good resistence to understeer, excellent body control, very controllable on the limit. Fun. A million miles ahead of most of the competition - i.e. Corsa.

Interior feels pretty cheap which is a shame.

The standard Fiesta is damn good, so the ST and RS should be amazing!

I'd driven a 1.4 Ghia and was most impressed. The only thing it was letting down on was the mid-range pull - everything else was really impressive...

That being said, they do a 1.6 Ghia as well so I would assume that one would make up for it...

The more time goes on, the more I think the RS is just going to be ridiculous (far too expensive and way over-powered!)

Can see the ST being a huge success though and the TDCi version even more so...

The RS will be a riot in the same way as the Focus RS is. It may be a little over powered, but the RS will not be designed for mainstream appeal so I can't see this being an issue. The only two things that worry me with the Fiesta RS is that they may not achieve the same bespoke feel as my Focus and the styling may be too busy. That said, from what they've done with the Focus RS I'm pretty confident they'll do a good job.

Ive got just the basic 1.3 in the new shape and although 0-60 is 15secs i can still to this day say the only vehicle to overtake me through the bends has been a motorbike, with the current fiestas you can push so much speed through the corners even when understeer occurs its still amazingly controllable, and if the ST is gonna be as good as they say it is, surely it will handle better than the puma which finished 16th in top gear's 100 greatest cars of all time, after all the puma is just a fast fiesta underneath?

The Puma is based on an older Fiesta (mk4/5?), so same name but different car! The standard Mk6 Fiestas are great though, I've got a 1.6 Ghia. The standard Focuses were great too though, and thing that worries me about the ST Fiesta is what happened with the ST170 - it was nice but not hugely better than what was there already. I hope though with the different and much bigger engine the Fiesta ST will be totally different. Plus with the ST170 going out of production hopefuly there'll be no need to make the ST Fiesta slower than its big brother!