When the Focus ST was announced for 2012, initially I was mildly interested as I had grown up with FWD hot-hatches, especially those touched by Shelby's team in Whittier among others. I had also been impressed with the Focus SVT from the previous decade.
However at the time, I was more interested in the new Miata as I was finally sick and tired of working on my street cars and not having any time or energy for my project cars. I shopped the NC Miata a bit, drove a few and waited to pull the trigger as we were enjoying being without a car payment. The ND Miata came along and I fell in love instantly and started drooling all over the Mazda website, hoping to get more info on how to order one, etc.
Then on Halloween of 2015 my wife and I found out she was pregnant with our first child. Needless to say, the Miata was not going to work as a family car. This led me to the Focus ST initially as my co-worker had one and he seemed to enjoy it. Fiat/Chrysler had absolutely nothing close to the proper size that was as fun to drive (I'd love an Abarth and I like the Dart styling, yet there is no Dart SRT or similar) and aside from the Volt there wasn't really anything on the GM side that I was as interested in. After years of dabbling in vehicles from ze Germans, I had soured on their particular brand of masochism, so that counted out the MINI among others. Mazda in its infinite wisdom had dropped the MazdaSpeed line, so while the new 3 was fun to drive and very pretty, it was lacking a bit in the performance department.
Then Ford announced the RS for 2016. A real, honest to goodness Euro-RS coming to the US! January of 2016 I visited the local autoshow and they had an RS on display. I knew that was what I wanted. In February I visited a local dealer to place my order and I began my wait.
At the time, the dealer indicated it would only be a few months for the car to arrive. That turned into 9 months of waiting. 2 of those months, the car sat in Belgium waiting to be trucked to the shipping port so it could make the journey across the ocean to New York. Yeah, I was unhappy at losing an entire summer's worth of driving and by the time the car arrived, our daughter was 4 months old.
Fast forward to October 26th, 2016 and we arrive at the dealership to check it out:
After a brief test drive and much waiting at the dealership to get the financing sorted (I had a pre-approval from our Credit Union) I took it home and put a total of 15 miles on it.
As of Halloween evening, I had only put 110 miles on it and it still feels like I'm driving someone else's car they loaned me. I had driven older cars my entire life, so I've never had a new car.