But spec it with a performance pack from Mountune, and you've got a bit of a scorcher. We've managed to prise Stuart Milne out of one for long enough to tell you about it.

"There are no plans to replace the old Fiesta ST" said a source at Ford when I quizzed him after driving the standard car in Italy last year.

And despite buzzing with excitement after driving the fizzy supermini against a stunning backdrop in Tuscany, I couldn’t hide the pangs of disappointment.

My mood rose a couple of months later when I discovered there would be a hotter version of the 120bhp Zetec-S – but it's not your usual hot hatch fare. That's because rather than swallowing the huge development costs of tuning and styling a car itself, Ford gave the job to top tuning house Mountune.

Buy a standard Zetec-S for 14 grand, and a pile of Mountune loveliness is yours for a piffling £1,299 straight from your friendly Ford dealer – and you even get to keep the car's standard three-year warranty. Power without the pain? I should say so.

So what does your £1,300 get you? A bit more power, a bit more fun and a whole lot of extra noise. A high-flow induction and bad boy exhaust turn the volume to ten, but the ECU remap cranks it all up another notch.

Boosting power from 118bhp to 138bhp and torque from 112 to 125lb/ft might sound a bit limp, but it slashes the car's 0-62mph time by two seconds to 7.9 seconds.

From tickover, the exhaust's burble scratches the itch left by the demise of old-skool hot hatches like the Pug 205 and Mk2 Golf GTi, and as the revs build, the note rises from boomy to a throaty howl at speed. In the sound stakes only the Corsa VXR comes close.

The engine seems to rev more freely than the standard Zetec-S, and there's bags of fun to be had wringing it round to the redline.

It seems to rev more freely than the standard car; rather like a bunged-up Zetec-S which has been treated to a Mountune-flavoured Locket.

And that's the key to the Mountune's charm. The standard Fiesta is a staggeringly good drivers' car, and while it's adorned with a slug more power, it's not too powerful to make driving it at the limit a license-losing affair.

In a world with 400bhp Evos, 1,000bhp Veyrons, speed cameras, traffic jams and petrol at £1 a litre, the little Fiesta is just what the petrolhead ordered.

But the whole Mountune thing can be done for an awful lot less than £15k. Spend a breath over £10,000 on a nearly new Z-S and buy the conversion – which also comes with 12 months warranty – and you've more than covered the cost of insurance, tax and a few tanks of the explosive stuff.