Upshot? A 20% improvement on lab-test fuel economy and CO2 emissions compared with the old ST – while, as might be of more interest, the new motor is lighter than the one it replaces, too.

This is also the first Fiesta ST to have selectable driving modes: Normal, Sport and Track. As you cycle through them, that engine gets fruitier sounding as its active exhaust and engine sound synthesising system combine to bring additional layers of noise. There’s a distant flavour of the original five-cylinder Focus ST with the way this engine warbles and the torquey mid-range feel its performance has.

I’m not totally sold on the time it takes the crankshaft to slow down from high revs, I have to say – a function of the counterbalance measures that three-pots need to run smoothly at low engine speeds. I can’t help but wonder, either, how much faster the engine would spin, and how much more power it would develop, if Ford dropped the flywheel completely. Still, perhaps that’s just me. All in all, there’s certainly plenty of urgency, plenty of character and, in spite of the torque, a likeable willingness to rev.

Elsewhere, the Fiesta ST feels like the car it replaces in lots of ways; it has meaty, fixed-ratio steering with which it’s easy to gel in spite of its pace, as well as supreme handling response and brilliantly flat body control.

But the way it rides is something else. Having only driven the car on a test track, I can’t tell you with any certainty how it might deal with a British B-road – but there is quite a lot more suppleness and ride dexterity here than there used to be. Over what lumps and bumps I could find on our test drive, over which the last Fiesta ST’s dampers might have bristled and its body fidgeted, the new model’s suspension just sucks up the punishment and lets you get on with it.

Perhaps more importantly still, on surfaces over which you might have felt the need to apologise to your passenger for the selfishness of your buying decision in the last car, I suspect you won’t have to do the same in the new one. And that’s a bit of a revelation: a Fiesta ST that passes the ‘girlfriend/mother-in-law low-speed ride acid test’. Hurrah.

Equally brilliant is the car’s handling – although that much we expect of a Ford performance product. The Fiesta ST feels a shade more precise in its steering response than the last one did, turning in more crisply, gripping harder and staying slightly truer to your intended path than its forebear as the lateral load builds into the rear tyres. It’s certainly capable of carrying more cornering speed than the last car and has a little bit more mid-corner stability, while traction on corner exit is quite subtly but notably stronger than it was through the machinations of that Quaife limited-slip differential.

But fear not: the car is still a barrel load of fun when you disengage the stability control and unload the rear axle. On a trailing throttle, the Fiesta ST can be teased into easily tamed oversteer more dependably and willingly than any other hot supermini I can think of.